makeshiftmind

Last night marked the end of what many consider to be the finest science fiction series to ever grace television. Battlestar Galactica brought science fiction into the mainstream by focusing on plot, character, and issues instead of the traditional techno babble, campy aliens, and painfully silly stories that give the SciFi channel its current reputation. As a rabid follower of Galactica, I feel compelled to say a few closing comments, particularly since I’ve evangelized it to pretty much everyone I’ve ever talked to (people at work are, yes, in a queue to borrow my DVDs). I’m not going to recap the entire series, but I want to spill my opinions about the final episode, since much of the tension in the series was supposed to be resolved in Battlestar’s final hours. If you haven’t watched the series, or have merely seen a spattering of episodes here and there, I encourage you to skip this post, watch all four seasons on DVD, then come back and read my opinions (if you even remember that I have any by that point!).

William Adama is probably my favorite character in the show, simply because he resonates with my masculinity in so many ways. And because it sounds like his vocal chords were victims of a power sander. In the last two episodes, we are given a glimpse into his life right before the Cylon attack on earth, where he is offered a fat salary and laudable title to park his ass behind a desk and wilt away into bureaucracy. That’s not how the Old Man rolls however, and he rejects his promotion to spend the last hours of his career onboard his outdated ship called Galactica that is being decommissioned. The irony of course is that the Cylon attack happens during the decommissioning ceremony and Adama spends the next several years commanding the lone Battlestar and a fleet of civilian ships running for their lives. During that time, Adama falls in love with Roslin, who we learn very early on has terminal cancer. Adama is forced to endure as the two “ladies” he loves (Galactica and Roslin) are slowly taken from him by combat and disease.

If anyone deserved to find a happy ending, it was Adama. He wasn’t perfect, but without his leadership skills and guts of iron, the fleet would have perished quite early in the series. If there’s one thing that Battlestar is good at serving up, however, its tragedy, and Adama’s last days are certainly no departure. Galactica’s last emergency jump cripples the ship in a sickening sequence in which her “spine” is broken by the stress of combat and age. The crew is forced to abandon ship, but luckily a habitable planet has been found, so they aren’t without salvation. Roslin, meanwhile, continues to pump herself full of drugs to give herself a last forty-eight hours of life. Adama, knowing her time is short, says a tearful goodbye to Lee and Starbuck, then takes a Raptor and flies low over the planet so they can look for the spot on which they will build the dream home they’ve talked about for so many years. During the flight, Roslin finally dies, and Adama lands the Raptor to bury her. Adama’s final words to Lee indicate that he never intended to return from his final flight. Adama’s losses were certainly tragic, and I think for the sake of the finale the drama of his “last flight” was pretty powerful. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that there was still a great deal that Adama had to live for. His best friend Saul was still alive, as was his son Lee, and many of the officers and pilots to which he had grown close. The fleet had found a lush planet on which to live out their final days, and more than 30,000 humans survived the long trek to get there. Adama is nothing but the archetype of strength, so I question whether the loss of Galactica and Roslin would have finally broken him or not.

If the finale’s treatment of Adama was tragic, it was at least understandable. Starbuck, on the other hand, was a profound disappointment (to me at least). Ever since Kara’s miraculous return in season 3, viewers have been madly speculating about what exactly happened to her on her recon mission to find Earth. When season four began and Kara finds her own skeletal corpse in a viper wreck planetside, things *really* began to get mental with the Starbuck plotline. Even the cryptic Leoban gets a bad case of the willies when Kara yells at him, “What am I!?” But all creepiness and mystique aside, this is really where Starbuck’s story begins to teeter. In season 3, Lee clearly saw her Viper explode, which seems to contradict her Viper’s presence on Earth I. When she miraculously re-appeared with a shiny new Viper, everyone suspected her of being a Cylon (because they could resurrect), but the Final Five were revealed and Kara wasn’t one of them, so that simply made her an enigma. She gives Baltar the dogtags she found on her own corpse, which were spattered with blood, and “asks” him to run DNA tests to determine if it was really her blood. Baltar confirms her suspicion, and his explanation is that she is an angel from god, which is not surprising since Baltar basically leads his own cult on board Galactica. No one takes him seriously, but he concludes that Kara is essentially the same kind of entity as the Six that he keeps seeing in his own head. Except everyone can see Kara. Which makes no sense at all. After Galactica is abandoned, the crew is safely planet side, and Adama has departed for his last flight, Starbuck asks Lee what he intends to do with his new life. Lee, the eternal optimist, takes in the scenery and says he wants to go exploring. When he turns around, Kara has vanished, and Lee realizes that whatever the hell she was, she’s gone for good. The implication is that she really was some kind of angel, which I found to be anticlimactic all things considered. As a character, Starbuck played a pivotal role in so many plotlines, that to reduce her to a mere mystical phenomenon seems to be a kind of bad deus ex machina. Even so, the implication was that at one point she was mortal (she did find her own body, after all), so her buried foreknowledge (her painting, the song her father taught her, etc.) has still not really been explained. Also, every Hybrid that Starbuck encountered, including her own Cylon husband Sam, told her ominously that she was the harbinger of death, and would lead the human race to its end. Which I’m happy to say did not actually happen, but it’s yet another Kara plotline that was conveniently forgotten at the eleventh hour.

I *am* glad that Helo, Athena, and Hera all survived, and while the “mitochondrial Eve” tie-in was somewhat expected, at least it fit well within the story. Even though Hera represents the marriage of human and Cylon DNA, we still don’t know why she was able to produce the pattern of dots that:

1. turned out to be the song that Kara’s dad taught her;
2. that turned out to be the song that the final five played on Earth I;
3. that triggered the memories of the final five;
4. that turned out to be the coordinates to Earth II, which none of them had been to before;
5. that is really a Bob Dylan song

Another thing I was a little disappointed about in the Hera plotline was the resolution of the Opera House dream. The implication of the dream from previous seasons was that Six and Baltar would actually take the child instead of merely protecting her for a grand total of about 30 seconds. Even Baltar was surprised when his phantom-angel-self confirmed that the protection of Hera was really his only purpose with Caprica. We are also never told why Roslin, Athena, Caprica and Baltar began having the dream in the first place. The dream offered no insight into *how* they were supposed to act to protect Hera, it was simply a veiled view of *what* would actually take place.

Finally, I have to say a few words about the “moral message” of the series finale. One thing Battlestar has always been very good at is dealing with moral issues through plotlines instead of monologues, but I found the last few minutes of the finale to be a real departure from this pattern. When I heard about the U.N.’s invitation to select members of the Battlestar cast to come speak about world issues, I had an inkling that the show might suffer from self-importance, and I think the finale demonstrated that. A recurring theme spoken from the mouths of bathtub-ridden Hybrids was that the history of humanity tended to move in cyclical patterns — “This has all happened before, this will all happen again.” The revelation of the Final Five and the fate of Earth I certainly illustrated the Hybrid observation. At the end of the finale, the show jumps 150,000 years into the future — to present-day New York — and we find angels Baltar and Caprica perusing the magazines of a news stand next to bystander Ronald Moore (the show’s producer) who is reading a current paper. The show then departs from its “show, don’t tell” policy and we are given an earful about how decadent and unstable humanity has become. Baltar asks Caprica if she thinks the pattern will repeat, and she indicates that even in ordered systems there is a chance of random departure from the norm. The camera then swoops down to an old woman begging on the street, then sweeps up to electronic billboards that are advertising the latest robotic advancements (which are really lame compared to Centurions, so it was almost like, “Really? You’re going there?”).

At first I didn’t quite make the connection between poverty and robotics. The show has always (ironically) had a slight bent against technology (no networked computers on Galactica, the use of old, corded phones, etc.), but the justification was always that precautions were necessary so that the Cylon war wouldn’t repeat itself. Then I found myself wondering whether the show was going one step further and blaming all of mankind’s problems on technology. (This is a silly position of course. If people think that we are worse off now than the pre-industrial middle ages, I think a history lesson is in order.) But then it occured to me that perhaps the show was simply making the point that it is ironic how much we are focused on artificial life, when so much real life around us needs attention. Procreation, whether biological or articial, is not enough. The survival of a species is not enough. As Adama observed early on, a species (whether Human or Cylon), must be *worthy* of survival. And that, perhaps more than anything, is the true message of Battlestar Galactica.

Although I was somewhat disappointed by the series finale, I realize that it had enormous expectations to meet, and I think it was adequate for the task. I will still whole-heartedly recommend the series to anyone who has not seen it. Hell, I may just go back and watch it all again.

Because it is not enough that your children are going to grow up in a world where government is messianic, you can now help them understand their new subjugation with the aid of the Playmobil Security Checkpoint!  I for one welcome our new plastic overlords.  Thanks to this blogger for the enlightenment.

Here’s a quick question for everyone: what objective criteria should we use to determine if Obama’s presidency is a success or failure?  No holds barred — I’m interested in everyone’s thoughts.

There is no other movie more aptly titled than Requiem for a Dream.  The whole movie is, in fact, just that.  The movie revolves around four characters – the elderly Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his best friend Tyrone.  Each character has dreams of becoming more than they are.

Sara is old and lonely; her husband is dead, and her son rarely visits.  When he does, he usually procures his mother’s household items to pawn for drug money.  Sara loves him to a fault, and refuses to turn him in to the police, but routinely visits the street corner pawn shop to buy her things back after his “visits”.  Sara receives a phone call early in the film, informing her that she has been “pre-selected” to be a featured guest on her favorite self-help television show, if she fills out an application that will be mailed to her.  She quickly spreads the word throughout her apartment building and becomes the center of attention as her friends all fawn over her opportunity to be famous.  Conscious of her age and weight, Sara confides in a friend who colors her hair and loans her a book about dieting.  The diet is strenuous and Sarah has trouble keeping pace, so she seeks out a doctor who prescribes pills that will help her lose weight.  The pills give her an enormous buzz, lots of energy, and eventually she begins shedding the pounds.  Her dream of being on television is within reach.

It’s easy to dislike Harry for taking advantage of his mother, but on occasional tender moments, he reveals a soft side – it is never his intent to hurt her, and he wants her to be happy.  Harry and Tyrone have been raised on the streets, but Marion is from a privileged yet distant family.  Together they agree to traffic drugs to raise money and elevate their lifestyle.  Marion is a gifted clothing designer, and Harry encourages her to pursue her dream.  Tyrone is good natured, often reminiscing about his life as a child when he promised his mother, living in poverty, that he would make something of himself.  They want their dreams to take them beyond the present, gritty reality they all deal with every day, and drug dealing is their golden ticket.  Moderate success brings quick cash, and things are going smoothly.  Harry and Marion purchase a small shop for her to begin showing her designs.  They party together, pull pranks together, walk on the beach together, and make love together. Tyrone also, in a brief scene, has an intimate moment with a girl that is implied to be his romantic interest (she is absent in the rest of the film).

As the movie continues, Sara becomes more and more obsessed with her television appearance.  She joins the other elderly ladies in their daily sunning ritual by propping her lawn chair on the sidewalk next to the rest of them, in a spot that places her at the center of attention.  When the mailman walks by, she rushes to meet him every day waiting for her application to be on television.  When it does arrive, the ladies rush up to her apartment to fill it out and deliver it ceremoniously to the blue post office box on the corner of the sidewalk.

As Sara’s excitement grows, so does the energy she receives from her daily medication.  She can’t sleep at night and has to take special pills to reverse the nervous anxiety generated by her dietary medication.  She goes on cleaning sprees through her apartment and removes all the food from the fridge lest she be tempted to eat.  The self-help television show she watches religiously exhorts her to take control; all the while a constant, anxious paranoia builds inside her head.  She begins to hallucinate occasionally, imagining that her refrigerator is growling at her for leaving it empty.  She attributes her ailments to her medication, but her doctor continues prescribing it and telling her she only needs time to “adjust”.

Things are still going well for Harry, and he decides to pay his mother back for pawning her possessions when he was tight for money.  He purchases her a large, brand new television and takes a trip to her apartment to deliver the news in person.  Sara is delighted to see him, but her nervous energy flags Harry’s awareness.  He presses her about her weight loss when he hears her grinding her teeth at the kitchen table.  For the first time in the film, Harry sees the lie for what it is – his mother is becoming addicted to drugs to secure her own happiness.  Harry’s cognitive dissonance is apparent, and he forcefully warns her to stop taking her medication (which he identifies as a variant of Speed), but she responds with a small monologue which, I can only describe as being so painfully sad, and so painfully true at the same time.  She tells him that the promise of her appearance on television has given her a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to care about how she looks.  She even dusted off her fancy red dress that she wore to Harry’s graduation, and only needs to lose twenty-five more pounds to fit in it.  She likes the way she feels, and she is the center of attention among her friends, which is so important to her because she is so utterly lonely.  Harry promises that he will come and visit more often, and bring Marion so Sara can meet her.  Then he awkwardly leaves with a short good-bye.

Months pass, and Harry, Marion and Tyrone continue using and selling drugs.  The supply on the street quickly dries up when the mob executes a hit on a gang encroaching on its territory.  Tyrone gets caught in the middle of the hit, and manages to escape with his life, but is arrested and placed in prison.  Harry uses a significant portion of their drug money to pay for Tyrone’s bail.  Once their supply is used up, Harry and Marion begin going into withdrawal.  Pale skin, sunken eyes, and constant perspiration form a pale visage of their once youthful forms.  Harry has an infected vein on his arm where he shoots up, but he ignores it hoping it will go away.  When they become desperate for a fix, Harry encourages Marion to accept the advances of an older man in exchange for money so they can buy more drugs.  The eyes in his darkened sockets reveal two horrible things: that he knows his request is horribly twisted and wrong, and yet his addiction has taken ownership of his soul and he will do anything – even sacrifice his love – to feed it.  Marion’s need is just as strong, and though she abhors the idea, the need compels her and she accepts Harry’s proposal.

After Marion returns with the money, Harry and Tyrone go to a meet for a local drug dealer who has agreed to release more drugs onto the street.  When the crowd gets unruly and shots are exchanged,  the drug dealer pulls out and Harry and Tyrone are left with no drugs.  They agree to travel to Florida where the drug dealer is based in order to bring drugs back home, but when they return to Harry’s apartment empty handed, Marion goes into hysterics because she endured the degradation of selling her body and could not get her fix in return.  In anger, Harry writes down the phone number of a local john who is known to exchange drugs for sexual favors.  Harry thrusts it into Marion’s hands and leaves the house to go to Florida with Tyrone.

Sara’s paranoia and delusions have reached extreme levels, meanwhile.  She spends hours in front of the television watching her self-help program, daydreaming about her eventual appearance on center stage.  She takes more and more diet pills because of her increasing agitation, and begins to hallucinate that her refrigerator is sliding across the kitchen floor, coming to devour her.  The television personas begin to come out of the TV and move around her home, mocking her impoverished lifestyle and laughing at her homely appearance.  Every insecurity that Sara has becomes a psychotic nightmare relentlessly grinding away at her consciousness.  In a final maddening break, she flees her apartment and boards a bus to the television station, telling everyone along the way how she will be on TV with her son and her dead husband.  When she reaches the studio she is in hysterics; she doesn’t understand why they haven’t called her.  Soon police arrive and take Sara to the hospital, where a doctor drugs her further and she is force fed by careless orderlies.  When the treatments don’t work, the doctor concludes that experimental electro-shock treatment is necessary.  Sara is strapped to a table and the procedure is conducted.

While on the road to Florida, Harry begins going into withdrawal and decides to shoot up in the car.  Tyrone sees Harry’s horribly infected arm, and insists they visit a hospital.  When they arrive the doctor calls the police.  Harry manages to make one call to Marion, who is preparing to leave for a special “party” the john is throwing where she will be the center of attention in order to pay for more drugs.  She begs Harry to come home, and he promises that he will, but through the tears and the agony, their faces both reveal what they both know: he won’t be coming home.

Harry and Tyrone are thrown in prison overnight, where Harry agonizes over the pain in his arm, and Tyrone continues to yell for someone to help.  In the morning, a doctor arrives and after Tyrone endures racial insults and the abusive guard accompanying the doctor, Harry is taken to the emergency room where his arm is amputated, and the doctor comments that he doesn’t expect Harry to survive the night.  When Harry awakes from his surgery, the nurse hears him repeating Marion’s name, and she tries to encourage him by telling him that whoever Marion is, she will be notified so she can come be with him.  He begins sobbing and finally manages to say, “No, she won’t.”

Tyrone is taken to prison to work on a chain gang.  The last time he is seen, he is sleeping on his prison cot, plagued by a nightmare in which he is a little child telling his mother that when he is older, he will make something of himself.

Sarah is committed to a mental institution, and when her friends from the apartment building come to visit, they are shocked to find Sara a hollow shell of a human being.  After their visit they sit outside on a bench and cry together for their friend.

Marion attends the john’s party, where she is put on display for the gratification of high paying bidders, mostly disgusting older men.  The humility is overbearing; the price is so high, the payoff so little.  But when Marion returns home, she lays on her couch clutching her drugs as if they were life itself.

At the beginning of the film, even though the characters are all flawed and I have a certain disdain for the seedy underbelly of life that they participate in, I can still see and identify with the flecks of beauty beneath the stained exterior at this point.  The appeal to empathy is subtle, but effective.  I am emotionally invested at this point – not extensively, but sufficiently.  And this is an important distinction, because the rest of the movie is one horrible, damnable betrayal of that limited investment.  All the characters began with dreams.  They wanted to be happy and fulfilled. But the means that they chose to pursue those dreams became the very things that consumed them and destroyed their happiness, hopes, and ultimately, their humanity.

Sara daydreams of her appearance in front of a live audience, where she can smile and everyone likes her – she wants to tell them about her husband, and her son of whom she is so proud.  Before Harry starts dealing drugs, he has a waking dream where he is running along a long pier.  He can see Marion at the end and as he nears her, she turns and smiles warmly at him.  As the film closes, Sara’s dream has changed, and her son comes to stand with her center stage, and as he hugs her he says “I love you ma”.  She realizes that the fame and accolades are not the real meaningful things, and that it is too late for her to ever have the thing she wants the most: Harry’s love.  In the final moments on his hospital bed, Harry also relives his vision – he runs towards Marion but as he nears the end of the pier, she disappears and there is nothing.  He starts to back up in astonishment, the pier disappears, and he falls into a dark abyss.  His only love has been taken from him, and only he is to blame.

I don’t like Requiem – not because the movie had flaws, but because it’s not a movie to be liked.  The acting is superb, the music haunting, the cinematography surreal.  Requiem is a movie about finality – the finality of mistakes that we deny we’re making.  It is about last chances squandered.  The film ends, literally, at the point of no return, where all tragedies must necessarily end.  It is one of the most artful portrayals of self-destruction that I have ever seen.  And I don’t think I will ever watch it again.

By Keith Lockitch (Washington Times, January 9, 2008), reprinted with permission.

As environmentalism continues to grow in prominence, more and more of us are trying to live a “greener” lifestyle. But the more “eco-friendly” you try to become, likely the more you find yourself confused and frustrated by the green message.

Have you tried giving up your bright and cheery incandescent light bulbs to save energy–only to learn that their gloomy-but-efficient compact fluorescent replacements contain mercury? Perhaps you’ve tried to free up space in landfills by foregoing the ease and convenience of disposable diapers–only to be criticized for the huge quantities of energy and water consumed in laundering those nasty cloth diapers. Even voicing support for renewable energy no longer seems to be green enough, as angry environmentalists protest the development of “pristine lands” for wind farms and solar power plants.

Why is it that no matter what sacrifices you make to try to reduce your “environmental footprint,” it never seems to be enough?

Well, consider why it is that you have an “environmental footprint” in the first place.

Everything we do to sustain our lives has an impact on nature. Every value we create to advance our well-being–every ounce of food we grow, every structure we build, every iPhone we manufacture–is produced by extracting raw materials and reshaping them to serve our needs. Every good thing in our lives comes from altering nature for our own benefit.

From the perspective of human life and happiness, a big “environmental footprint” is an enormous positive. This is why people in India and China are striving to increase theirs: to build better roads, more cars and computers, new factories and power plants and hospitals.

But for environmentalism, the size of your “footprint” is the measure of your guilt. Nature, according to green philosophy, is something to be left alone–to be preserved untouched by human activity. Their notion of an “environmental footprint” is intended as a measure of how much you “disturb” nature, with disturbing nature viewed as a sin requiring atonement. Just as the Christian concept of original sin conveys the message that human beings are stained with evil simply for having been born, the green concept of an “environmental footprint” implies that you should feel guilty for your very existence.

It should hardly be any surprise, then, that nothing you do to try to lighten your “footprint” will ever be deemed satisfactory. So long as you are still pursuing life-sustaining activities, whatever you do to reduce your impact on nature in one respect (e.g., cloth diapers) will simply lead to other impacts in other respects (e.g., water use)–like some perverse game of green whack-a-mole–and will be attacked and condemned by greens outraged at whatever “footprint” remains. So long as you still have some “footprint,” further penance is required; so long as you are still alive, no degree of sacrifice can erase your guilt.

The only way to leave no “footprint” would be to die–a conclusion that is not lost on many green ideologues. Consider the premise of the nonfiction bestseller titled “The World Without Us,” which fantasizes about how the earth would “recover” if all humanity suddenly became extinct. Or consider the chilling, anti-human conclusion of an op-ed discussing cloth versus disposable diapers: “From the earth’s point of view, it’s not all that important which kind of diapers you use. The important decision was having the baby.”

The next time you trustingly adopt a “green solution” like fluorescent lights, cloth diapers or wind farms, only to be puzzled when met with still further condemnation and calls for even more sacrifices, remember what counts as a final solution for these ideologues.

The only rational response to such a philosophy is to challenge it at its core. We must acknowledge that it is the essence of human survival to reshape nature for our own benefit, and that far from being a sin, it is our highest virtue. Don’t be fooled by the cries that industrial civilization is “unsustainable.” This cry dates to at least the 19th century, but is belied by the facts. Since the Industrial Revolution, population and life expectancy, to say nothing of the enjoyment of life, have steadily grown.

It is time to recognize environmentalism as a philosophy of guilt and sacrifice–and to reject it in favor of a philosophy that proudly upholds the value of human life.

Keith Lockitch, PhD in physics, is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, focusing on science and environmentalism. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

For more articles by Keith Lockitch, and his bio, click here.

This is why we need to be thankful for Monty Python.

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya’
‘Bout the raising of the wrist.

SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED…

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: “I drink, therefore I am”
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed!