We Need a Sacrificial Death Star

In 1977 I was 13 years old. I was living in the debris of a divorce, in a shitty apartment on the outskirts of Orlando, which, at the time, was like the outskirts of any halfway large city: it was nowhere. It was hot and things were weird.

We didn't have 17 news channels and Google. I didn't have a frikkin clue about the rest of the world. My mom didn't watch the news and around 6 p.m. everyday, when the news was on, we were watching Three's Company or going to church. The Vietnam War was over by two years but the myth of it was only just learning to walk--on one leg. Joan Crawford and "Chico" (Freddie Prinze) had both died. Bob Dylan got divorced and the Sex Pistols were igniting dirty little imaginations and guitar sales in New York. Terrorists were getting press in DC and Bucharest. The Space Shuttle had just taken its training wheels flight.

I had just gotten in trouble for my great 7th grade prank: during a film about geography, I took one of the clay camels that had been standing peacefully on some kid's excruciatingly detailed diorama and reformed it in a position behind one of the other camels, a position I thought was perfectly natural but was considered surprisingly realistic and carnal by the teacher.

In 1977 I was roaming the unfinished apartments near my own, racing my bike through lake-sized parking lot puddles and drawing tits on the walls. I was grumbly and glum, besieged by some haunting guilt, living in a part of the world ill defined and gripped by a sadness and horror from a war that had overstayed its welcome and killed the children to boot. People were alcoholic, poor as fuck, pissed off, unemployed, and waiting for some kind of leadership. Nixon had let us down, fucked up no matter whom you asked. Gerald Ford was a Marx brother stand in for a president and when Carter stepped up, his fucking economic example-setting pissed off everybody. White House fundraisers with a cash bar and peanuts? Was he insane?

I think it was similar to what we have now. People are disassociated from their leaders, from a national purpose, from a common character. We're hated everywhere. We're all like I was at 13, racing through an empty landscape on our bikes with nothing to look forward to and no one telling us that this is all temporary. No one to tell us that there is hope.

Then Star Wars came out. Fucking hell. You want to know why that thing exploded? Besides the fact that it blew our minds on an eye candy level never seen before, besides being an act of technological magick so brilliant and so perfectly executed that no one was unaffected by it . . . the reason people stood up and cheered is because the Death Star was blown up--by one guy.

That Death Star was all of our problems reverse engineered into one dented rivet riddled hellish fist. It was our primo bogeyman. It was the ticking time bomb the disaffected were carrying in their chests. When we blew that fucker up . . .

Oh, yeah. It was us. We blew the bastard up--not Luke. Luke was the avatar. Luke was the god form we evoked and wore like a suit of armor. In that scene, that cramped and capable cockpit, in that narrow deadly channel at a thousand miles an hour, it was you and me that pulled the trigger, not Luke. And when that son of a bitch exploded we cheered because all our problems evaporated with it. Incinerated at seventy frames per second.

I walked out of that theater afraid of nothing and a believer. I took to the force like a drunk takes to Jesus H. I had something to live for. I didn't know what the fuck it was, I didn't have a name for it, and it didn't really exist as anything more than a story.

But a story is a valuable thing.

Think of the grail. Hell, people have defined their life for that thing and it's just a story. The core of the Star Wars phenom was no different--it gave us all a story to slay our dragons with. That's why successive iterations have ultimately never succeeded the original--the first one changed how we see the world on every level.

Now we need another sacrificial Death Star. We need a new story to pull us out of this mess.

Look at us: our country is reviled, best friends flame each other over political differences, people think of their party as a culture, we're in a war even less worthy than Vietnam, we don't trust our leaders, actions of actual courage and character are publicly derided as traitorous. We have no heroes.

What we need is the next Galahad. We need the next Kennedy. The next Mr. Smith. The next Luke Skywalker. We need a story that swallows our anxieties whole and gives birth to a new grail--to the next hero.

The reason these stories exist, and that we remember them, tell them to our kids, rent them into the millions at Blockbuster, is that they inspire us to noble purpose. I can hear the sneering sighs of the cynical slithering through the wires as you read this. But sometimes cynics need to take a backseat and let the believers do their job. These stories, these myths, work by reminding us that it isn't just the fight that is important, but our conduct during the fight: our compassion, our courage, our dignity--our character as evidenced by our conduct. It is this: We are all part of a story we will eventually tell someone. And it is important to be the good guy.