Star Wars on Trial Read Online Free PDF

reinforce sameness and changelessness for millennia, transfixing people in nearly every culture, from Babylon to modern times.
    The Professor claims that this pattern represents our deepest shared zeitgeist, ingrained in our very souls. But might there be another reason that it kept recurring? Picture yourself as Homer, or some other ancient bard. Where do you want to recite? In some peasant hovel, where you'll be fed gruel and nobody will remember? Or in the chief's lodge, the Sacred Temple, perhaps even the High King's hall, where beer and meat will flow, where the powerful may bestow favors, where acolytes will memorize your poesy...
    ... and all you have to do is flatter a little? Spin tales about knights and Ubermenschen superguys. Poets and bards faced the same incentive, everywhere, in every era. By keeping to the program-praising elites-you could stay on the gravy train. For life.
    All right, that explanation is a bit cynical. But shouldn't it be mentioned, at least as an alternative?
    Not when Bill Moyers tossed Campbell one fawning softball ques tion after another. To romantics, that endlessly repeated mythic structure is the only human way to tell a story.

    Another example: Aristotle-in his Poetics-prescribed extremely rigid plot structures that required absolute acceptance of unalterable fate and the will of the gods. Right. Chain up storytelling. Mortify it in rigid stone. And call it a good thing.
    Face it. The fix has been in for thousands of years.
    Dr. Stephen Potts, of the UCSD Literature Department, has an interesting take on why so many ancient myths seem to have traits in common:
None of us ever completely shakes loose the scars of adolescent solipsism-our belief that we are special but misunderstood, that we stand aloof from authority figures and peers alike, that we may even have some mysterious origin or unique destiny. Adolescence is the age of identity crisis and formation, of self-doubt and self importance-all reflected in the hero myths we inherit from our barbaric past. Campbell's "monomyth" is itself loaded with Freudian and Jungian assumptions regarding sexual identity, separation from and reconciliation with the parent, connection with a "goddess" or anima figure that naturally assumes the hero is male and in need of sexual completion. It is not a surprise, therefore, that Star Wars and similar vessels provide adolescent wish fulfillment (as do comic superheroes), and while we can all enjoy swinging with Spiderman or kicking ass with the Bat, God help us when we embrace these primitive paradigms as models for real life.
    I can think of two recent Western cultures offhand that bought fully and unreservedly into Campbell-style myths, using those fables to forge a unified sense of purpose. In the antebellum American South, the immensely popular and influential novels of Sir Walter Scott-filled with knights errant and questing princes-served the same purpose that Wagner operas and Aryan tales did in pre-WWII Germany, helping to consolidate righteous belief in a clearly defined destiny and purpose. Both the Confederacy and the Nazis emphasized romantic adolescent drama and the glory of a cause to almost complete exclusion of any thought about long-term consequences. Both also had a predilection for archaic weaponry, like swords and daggers (just like the Jedi), as well as a penchant for pageantry, grandiloquence and authority-as-birthright.

    Another dark trait of romanticism, tragically illustrated by both of those cultures, is the willingness (seen in countless Campbellian myths) to reclassify whole swaths of humanity as subpar, not even deserving the minimal rights granted to honorable enemies. Whether they are Ores or soldier-robots or clones ... or black slaves or Jews ... there is no need to bother the conscience when they are disposed of. No need to answer to their mothers. (In fact, conveniently, Ores and robots and clones have no mothers.)
    Is it, then, any mystery why so few of the