‘A short time ago in a galaxy not far away’

 A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

How well I remember the first time I saw that line. It was early summer of 1977, and I was sitting in Oldham’s Theater. I was 9 years old. That very first Star Wars opening crawl was not super-detailed -it merely told us that a band of determined freedom-fighting rebels had just struck their first blow against an evil empire. And that was good enough for a 9-year-old, really. Within a few minutes it had been established that there was a cruel dictator named Emperor Palpatine who was trampling on the rights of citizens all around the galaxy, and that his chief hatchet-man was a ruthless, imposing, evil wizard-figure named Darth Vader. There was also a smarmy and arrogant autocrat, Governor Tarkin, whom I recognized as Professor Van Helsing and Dr. Frankenstein from the Hammer horror films I’d loved for a long as I could remember, and a bunch of generals and admirals.

I missed some of the subtext on that first viewing (and the next several, really). For example, early on, one of the generals complains about complications arising in the senate, when Governor Tarkin delivers a piece of news that flew right over my 9-year-old head: “The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I’ve just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.”

25 years later I was sitting in one of the theaters at Highland Cinema in Cookeville (Oldham’s closed not long after that first Star Wars film years earlier), watching Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, my own 9-year-old child beside me. In case you don’t follow these things, that was one of the prequel films, set about a quarter of a century before the first movie. The main plot involved then-Senator Palpatine manipulating events to get himself elected chancellor and then creating a false emergency that gave him the excuse to eventually declare martial law and make himself Emperor. The final step of that, a generation later, was the complete dissolving of the senate. The first steps, in the previous movie, had been the beginning of a trade war that would help set up the fake emergency later.

This movie also focused on Palpatine’s efforts to manipulate an idealistic, naïve and (mostly) heroic young Jedi with anger issues, Anakin Skywalker, into becoming his fervent supporter -he would later become Darth Vader and perform cruel acts his younger self could never have imagined. At the same time, young Anakin was falling in love with a beautiful -and highly principled -young senator named Padme Amidala. All of us in the audience knew they would one day become the parents of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia.

In the midst of a romantic scene between the young couple, they discuss politics… and there is a foreshadowing of the troubles between them to come.

ANAKIN: “I don’t think the system works.”

PADME: “How would you have it work, then?”

ANAKIN: “We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problem, decide what is in the interests of all the people, and then do it.”

PADME: “That’s exactly what we already do. The trouble is that people don’t always agree.”

ANAKIN: “Well, then, they should be made to.”

PADME: “By whom? Who’s going to make them?”

ANAKIN: “I don’t know. Someone.”

PADME: “You?”

ANAKIN: “Of course not me. Someone wise.”

PADME: “Sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.”

ANAKIN (pause): “If it works….”

We all knew what was coming down the pike… because we had seen the earlier movies. But 34-year-old me knew a lot more about history than 9-year-old me had, and I had long understood that George Lucas’s tale of the rise of Palpatine was closely modeled on two things: the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Caesars, and the fall of the Weimar Republic of 1920s Germany and the rise of Hitler. And those were only the two most famous examples of a template that has been followed over and over again through history. A democratic republic exists, in which the people are represented by an elected senate… until the people put into power a charismatic and ambitious man who becomes a dictator by, first, making the senate powerless and irrelevant, and then by eliminating them altogether.

Know who else knew their history (except for the Hitler and Star Wars stuff)? The Founding Fathers. They knew how democracies, republics, and democratic republics have tended to end. And as they worked together in 1787 to draft a constitution to guide this new republic they were creating, they tried to install fail-safes to prevent the repeating of that history - to prevent the rise of tyranny. They did this by creating three co-equal branches of government -executive, legislative, and judicial - to provide checks and balances against each other, so that one individual would not have the power to tear it all down.

But do you know what they didn’t have in 1787 and didn’t plan for? Political parties. The Founding Fathers did not envision a time when all three branches would be controlled by one party or that such a party would be so devoted to their leader (or, more accurately, to their voters who adored him) that they would hand over all power to him, enabling him to be a dictator from day one.

Maybe you don’t know much about history, or the Constitution. But, for Pete’s sake, you can watch Star Wars.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.