Archives for May 2014

I have long bemoaned the dumbing down of America. There seems to be a growing number of humans who sincerely believe that their opinion carries as much weight as actual facts. They are 100% wrong but that fact doesn’t even enter their equations. If I may insult the word equations. It’s one thing to believe in something. Regular readers know that I believe in God. Mostly because I refuse to believe that I’m the most evolved being in the universe. Believing in God does not, by any stretch, require me to believe all of the hateful things that a god is supposed to enjoy. My beliefs are simple. Since I do not want to marry someone of the same sex I have not done so. See how easy that is? Just because I’m not comfortable loving a man as I would love a woman should have no impact on those who are wired differently. The same applies to most things. And yet there are those, a growing contingent it seems, who feel contrariwise. They firmly believe that all truth flows through them. That if they don’t understand it then it’s not true. And that’s not only stupid, it’s dangerous. Diseases long conquered are making a comeback thanks to these idiots. Science long settled is being bludgeoned into meaningless sound bites. Facts are now treated as politically skewed opinions. There are people who firmly believe that hex signs and such have as much validity as science. And thanks to these people children are dying and people are rediscovering that human rights are not a given.

As I said, this is not just stupid, it’s dangerous.

Thansk to my pal Jon Schnepp, I found out that Jonathon Gatehouse, at MacLeans, says things are even worse than I thought.

South Carolina’s state beverage is milk. Its insect is the praying mantis. There’s a designated dance—the shag—as well a sanctioned tartan, game bird, dog, flower, gem and snack food (boiled peanuts). But what Olivia McConnell noticed was missing from among her home’s 50 official symbols was a fossil. So last year, the eight-year-old science enthusiast wrote to the governor and her representatives to nominate the Columbian mammoth. Teeth from the woolly proboscidean, dug up by slaves on a local plantation in 1725, were among the first remains of an ancient species ever discovered in North America. Forty-three other states had already laid claim to various dinosaurs, trilobites, primitive whales and even petrified wood. It seemed like a no-brainer. “Fossils tell us about our past,” the Grade 2 student wrote.

And, as it turns out, the present, too. The bill that Olivia inspired has become the subject of considerable angst at the legislature in the state capital of Columbia. First, an objecting state senator attached three verses from Genesis to the act, outlining God’s creation of all living creatures. Then, after other lawmakers spiked the amendment as out of order for its introduction of the divinity, he took another crack, specifying that the Columbian mammoth “was created on the sixth day with the other beasts of the field.” That version passed in the senate in early April. But now the bill is back in committee as the lower house squabbles over the new language, and it’s seemingly destined for the same fate as its honouree—extinction.

What has doomed Olivia’s dream is a raging battle in South Carolina over the teaching of evolution in schools. Last week, the state’s education oversight committee approved a new set of science standards that, if adopted, would see students learn both the case for, and against, natural selection.

Charles Darwin’s signature discovery—first published 155 years ago and validated a million different ways since—long ago ceased to be a matter for serious debate in most of the world. But in the United States, reconciling science and religious belief remains oddly difficult. A national poll, conducted in March for the Associated Press, found that 42 per cent of Americans are “not too” or “not at all” confident that all life on Earth is the product of evolution. Similarly, 51 per cent of people expressed skepticism that the universe started with a “big bang” 13.8 billion years ago, and 36 per cent doubted the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years.

The American public’s bias against established science doesn’t stop where the Bible leaves off, however. The same poll found that just 53 per cent of respondents were “extremely” or “very confident” that childhood vaccines are safe and effective. (Worldwide, the measles killed 120,000 people in 2012. In the United States, where a vaccine has been available since 1963, the last recorded measles death was in 2003.) When it comes to global warming, only 33 per cent expressed a high degree of confidence that it is “man made,” something the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has declared is all but certain. (The good news, such as it was in the AP poll, was that 69 per cent actually believe in DNA, and 82 per cent now agree that smoking causes cancer.)

If the rise in uninformed opinion was limited to impenetrable subjects that would be one thing, but the scourge seems to be spreading. Everywhere you look these days, America is in a rush to embrace the stupid. Hell-bent on a path that’s not just irrational, but often self-destructive. Common-sense solutions to pressing problems are eschewed in favour of bumper-sticker simplicities and blind faith.

In a country bedevilled by mass shootings—Aurora, Colo.; Fort Hood, Texas; Virginia Tech—efforts at gun control have given way to ever-laxer standards. Georgia recently passed a law allowing people to pack weapons in state and local buildings, airports, churches and bars. Florida is debating legislation that will waive all firearm restrictions during state emergencies like riots or hurricanes. (One opponent has moved to rename it “an Act Relating to the Zombie Apocalypse.”) And since the December 2012 massacre of 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., 12 states have passed laws allowing guns to be carried in schools, and 20 more are considering such measures.

The cost of a simple appendectomy in the United States averages $33,000 and it’s not uncommon for such bills to top six figures. More than 15 per cent of the population has no health insurance whatsoever. Yet efforts to fill that gaping hole via the Affordable Health Care Act—a.k.a. Obamacare—remain distinctly unpopular. Nonsensical myths about the government’s “real” intentions have found so much traction that 30 per cent still believe that there will be official “death panels” to make decisions on end-of-life care.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has been engaged in an ever-widening program of spying on its own—and foreign—citizens, tapping phones, intercepting emails and texts, and monitoring social media to track the movements, activities and connections of millions. Still, many Americans seem less concerned with the massive violations of their privacy in the name of the War on Terror, than imposing Taliban-like standards on the lives of others. Last month, the school board in Meridian, Idaho voted to remove The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie from its Grade 10 supplemental reading list following parental complaints about its uncouth language and depictions of sex and drug use. When 17-year-old student Brady Kissel teamed up with staff from a local store to give away copies at a park as a protest, a concerned citizen called police. It was the evening of April 23, which was also World Book Night, an event dedicated to “spreading the love of reading.”

If ignorance is contagious, it’s high time to put the United States in quarantine.

Americans have long worried that their education system is leaving their children behind. With good reason: national exams consistently reveal how little the kids actually know. In the last set, administered in 2010 (more are scheduled for this spring), most fourth graders were unable to explain why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure, and only half were able to order North America, the U.S., California and Los Angeles by size. Results in civics were similarly dismal. While math and reading scores have improved over the years, economics remains the “best” subject, with 42 per cent of high school seniors deemed “proficient.”

They don’t appear to be getting much smarter as they age. A 2013 survey of 166,000 adults across 20 countries that tested math, reading and technological problem-solving found Americans to be below the international average in every category. (Japan, Finland, Canada, South Korea and Slovakia were among the 11 nations that scored significantly higher.)

The trends are not encouraging. In 1978, 42 per cent of Americans reported that they had read 11 or more books in the past year. In 2014, just 28 per cent can say the same, while 23 per cent proudly admit to not having read even one, up from eight per cent in 1978. Newspaper and magazine circulation continues to decline sharply, as does viewership for cable news. The three big network supper-hour shows drew a combined average audience of 22.6 million in 2013, down from 52 million in 1980. While 82 per cent of Americans now say they seek out news digitally, the quality of the information they’re getting is suspect. Among current affairs websites, Buzzfeedlogs almost as many monthly hits as the Washington Post.

The advance of ignorance and irrationalism in the U.S. has hardly gone unnoticed. The late Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer prize back in 1964 for his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which cast the nation’s tendency to embrace stupidity as a periodic by-product of its founding urge to democratize everything. By 2008, journalist Susan Jacoby was warning that the denseness—“a virulent mixture of anti-rationalism and low expectations”—was more of a permanent state. In her book, The Age of American Unreason, she posited that it trickled down from the top, fuelled by faux-populist politicians striving to make themselves sound approachable rather than smart. Their creeping tendency to refer to everyone—voters, experts, government officials—as “folks” is “symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards,” she wrote. “Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls.”

That inarticulate legacy didn’t end with George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. Barack Obama, the most cerebral and eloquent American leader in a generation, regularly plays the same card, droppin’ his Gs and dialling down his vocabulary to Hee Hawstandards. His ability to convincingly play a hayseed was instrumental in his 2012 campaign against the patrician Mitt Romney; in one of their televised debates the President referenced “folks” 17 times.

An aversion to complexity—at least when communicating with the public—can also be seen in the types of answers politicians now provide the media. The average length of a sound bite by a presidential candidate in 1968 was 42.3 seconds. Two decades later, it was 9.8 seconds. Today, it’s just a touch over seven seconds and well on its way to being supplanted by 140-character Twitter bursts.

Little wonder then that distrust—of leaders, institutions, experts, and those who report on them—is rampant. A YouGov poll conducted last December found that three-quarters of Americans agreed that science is a force for good in the world. Yet when asked if they truly believe what scientists tell them, only 36 per cent of respondents said yes. Just 12 per cent expressed strong confidence in the press to accurately report scientific findings. (Although according to a 2012 paper by Gordon Gauchat, a University of North Carolina sociologist, the erosion of trust in science over the past 40 years has been almost exclusively confined to two groups: conservatives and regular churchgoers. Counterintuitively, it is the most highly educated among them—with post-secondary education—who harbour the strongest doubts.)

The term “elitist” has become one of the most used, and feared, insults in American life. Even in the country’s halls of higher learning, there is now an ingrained bias that favours the accessible over the exacting.

“There’s a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization,” says Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critiqueand a film and media studies professor at University of California at Irvine. Both ends of the political spectrum have come to reject the conspicuously clever, she says, if for very different reasons; the left because of worries about inclusiveness, the right because they equate objections with obstruction. As a result, the very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.” (Boomers, she says, deserve most of the blame. “They were so triumphalist in promoting pop culture and demoting the canon.”)

The digital revolution, which has brought boundless access to information and entertainment choices, has somehow only enhanced the lowest common denominators—LOL cat videos and the Kardashians. Instead of educating themselves via the Internet, most people simply use it to validate what they already suspect, wish or believe to be true. It creates an online environment where Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy model with a high school education, can become a worldwide leader of the anti-vaccination movement, naysaying the advice of medical professionals.

Most perplexing, however, is where the stupid is flowing from. As conservative pundit David Frum recently noted, where it was once the least informed who were most vulnerable to inaccuracies, it now seems to be the exact opposite. “More sophisticated news consumers turn out to use this sophistication to do a better job of filtering out what they don’t want to hear,” he blogged.

But are things actually getting worse? There’s a long and not-so-proud history of American electors lashing out irrationally, or voting against their own interests. Political scientists have been tracking, since the early 1950s, just how poorly those who cast ballots seem to comprehend the policies of the parties and people they are endorsing. A wealth of research now suggests that at the most optimistic, only 70 per cent actually select the party that accurately represents their views—and there are only two choices.

Larry Bartels, the co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University, says he doubts that the spreading ignorance is a uniquely American phenomenon. Facing complex choices, uncertain about the consequences of the alternatives, and tasked with balancing the demands of jobs, family and the things that truly interest them with boring policy debates, people either cast their ballots reflexively, or not at all. The larger question might be whether engagement really matters. “If your vision of democracy is one in which elections provide solemn opportunities for voters to set the course of public policy and hold leaders accountable, yes,” Bartels wrote in an email to Maclean’s. “If you take the less ambitious view that elections provide a convenient, non-violent way for a society to agree on who is in charge at any given time, perhaps not.”

A study by two Princeton University researchers, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, released last month, tracked 1,800 U.S. policy changes between 1981 and 2002, and compared the outcome with the expressed preferences of median-income Americans, the affluent, business interests and powerful lobbies. They concluded that average citizens “have little or no independent influence” on policy in the U.S., while the rich and their hired mouthpieces routinely get their way. “The majority does not rule,” they wrote.

Smart money versus dumb voters is hardly a fair fight. But it does offer compelling evidence that the survival of the fittest remains an unshakable truth even in American life. A sad sort of proof of evolution.

That last part is a solid reminder how much your vote counts. If you sit on the sidelines and allow idiots to get into office then you get the government you deserve.

So how do we fix this? Education. We stop legislators from gutting curricula and force kids to learn actual facts. The earth is more than 6,000 years old. Jesus never rode a velociratpor. Vaccines cure diseases, they don’t cause them. Drinking bleach does not cure AIDS. 2+2=4. The universe is infinite. Life can, and most likely does, exist on other worlds. There is no such thing as Bigfoot. There is no such thing as UFOs. Contrails are not chemtrails. 9/11 was caused by a small band of terrorists, not by the world’s largest religion. Fluoride does not allow the government to track your movements via satellites. Seeing a man kiss another man will not make you gay any more than drinking milk will make you a cow.

We need to teach them these facts and more if we ever hope of having a better world.

It can be done, but we need to get off our complacent asses to make it happen.

Stupid Girls by P!nk from Mie Madsen on Vimeo.

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This Sunday is Mother’s Day. Yes, it is Mother in the singular possesive. There’s a reason for that and we’ll get to it in a bit. One thing is certain is that the holiday has changed since its inception. Originally it was almost a religious holiday. A day of reverence and service. Now we have brunches and sales and MILFs. And, to be perfectly honest, I am a fan of the whole MILF thing. That, however, will be a story for another day. Other people aren’t so sure. I have good news for them. If you don’t really know what you’re into then just visit Cerebral Encounters and fill in the registration form. In keeping with our theme today I’ll note that it’s a site run by a MILF. Did I mention that I’m a MILF fan? Yeah, I think I did. Anyway, it’s Mother’s Day and maybe you’d rather not think about your mom the same way I do. If that’s the case allow me to take you down the dusty, and safe, roads of history.

The nice folks over at IB Times did a little poking through various tomes and were able to provide a pleasant, and brief, history of all the mothers’ day celebrations prior to it becoming a holiday here in the U.S., and later the world.

Ancient History:
The earliest history of the Mother’s day celebration can be traced to the Greek’s celebration of a day in honor of the maternal goddesses. Rhea, wife of Cronus and the mother of many deities of Greek mythology was honored.

A celebration of ancient Romans that dates back to some 250 years before Christ was born, is also thought to be a possible origin of the present day Mother’s day. They celebrated a spring festival called ‘Hilaria’ that was dedicated to Cybele, a mother goddess. However, the celebrations that usually lasted for three days with parades, games and masquerades; were thought to be notorious and the followers of Cybele were ultimately banished from Rome.

The fourth Sunday of lent was also celebrated by early Christians in honor of the Virgin Mary, Christ’s mother. But in the UK, the celebration was expanded to include all mothers and was called Mothering Sunday.

And that brings us up to the Civil War in the U.S. While the ancient celebrations tended to focus on what made moms moms in the first place – NAKEY TIME! – or focused on their role in society – VENERATION TIME!! – it wasn’t until it all got balled together with conservative Christianity and a woman with a mommy complex so severe that Freud would have surrendered that it all went down a dark path.

Brian Handwerk over at National Geographic has the whole, sordid, tale.

Before the brunches, before the gifts and greeting cards, Mother’s Day was a time for mourning women to remember fallen soldiers and work for peace.

When the holiday went commercial, its greatest champion gave everything to fight it, dying penniless and broken in a sanitarium. Of course, Mother’s Day marched on without her and is today celebrated, in various forms, on a global scale.

As early as the 1850s, West Virginia women’s organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis held Mother’s Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and try to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination, according to historian Katharine Antolini of West Virginia Wesleyan College.

The groups also tended wounded soldiers of both sides during the U.S. Civil War from 1861 to 1865, she added.

In the postwar years Jarvis and other women organized Mother’s Friendship Day picnics and other events as pacifist events uniting former foes. Julia Ward Howe, for one—best known as the composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—issued a widely read “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870, calling for women to take an active political role in promoting peace.

Around the same time, Jarvis had initiated a Mothers’ Friendship Day for Union and Confederate loyalists across her state. But it was her daughter Anna who was most responsible for what we call Mother’s Day—and who would spend most of her later life fighting what it had become.

“Mother’s Day,” Not “Mothers’ Day”

Moved by the 1905 death of her own mother, Anna Jarvis, who never had children of her own, was the driving force behind the first Mother’s Day observances in 1908.

On May 10 of that year, families gathered at events in Jarvis’s hometown of Grafton, West Virginia—at a church now renamed the International Mother’s Day Shrine—as well as in Philadelphia, where Jarvis lived at the time, and in several other cities.

Largely through Jarvis’s efforts, Mother’s Day came to be observed in a growing number of cities and states until U.S. President Woodrow Wilson officially set aside the second Sunday in May in 1914 for the holiday.

“For Jarvis it was a day where you’d go home to spend time with your mother and thank her for all that she did,” said West Virginia Wesleyan’s Antolini, who wrote “Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Defense of Her Mother’s Day” as her Ph.D. dissertation.

“It wasn’t to celebrate all mothers. It was to celebrate the best mother you’ve ever known—your mother—as a son or a daughter.” That’s why Jarvis stressed the singular “Mother’s Day,” rather than the plural “Mothers’ Day,” Antolini explained.

But Jarvis’s success soon turned to failure, at least in her own eyes.

Storming Mother’s Day

Anna Jarvis’s idea of an intimate Mother’s Day quickly became a commercial gold mine centering on the buying and giving of flowers, candies, and greeting cards—a development which deeply disturbed Jarvis. She set about dedicating herself and her sizable inheritance to returning Mother’s Day to its reverent roots.

Jarvis incorporated herself as the Mother’s Day International Association and tried to retain some control of the holiday. She organized boycotts, threatened lawsuits, and even attacked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for using Mother’s Day to raise funds for charities.

“In 1923 she crashed a convention of confectioners in Philadelphia,” Antolini said.

A similar protest followed two years later. “The American War Mothers, which still exists, used Mother’s Day for fundraising and sold carnations every year,” Antolini said. “Anna resented that, so she crashed their 1925 convention in Philadelphia and was actually arrested for disturbing the peace.”

Jarvis’s fervent attempts to reform Mother’s Day continued until at least the early 1940s. In 1948 she died at 84 in Philadelphia’s Marshall Square Sanitarium.

“This woman, who died penniless in a sanitarium in a state of dementia, was a woman who could have profited from Mother’s Day if she wanted to,” Antolini said.

“But she railed against those who did, and it cost her everything, financially and physically.”

Today, of course, Mother’s Day continues to roll on as an engine of consumerism.

In the U.S. alone, Mother’s Day 2012 spending will reach $18.6 billion—with the average adult spending more than $152.52 on gifts, the National Retail Federation estimates.

Sixty-six percent of Americans celebrating Mother’s Day will treat their mothers to flowers, the federation reports, and more than 30 percent of the surveyed celebrants plan to give their mothers gifts of jewelry.

The U.S. National Restaurant Association reports that Mother’s Day is the year’s most popular holiday for dining out. Last year the association estimated that some 75 million U.S. adults woud do just that on the holiday.

As for Mother’s Day being a Hallmark holiday, there’s no denying it, strictly speaking.

Hallmark Cards itself, which sold its first Mother’s Day cards in the early 1920s, reports that Mother’s Day is the number three holiday for card exchange in the United States, behind Christmas and Valentine’s Day—another apparent affront to the memory of the mother of Mother’s Day.

“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” Jarvis once said, according to the book Women Who Made a Difference.

“And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.”

Mother’s Day Gone Global

The holiday Anna Jarvis launched has spread around much of the world, though it’s celebrated with varying enthusiasm, in various ways, and on various days—though more often than not on the second Sunday in May.

In much of the Arab world, Mother’s Day is on March 21, which happens to loosely coincide with the start of spring. In Panama the day is celebrated on December 8, when the Catholic Church honors perhaps the most famous of mothers, the Virgin Mary. In Thailand mothers are honored on August 12, the birthday of Queen Sirikit, who has reigned since 1956 and is considered by many to be a mother to all Thais.

Britain’s centuries-old Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of the Christian period of Lent, began as a spring Sunday designated for people to visit their area’s main cathedral, or mother church, rather than their local parish.

Mothering Sunday church travel led to family reunions, which in turn led to Britain’s version of Mother’s Day.

All different yet all the same since at their core they honor the moms among us.

So whether your family busts outs the rites of Cybele and shares the wine and naked time with loved ones or if you celebrate the day in quiet reflection on what your mom means to you, just know that each of us here at the World News Center wish you a Happy Mother’s Day.

Oh, and for the record, we tend toward the whole naked with wine thing around here.

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Regular readers here know that I’m a Star Trek fan. And even though the new movies have gone from an underlying premise of a future filled with hope and equality to “hey, let’s blow some stuff up real good,” that hasn’t changed. To be honest, I like the new films too. Violent though they may be they fit our modern world. And the type of hope they offer is the kind built on redemption and awareness. I can live with that. Star Wars, on the other hand, has always struck me as simplistic and pandering. But that hasn’t stopped billions of people from loving the series. And, while both franchises have fan fiction and a wide variety of games, books and what have you built around their respective brands, the two franchises have dealt with them very differently. In the Star Trek universe fans are welcome to submit works for publication. All such works must fit in the timelines presented, must tell an original story or provide a new way of looking at something old without polluting the timelines and so on. It was specifically to get around those facts that J.J. Abrams took the plot twist he did to make the new movies. He needed some wiggle room or he was going to end up with Trilogy of Tribbles. And even then he hews closely to the original so as not to lose the long time fans, like me. All things considered, that’s worked out well for them.

Star Wars, on the other hand, has handled things differently. As has been noted by many, George Lucas really never gave a rat’s ass about plots, acting ability or anything else. All he cares about are the toys he can license and the money they can generate. To be fair, that philosophy has made him a billionaire. However that has had unintended consequences. You see Disney just paid $4 billion for the rights to the Star Wars franchise. Their accountants looked at the various bottom lines, smiled and said cut that check.

Then Disney brought in some folks to keep the franchise current ans said unto them, “Go forth and extend the Star Wars saga.” And those folks fired back with “Which one?” You see, Uncle George has licensed so much stuff to so many people who had no interest in following any story but, rather, just wanted to play with the characters and, in some cases, create their own that there are now about 4 different Star Wars universes and all of them are popular to one degree or another. Especially the one with Slutty Princess Leah

Make sure your boss is at lunch before you click that link.

Anyway, a nice man named Phil Owens, over at Kotaku, who looks oddly like the comic book guy on the Simpsons did in college, does his best to make sense of it all.

The Star Wars universe as we know it is changing.

To a lot of fans, Star Wars is far more than just the movies. The “Expanded Universe” includes novels, comic books and video games that, to many fans, define Star Wars even more than the films that started this phenomenon.

But Disney and LucasFilm are producing new Star Wars movies set after the original trilogy, and they’ve decided that the task of reconciling the stories in these new films with the incredibly dense Expanded Universe lore is an impossible one. And so on Friday they announced that Episodes 7, 8 and 9 will likely disregard at least those parts of the Expanded Universe that take place after Return of the Jedi.

More cynical geek commentators might say this is no big loss. And while there are some things being discarded I’m happy to be able to forget now, there are other aspects of the EU I will mourn.

Good: Context and universe-building

I spent my school years reading Star Wars novels and comics and playing Star Wars games. It’s because I grew up with all that history that I’ve had a ridiculous amount of context for every trip I take into the Star Wars galaxy.

Though I would assume many of the Expanded Universe characters will make appearances in the new films, they won’t have the same histories that have been hammered into my skull over the last 20 years. Rebel pilot Wedge Antilles, who appeared in all of the original three films, has been fleshed out in novels and comic books into one of the most beloved characters in all of Star Wars. Likewise Mara Jade, who is an EU creation and eventual wife to Luke Skywalker, has been the prototypical Strong Female Character among so many others in the EU (more on that later). And Thrawn—an alien tactical genius so much better at warfare than everyone else that even the openly racist Empire couldn’t keep him from rising through its ranks—is almost a symbol for the EU despite not making many appearances.

Maybe those folks and others who have kept us coming back to the Expanded Universe will survive into the new Star Wars canon, but they won’t be the characters we’ve gotten to know so intimately.

When the Expanded Universe became a stated licensing initiative by LucasFilm over two decades ago, they wanted at least the book and comic content to be placed on a coherent timeline with everything counting and referencing everything else. In terms of world-building, it’s been a huge success. Even now as a recovering Star Wars fan I almost reflexively talk about it all the time because I know in-universe Star Wars history about as well as the history of our world. That should give you an idea of the impressive amount of lore built into Star Wars.

Bad: Helter-skelter lore

On the flip side of that, the first eight years of the Expanded Universe effort, from 1991 to early 1999, were pure chaos. And while most of the stories told did fit together decently on a timeline, there are some books that really just didn’t at all and have long been ignored, like the Jedi Prince series. And as much as I enjoy the Jedi Knight games, the folks who made them certainly didn’t try too hard to make them fit into the canon.

Kyle Katarn, for example, is the lead character in three of the four Jedi Knight games. While he does show up in some novels, his adventures in those games never feel like they exist in the same timeline as the rest of the lore, and are never (as far as I can recall) referenced in other works, just as those games never reference what else is going on in the galaxy at the time. The expansion pack to Jedi Knight, Mysteries of the Sith, even stars Mara Jade, and it exists in that same almost context-free bubble.

Star Wars novels were always more internally consistent in terms of continuity, but in that first decade, authors very often were placing stories in gaps in the timeline rather than each new story taking place after the last. Which could make it feel strange to read some of the early-written novels that tied into but did not reference key events from books that were written later but took place before.

But even many of the stories that fit on a timeline weren’t necessarily coherent or sensical in context with each other. In The Crystal Star, for instance, the bad guy kidnaps Han and Leia’s kids because he wants to feed them to an extradimensional jelly monster called Waru. In theJedi Academy Trilogy, Jedi Kyp Durron fell to the dark side and committed genocide but he wasn’t punished for it because they turned him back to the good side. And the less said about the Black Fleet Crisis, the better. Also indicative of this lack of baseline standards were Old Republic-era comics in which powerful Sith lords cause stars to go nova with their minds, making you wonder why the Emperor needed Death Stars, really.

Good: Wraith Squadron’s mentally ill misfits

Being a space fantasy, Star Wars has always been preoccupied with the Jedi and the Force, but a series of books nominally based on the X-Wing games got away from that entirely by focusing on a fighter pilot group called Rogue Squadron and its military operations in the New Republic — the successor government to the Rebel Alliance from the films. The nine books of the X-Wing series that were published in the ’90s (a 10th was released in 2012, and I haven’t read that one) are just about the most readable novels in all the Expanded Universe, and three by Aaron Allston about a starfighter group called Wraith Squadron is probably the peak of theEU in terms of human interest.

This squadron, created by Rebel hero Wedge Antilles (you’ll remember him as the pilot Luke ordered out of the Death Star trench in Star Wars and again flying alongside Lando in Return of the Jedi), is made up of misfits whose military careers are basically over but who have skills that make them suited to working both as pilots and commandos, and who will plan and execute ops with non-traditional methods.

The hook is that most of Wraith Squadron’s misfits are either mentally ill or have serious emotional hangups. We have, for example:

• Face Loran, who acted in Imperial propaganda films as a child and now feels immense guilt over it
• Ton Phanan, who is allergic to bacta (that magic healing fluid Luke was submerged in after his ordeal on Hoth at the start of The Empire Strikes Back) and so he’s been given lots of mechanical parts after traumatic injuries and has become depressed and suicidal about it
• Myn Donos, who is suffering from PTSD after his previous squadron was wiped out in an ambush
• Falynn Sandskimmer, who has a serious inferiority complex that causes her to hate herself because she’s not the best pilot in history
• Runt, a member of a species that naturally develops multiple personalities but who has no control over them and thus is basically a crazy person.

There are more, but you get the picture.

Wraith Squadron is an extraordinary success for a 12-person group specifically because, as we so often see with artists, those seemingly huge character flaws make them think in unique and unpredictable ways. Part of that, of course, is they take some unnecessary risks, but the point here is that this weird group of people gels with each other in a way they couldn’t with normal squadrons, and because of that they’re able to pull off ops nobody else would think to try.

Bad: Dark Empire comic stains the timeline

The first thing Dark Horse Comics did with Star Wars after acquiring the license was publish a series called Dark Empire in 1991, a few months after the acclaimed novel Heir to the Empirebegan this Expanded Universe initiative in earnest. While Heir to the Empire felt pretty grounded, relatively speaking, Dark Empire was about Emperor Palpatine being resurrected in clone bodies six years after Return of the Jedi. Yes, I’m serious.

This “Emperor Reborn” announced his existence to the galaxy by opening a hyperspace wormhole with the Force on Coruscant and sucking Luke Skywalker into it, taking him to the Emperor’s base on the planet Byss. And Luke turns to the dark side to keep from being murdered on the spot, which is kind of OK at first except nothing even remotely thought-provoking happens because of it.

The kicker is that during the three Dark Empire series, Leia gets pregnant and has a baby boy, and she and Han decide to name this kid Anakin. Kind of a horrible thing to do — imagine if Hitler’s adult kids had been the ones to take him down and then half a decade later one of them had a kid named Adolf — but it gets worse. The Emperor is using up clone bodies like candy because something something dark side, and so he needs a new body that’s more sustainable. And Palpatine, in all his wisdom, decides the only option is baby Anakin. Technically, this was an adviser’s idea, probably as a double cross, but, really, the final battle in Dark Empire was about the main antagonist of the Star Wars movies trying to possess a baby.

There are lots of bad Star Wars books and comics, but few of them contain a story that is so significant and sweeping as Dark Empire‘s. It left such a mark in-universe that it had to be referenced often in other works, and we could never forget.

There are more reasons why Dark Empire sucks, but we’ll come back to that.

Good: Progressive gender politics

This doesn’t come across in the movies at all, but the Star Wars Expanded Universe has a long tradition of opposing discrimination in any form. The Empire, aside from being generally evil and fascist, is institutionally racist and misogynistic; they rarely allow non-humans or women in the military, and those who do make it in rarely get the chance to have glorious careers. The Rebellion and then the New Republic, on the other hand, don’t care about that stuff.

Throughout these stories we see our heroes fully embrace inclusiveness. There are so many awesome, kickass ladies in these stories — the fighter squadrons in the X-Wing series are full of women and female aliens, for example — and the good guys never act like that’s a thing. People are people and whether they’re men or women or aliens doesn’t come into the conversation, unless it’s somebody like Borsk Fey’lia, regularly painted as the New Republic’s main Typical Asshole Politician, bringing it up.

Though, yes, the lack of gay people—or even homosexuality as a concept—in nearly all these stories is lame, and there’s no good reason for it. But even so, these stories do strongly encourage inclusiveness, and I can’t help but think that reading so many Star Wars books in my developing years helped make me be less of a jerk than probably I would be otherwise.

Bad: Superweapons

Timothy Zahn is best known in Star Wars circles for writing two sets of books, the Thrawn Trilogy and the Hand of Thrawn duology, the first taking place five years after Jedi and the second happening ten years later. In the Expanded Universe chronology, the time in between those stories is mostly just a black hole of bullshit. It’s also the main reason the EU is thought of as a collection of terribleness, since all this stuff was written in the ’90s when the Expanded Universe was just becoming a thing in earnest.

A big reason why this period sucks is because there are so many superweapons found there, a trend that began in Dark Empire. Let’s count them off.

• World Devastators, which would break up a planet and consume its resources. It’s a possibly benign purpose, but their name is ominous and the Emperor used them on New Republic planets.
• the Galaxy Gun, which destroyed planets
• the Eclipse dreadnaught, which destroyed planets
• a second Eclipse dreadnaught, built after the first one was blown up
• the Darksaber, which was just a Death Star superlaser without all the extra stuff
• an old Death Star prototype
• the Sun Crusher, which could cause stars to go supernova and was invincible
  
• the Eye of Palpatine, a “battlemoon” with enough conventional weaponry to destroy a planet’s crust
• Centerpoint Station, which was a machine that could do anything, pretty much.1

There’s also a book about a guy who used a factory to implant bombs in every droid and computer it produced and then eventually blew them all up at once. Not a superweapon, really, but implausible and over-the-top in the same way.

None of these weapons were the result of an arms race, either, as is the case in Bioware’s MMOStar Wars: The Old Republic where both sides are trying to outdo each other. Most of these superweapons are Imperial things created during the movie era, and apparently totally unnecessary since they weren’t used until much later. The non-Imperial weapons are Centerpoint, made by ancient beings called the Celestials to assemble the Corellian star system, and the Darksaber, which an ambitious Hutt funded in a power grab.

Good: The long-awaited introduction of moral shades of gray to Star Wars

In the late ’90s, some folks at LucasFilm realized they were putting out lots of really stupid books that had little regard for each other and decided to curate some longer-running story arcs that were more coherent than the one-offs and random trilogies that had been the norm. The first of these was the New Jedi Order, begun in 1999 and eventually spanning 19 novels over the following five years.

This series is where Chewbacca was infamously crushed by a falling moon, and it involved an invasion of the galaxy by some extragalactic aliens with a pain fetish. Which was fun. But for a couple years these books got bogged down in the same old Jedi philosophizing that had always been annoying in previous books and the prequel movies, with the main protagonists embracing a boring black-and-white view of the Force.

But this time it was a setup. In the 13th book and first-ever Star Wars novel that didn’t include a character from one of the movies, Traitor gave a different perspective: there are shades of grey in the morality of the Force. A person’s intentions do matter; using Force lightning does not make you a bad person by default, and enjoying a fight doesn’t mean you’re turning into a Sith. The old Jedi teachings would say this is heretical, but really it was refreshing that discussions about the Force were for the first time not horribly stodgy and dull. The 2004 RPGKnights of the Old Republic 2 is regarded well today despite being unfinished for that same reason. Alas, it was not to last.

Bad: Legacy of the Force novels and retcons

Some very vocal fans, however, were pissed about legit moral nuance being introduced to the series. Three years later another long series, the 9-book Legacy of the Force, revealed that whole philosophy from Traitor was just a trick by two old Sith named Lumiya and Vergere to turn Han and Leia’s son Jacen to the dark side. The plan succeeds, and Jacen becomes a Sith Lord who kills Mara Jade and rules the galaxy for a minute. The arc itself is not really even a bad one, being about a man trying to avoid a galactic war by doing some unpalatable things only to end up being the villain. But it’s ruined by having it come as the result of Jacen not thinking of the world in black and white because he was tricked by a secret Sith. This series is basically LucasFilm asserting that in Star Wars there is no such thing as moral nuance. Or that not only Sith deal in absolutes?

This sort of thing is indicative of why LucasFilm is now saying that only new stories and the past movies are perma-canon. Even after LucasFilm took firm control over the direction of the Expanded Universe  in the late ’90s, they kept the old stuff as canon and so retcon after retcon continued. With this statement, they give themselves the right to disregard things from the past instead of adapting them, and with new movies on the way the post-Jedi continuity was far too dense to navigate.

It’s still painful, of course; for me, sure, but Leland Chee at LucasFilm has been in charge of franchise continuity for a decade and it probably sucks to have so much of his efforts be wiped from the record in this post-Jedi reboot. But at the end of the day there’s far more money in having movies with context that can be easily communicated to normies than in satisfying Expanded Universe die-hards.

Can’t really blame them, then, for taming the Wild West of this massive universe by way of carpet bombing it.

Normies? Really? Did he just call humans with lives “normies”? How very un-Jedi of him.

Anyway, all of this brings us to the fact that Disney just announced the new cast for Star Wars VII.

It’s the old cast plus a bunch of folks no one cares about.

J.J. Abrams, who rebooted Star Trek, is being paid googobs of cash to have the same success here. Good for him.

I’ll give you an example of one problem that he faces. There is a cartoon called Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It takes place between the time Luke Skywalker is born and his eventual ascension to becoming a member of the rebellion. It’s a fun show and has spawned many profitable toys. I know this because I have nieces and I have been shopping.

Yes, I said “nieces.” You see the show has spawned many toys that girls like because it has very cool (as in “she’s rad Uncle Bill“) female characters that girls like. And, to be blunt, all of these female characters must die because they do not exist in the timeline after Luke grows up.

Ooops.

And, as Phil discusses, the alternate creations are racially diverse and have some interesting characters. However the actual films have an underlying whiff of accepted racism and are built on the belief that the rich are better suited to rule than you poor folk.

That’s called an oligarchy and that’s bad,

When this franchise started it came off like King Arthur with lasers. The underlying themes were only explored by bored college students who would go on to have careers as part time baggers in local groceries. But times have changed. Killing pretty girls so rich people can stay rich is not going to get the positive press that Disney might be hoping for.

And all you need to do is check out the recent news to see how well a plantation mentality is accepted by the masses.

On the other hand, all things like history and logic considered, if Disney incorporates the mentally challenged characters from the Wraith series I bet we’ll be subjected to some of the funniest defamation lawsuits ever drafted.

DARTH from cinema by moses on Vimeo.

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