I've not been writing because I've been busy with other things, and I am very much in this slack water mode. It seems as though events outrace anything I or anyone else has to say about them with any hope of writing anything truly insightful or helpful. Almost everything I read seems idiotic or at best to be quasi interesting but "not it," instead "missing it" because our eyes haven't adjusted yet to enable us to see meaningful patterns. And so, I suppose, I'm reluctant to write anything I know for sure is "not it". I'm not a professional blogger, and I don't have to write for my paycheck. I pity those who do. My basic assumption is that nobody knows what they're doing or what they're talking about because we're in a new situation nobody understands.
I know. People have ideas and theories about what ought to be done, and there is a course of action that is in fact the best possible course of action, and maybe someone is proposing it. But the fact is that whatever might be the best thing to do, there's no political constituency to back it, because whoever knows what the best thing to do is has no political power. Most of us wouldn't recognize the best thing to do if we heard it especially if it would cause too much short term pain, And so we have our opinions and as with all opinions some are better than others, but no one really knows. Even the guy who is proposing what would in fact turn out to be the best course of action doesn't know beforehand if it would work or not. Nobody knows anything for sure.
And so we can vent and shake our fists all we want, but it all comes down to the politics--who has the power and how will they use it. And the people with the power are the people who created or enabled the disaster in the first place. In a radio interview I heard (I think) Joe Nocera describe their power as that of people who have rigged the system with ticking bombs, and they demand to be paid their exorbitant because they are the only ones who know how to disarm the bomb, and if you don't let them do it them handle this crisis the way only they know how to do it because they are the ones who set the bombs in the first place, they'll let the whole system collapse. So so then let's keep paying them billions, and they'll fix the problem, maybe. And so the rest of us keep paying because, even if they don't know how to disarm the bomb or don't want to, we don't know what else to do.
So sure, there's a part of me that wants Summers and Geithner fired and which would prefer someone like Joseph Stiglitz managing the crisis, but how does the guy with the explosives strapped to his chest respond to someone who will read him the riot act? It's never about doing whatever might seem to be the right thing in the abstract--even if we know what that is--but about doing what's possible given the political realities.
Which is my segue into my sayonara to Battlestar Galactica. The finale was for me a disappointment, but I want to give the writers credit for reaching for something even if they missed it. The show was more sure footed when it got us to identify with the good guys Roslin and Adama in their authoritarianism because we saw that the democratic process was being abused by the bad guys Zarek and Baltar. Neither side was unambiguously good or evil, but was Battlestar a clever right-wing propaganda vehicle for its taking the
side of the benevolent dictators? Isn't that really how Cheney justifies his behavior? "Hey, I'm just like Laura Roslin doing what I have to do for the common good. You may not like it, but you don't understand what's really going on. You have to trust me."
And while most of us with any claim to good sense would never trust a guy like Cheney, we find ourselves trusting Roslin and Adama, and wishing even that they had taken care of Baltar when they had the chance. So what does that say about our commitment to democracy and the rule of law? I don't think the goal was to make Cheney's argument, but rather to make us experience our own ambivalence about things we think superficially with certainty, and that a good thing. We are most of us Lee Adama, caught in the middle wanting the best choices to be made, and committed to the process that often prevents them from being made. Or was it designed to be a challenge to our complacent assumptions about democracy? Are we to side with process and the rule of law or with the leader with dictatorial powers whom we believe has the common good as his/her primary motivator?
Battlestar was also interesting because of its metaphysical ambitions, but for me at least they were not realized, and the finale was a deep disappointment in that regard. It just came off a contrived and not well thought through. (I fear I will have the same reaction to Lost, which is similarly ambitious.) I suspected from the moment the quest for earth theme was introduced that the fleet would find our earth thousands of years ago and that the writers would try to tie it in with theories that human civilization was brought to earth by aliens who also introduced monotheism through the Egyptians. The writers knew that was the expectation, and that's why they upended it by the fleet's finding Earth 1 a nuclear wasteland. But they brought us to the green, unspoiled Earth II in the end.
And that's fine, so far as it goes, but in its other themes it was reaching for something that it really didn't know the answers for, and so the answers it gave were contrived and unsatisfactory. The business about resurrection was interesting, but while it made some sense with regard to the cylons in a reincarnational way, it didn't make much sense with regard to Kara Thrace. Why only her of all the people who died? I know, she's "special", but what kind of sense does it make to have a resurrection body and not know it, and then when she finally came to understand what had become of her, why didn't she explain it to Lee rather than just disappearing on him. I know it's less dramatic, but it's also an easy way to deal with it. Just assert it no matter how little sense it makes and move on. It's better not to play with fire if you don't understand it.
And the Six and Baltar angels? Let me get my eyes back down from where they're stuck toward the top of my skull. The whole nuclear destruction of Caprica and the other colonies was orchestrated by God through those two? That was God's plan? So that, what, Hera could get to Earth II?
Why should we care? What sense in the end did that make? The assertion in the final minutes that she of all the people from the fleet who settled on Earth II was the mitochondrial Eve just seems silly. This was what the whole mission to find earth was designed to achieve? That earth evolution be directed by a species that is half human/half cylon? Why should it matter? What difference does that make since humans and cylons are in the end indistinguishable?
Who cares? Ask yourself what difference it would have made if fleet found its way to earth without Hera. Wouldn't one of the other women have been Eve? Couldn't Sharon and Helo or another human and cylon have babies on earth? Weren't they likely to? The whole idea that finding Hera was central to the human future made no sense unless every other human or cylon woman who landed would be infertile. Maybe there's something else intended here that I'm missing, but unless I am, I see no reason why anyone should have cared more about Hera than any other little girl in the fleet.
I know, it's just TV, but this was supposed to be different and in its final episode it just seemed like TV. I was hoping it could be more. I was hoping it could touch a mythopoetic chord that would resonate more deeply. It was satisfied with being merely clever.