Luke Skywalker, Left Unity and the Stuttgart Megabrothel

Having been approached by the Star Wars franchise to write a tie-in with quote “a startlingly fresh angle on the canon”, I find myself-

Okay, just kidding.  Though it is tempting to imagine which New York-based emigre Latin American or East European post-modernist writer you might hire to deliver a tie-in novel behind that title…..  No, ahem, what this is really about is a minor revelation of linkage I had a few weeks ago.  I’d greeted the foundational statements of Ken Loach’s political brainchild Left Unity back in November with a facepalm-level groan – hey, a political party that’s against inequality and injustice; how come no-one ever thought of that before?  What a genius innovation!  All those other people who’ve spent their lives working in politics must just be kicking themselves that they missed that one.  And the procedures, I mean, it’s so simple – just end capitalism.  Yes, that’s worked so fucking well every time it’s been tried before.  Oh, and on an international scale while we’re at it!  Yes.  Just oppose all forms of discrimination, fully democratise all levels and aspects of society, everywhere.  Off we go, then!

So, wearily irritated by the fact so many seemingly intelligent people seem to be drinking this particular Koolaid, off I grouched.  Didn’t even bother posting at the site because, honestly, what’s the fucking point?  I mean, have we really learnt nothing in the last few decades?  Nothing about human nature, about social dynamics, about wealth-creation, about state control, about power – nothing, in short, about who we really are?

But I did notice that the irritation felt vaguely familiar.  I’d had the same basic feeling about something else, at some other time – but couldn’t pin down what exactly it was.

It took this article about megabrothels in Germany, with its links to an article on Canadian sex trade legislation and an interview with a British sex worker, for the penny to drop.  Here again, was the same myopic well-intentioned idealism, repelled by an unpleasant aspect of human behaviour, and touting brain-dead big-stick policy-making as the cure.  Yes – just ban prostitution; that’ll work.  Oh, and hey, why don’t we have a war on drugs while we’re at it, fuckwits?  Take down that Evil Empire, why don’t you?

Ah.

Sudden recollection slammed in, of this quote from George Lucas on the subject of his inspiration for the original Star Wars (the quote is from Wikipedia here, cited as occurring in the Joseph Campbell biography A Fire in the Mind):

“I came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what’s valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is”

Right.  Which is why I could never stand Star Wars once I’d reached the age of about fifteen.  Because by then, most of the literature and cinema I was consuming was precisely about showing the world (the human world anyway) the way it is.  By then, I took – and still take now – the effective mirroring and interrogation of the human condition (rather than dreamy, idealistic flight from it) as the hallmark of good adult fiction.

Thing is, though, Star Wars sure is popular, and not just with kids under the age of fifteen.  Huge numbers of people actively enjoy the refuge from the real that idealised Hero figures and their battles against a Great Evil provide.  Which is fine, I guess, it is only fiction after all.  But I can’t help wondering whether an entertainment matrix which constantly reinforces unrealistically black and white contexts of struggle doesn’t also distil a similarly unrealistic attitude when it comes to assessing real human struggle in the real human world.  How many Left Unity supporters see themselves as Che-style X-wing pilots, swooping in to destroy the evil capitalist Death Star, because then, of course, all will be right with the universe?  How many campaigners for maintaining the criminal status of prostitution once dreamed of rescuing a captured Princess from the clutches of evil men?  Come to that, how many supporters of the Iraq war thought they were finally seeing a chance to take down Darth Vader and set a people free of tyranny just like that?

My irritation is not with the dreams.  They’re part of who we are; we all have them – wouldn’t it be nice if…….  My problem is with those who stubbornly expect, against all the gathered evidence and informed opinion from those on the ground, that their dreams can be imposed, flatly and mechanistically, onto the myriad teeming variegated mess that is the real human world.  Abolish capitalism.  Abolish commerce in sexual relations.  Stamp out Drugs.  Free Iraq.  Yeah, right.

And I have the feeling that the general failure of maturity present in that mindset, the apparent congenital inability to understand that in the real world things are actually a bit complicated than that, isn’t helped by the pervasiveness of a fiction whose primary intention is full retreat from that real world.