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By Your Command (II)

Daniel Larison wants us to leave Battlestar Galactica out of the war debate. Like a picky eater, he seems averse to letting the two touch each other on his plate. He writes:   If you think Colonials fighting the Cylons = jihadis fighting Americans, you have your wires crossed somewhere. The Cylons are the inhuman […]

Daniel Larison wants us to leave Battlestar Galactica out of the war debate. Like a picky eater, he seems averse to letting the two touch each other on his plate. He writes:

 

If you think Colonials fighting the Cylons = jihadis fighting Americans, you have your wires crossed somewhere. The Cylons are the inhuman religious fanatics, remember? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s science-fiction and doesn’t have to have an immediate political application. Maybe BSG is a more fundamental story of human survival and, as many good sci-fi stories have been, a study of human nature in the extraordinary circumstances of a fantastic alien situation.

 

I’m inclined to think he takes this a little too far. Regardless of what Moore intended (or says), there’s a clear connection between the show and the current war, and the night-vision sequence all but flashed the words POLITICAL ALLEGORY on the screen. And of course, the suicide bombing by the humans is tough to take without making political correlations in this age of suicide-driven terrorism. So, while I’m sympathetic to Larison’s disinclination to ascribe partisanship to the show, I’m not entirely willing to depoliticize it completely. ~Peter Suderman

Let me say first that I wholeheartedly agree with Peter’s assessment of the excellence of BSG, which is why I am a bit annoyed at myself for missing the season premiere last week.  I should note at the beginning that, lacking a television, I have not seen the start of the third season (except for the first part of the first hour SciFi offered on their website), so I cannot comment in any detail on how “relevant” to contemporary politics the third season has turned out to be so far.  And, as it happens, I am a picky eater (and I hate it when different things touch on my plate–doesn’t everyone?), but that isn’t why I wanted to throw out the NRO reader’s Iraq comparison. 

My initial reaction to the suggestion that the entire New Caprica arc was a commentary on Iraq was based in my knowledge of the first two seasons of the show and the webisodes, which had successfully avoided easy and simple identifications with any specific political problem.  It reminds us of all sorts of wartime moral and political problems because it is a wartime drama.  The Colonials represent the weaker, occupied group, and so they resort to the tactics of an insurgency.  For some reason, rather than identifying these insurgents with anti-Nazi partisans the reader concluded that it must have something to do with Iraq.  If that is the kind of political response the BSG generates, I would prefer that we ignore the show’s implications for contemporary politics and just enjoy it as an interesting sci-fi story.  

Most Republican viewers seem to have no problem with anything they see in 24, which routinely pats them on the head and assures them executive overreach and torturing terrorists are all for the common good, but somehow anything in BSG that might reflect poorly on the Iraq war seemed to disqualify BSG as a show worth watching for this particular NRO reader.  The reader’s reference to Iraq and the implication that BSG had somehow crossed a line into the supposed looney left-wing fringe simply set me off, because it struck me as precisely the kind of reflexive politicisation of a piece of pop culture that drives me crazy whenever anyone does it.  In particular, this claim bothered me:

However, I’m getting a very bad vibe about it being a multi-episode Iraq war bashfest.  In particular, the webisodes – which, in all honesty, I’ve only seen the first five or six – draw complimentary parallels between the jihadi “insurgents” and the human resistance forces on New Caprica.  

As I said before, you have to have a pretty low opinion of American soldiers to equate them with the Cylon occupation of New Caprica and an oddly high opinion of jihadis to associate them with the Colonials.  If by “complimentary parallels” the reader means that terrorist methods seem more appealing to us when the presumed Good Guys use them against their oppressors than when the Bad Guys use them against us, maybe so, but then that only underscores just how arbitrary some people are willing to be when it comes to condemning and approving of terrorist tactics by an insurgency if it all depends on who the insurgents are.  Presumably we should condemn terrorism whether committed by jihadis or by Caprican resistance fighters who are taking out the “skinjobs” in a cafe, but in BSG we do at least always have the excuse that the Cylons aren’t human; the normal rules don’t apply.  That makes us feel better when we root for the Colonials to kill the “Toasters”; it ought also to make us reconsider just how often “we” are willing to view other people as little better than Toasters to be scrapped in pursuit of a greater goal. 

But the implication of the reader’s remarks about the webisodes (that they are basically making an apology for terrorists) annoyed me for the same reason other attempts to politicise other movies and TV shows irritate me.   I objected with similar vehemence when someone tried to make Harry Potter out to be the embodiment of regressive Toryism, and I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the claim–put forward in a law review article, no less–that Harry Potter was going to breed a new generation of anti-statist libertarians.  When certain people overlooked the many, many flaws of V for Vendetta because it expressed their contempt for George Bush, I laughed at them and laughed at the movie.  It wasn’t just that the analysis in each case was often lacking or mistaken–the attempts to find political meaning in entertainment and pop culture generally creeps me out and, in this most recent case, gives me a feeling that for some folks who support the war even BSG is supposed to adhere to the canons of hegemonist realism.   

My annoyance with the reader’s Iraq comparison stemmed from the suggestion that, even if there were storylines that bore some resemblance to the experience of the occupation (because they are storylines common to all occupations), the show would somehow cease to be worth watching if it offended the reader’s precious political sensibilities about Iraq.  The new season might be a “multi-episode Iraq war bashfest”–oh, no!  Even supposing it is true that the new season is making references to Iraq, and it seems that Moore acknowledges as much, the show isn’t the one doing the sermonising or moralising about the rights and wrongs of the resistance to the Cylons.  The viewers are the ones who will probably draw the conclusion that resistance to occupation is admirable and noble in this particular case, because in this particular case it is a classic “us” vs. “them” scenario in which humanity is fighting for its very survival.  If this reader thinks the new season appears to be an “Iraq war bashfest,” what can it possibly say for the Iraq war that it bears close enough resemblance to the enslavement of humanity by a race of machines that it can be effectively paralleled in a drama as otherworldly as BSG

Anyone who has seen a couple episodes knows that, insofar as any television is actually worth watching, BSG is worthwhile even if the politics of any one particular episode or series of episodes drive us up the wall.  Rather than allowing the show to provoke some kind of reassessment or thoughtful consideration of the problems raised in this or that episode, this reader seemed inclined to mock any attempt to say something intelligent about the potential moral conflicts and injustices of occupation.  The dismissive remark about “speaking truth to power” (as if this were in itself not a worthy thing to do simply because it has become a shopworn cliche) summed up the knee-jerk reaction that I found so obnoxious.  If that is the level of understanding viewers are going to bring to the political questions covered by BSG, they might as well stop trying to relate the show to current events or historical parallels, as I suspect viewers such as the one who wrote in to NRO want a story of clean-cut political morality to reassure them that they are in no way similar to the Cylons and that there are no ambiguities or moral conflicts in war.   

The ambiguities that Moore prizes in his storytelling also prevent the ready-made associations with Iraq or the “war on terror” that some people across the spectrum have been inclined to draw.  For example, when Leoben was being tortured in season one, some liberals thought this was a great indictment of Abu Ghraib–never mind that, unlike Leoben, the Iraqis actually are human, and that the show seemed to tell us that summarily executing the prisoner was the right thing to do.  The mass murdering done by the super-religious Cylons seemed to some to mirror the jihadis perfectly right down to their own Inshallah, the old “by your command” from the original series, while for others they represented kooky Christian fundamentalists who keep talking about God’s love while dropping the odd nuke on your cities.  Presumably someone will come up with the argument that Gaius Baltar represents academia and shows us that all intellectuals are potential collaborators with the enemy.  It reaches a point where you simply want to tell everyone to stop trying to find political angles and advantage in a fictitious story about genocidal cyborgs, since, last I checked, we are not now confronted with a cyborg threat. 

It is fundamentally a story that delves into what it means to be human, and uses the setting of an apocalyptic war and exile to test and challenge our assumptions about what humanity is, and that is why it is such a powerful story.  That story is ultimately far more interesting than whether Moore endorses or criticises a particular war in the process.  It tries, as best it can given the constraints of time and the genre, to tell the truth, including the ugly truths, about human beings in wartime.  If that makes some war supporters unhappy, well, it is hardly a surprise.  

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