The Phantom Menace

 In 1977 I was 14 years old. I had heard about this Science Fiction movie that had come out called Star Wars. Was tangentially interested. I was a reader of Science Fiction and snobbishly felt that a Book would always be superior to a movie.

In the middle of the summer I was sent up to Canada to my once yearly month long visit with my Father. I did not usually enjoy those visits. My father worked as a Taxi driver in Mississauga ON, a suburb of Toronto, and lived in Oakville, just over the border from Mississauga, in the middle of farm country. To get anywhere that had anything going on was money and a long bus ride. Bus and subway if going into Toronto. So, very boring.

After I had been there a couple days my father came back to the house in the late morning and asked me what I wanted to do for the day. So I said something like I guess I'll go see that Star Wars movie. He handed me just enough to go see the movie and then catch a bus back to the corner of Winston Churchill Blvd and Dundas St, where I had to walk about a half mile into Oakville to get to the house, and then drove me to the Mall where the movie theatre was.

Folks, I had a "Religious" experience. I will probably write about that someday. Today is not about that. I said all this just so that you can understand that I have been immersed in the Star Wars Universe, obsessed at times I must admit, since the beginning.

I watched all three of the "original trilogy" in the theatres. And I still believe that "The Empire Strikes Back" is the best of the bunch. I have had a lot of discussions about the movies, the books, the fan fic, etc with other Star Wars fans and some haters.

I refuse to get into the Star Wars versus Star Trek debate. They are both wonderful and fulfill different purposes while telling very different stories.

And then the "Prequals" came out. I liked them. I thought that George Lucas could have spent more time in story development and less time in graphics, and the whole debate about Jar-Jar Binks I am not going to touch, and over all I thought that they were decent.

And now we get to the crux of things. The title of the first prequal movie. The Phantom Menace.

And I think that it fits the structure of the story very well. We have a manufactured crisis, created by Darth Sidious pulling the strings of the Separatist Alliance and his alter ego, Senator Palpatine, pulling the strings in the Galactic Republic. From both sides he creates the crisis which starts to tear the Galaxy apart and to destroy people faith in the Republic and the Jedi.

So, the Phantom Menace equals a Manufactured Crisis. A crisis designed to bring discredit on the Government and create a lack of trust in the Guardians of the Peace the Jedi Order. It has been going on for a long while and has very deep pockets and a lot of enablers. AKA Fellow Travelers.

And what Darth Sidious does is actually pretty easy to do. He takes some Legitimate complaints and blows them up from one side making them greater than they are and then, as Senator Palpatine, creates delay and obstruction in getting anything resolved while decreasing the Governments ability to address any of these issues with anything resembling clarity and/or resolve. Nothing can get thru the Bureaucracy.

So weaponized grievance and ineffectual government. And then war with dissention on both sides.

A Manufactured Crisis with people with bad intent pulling the strings.

A Phantom Menace made real and deadly.

And the First Galactic Empire is the result.

And so today we live in another Phantom Menace.

Created by real grievance weaponized with an attack on governance and a bunch of people with bad intent pulling the strings.

How many of us remember when Hilary Clinton talked about a vast right wing conspiracy? Anyone besides me ready to admit that she nailed it? That she was not only correct that she was accurate?

Because the result of mocking her instead of listening to her we are in the end game of the fall of the United States of America as a Representative Democracy and the transformation into a defacto Empire of Oligarchy.

Because the people who tried to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Business Plot in 1934, using an army of veterans and a lot of money, were never punished. And they learned. They did not need an army. What they needed was a structure.

And out of that they created Think Tanks and Pipelines for the people that they wanted to put in place. And then they bought Ronald Reagan and began the process of attacking Governance and Weaponizing Grievance.

And here we are folks.

In the end game of a Phantom Menace. Created by Oligarchs who want to make themselves richer and the rest of us barely able to subsist.

And, like the Roman "Republic", they will keep the forms of a representative republic while completely neutering those forms in actuality.

It is just about the Dictatorship of the Oligarchy.

We have very little time left to stop this.

If we can.

So. Get. Busy.

NOW!!!