Chapter 4

SIR LUKE, WE NEED
YOU NOW

"I see, sir."

"You can call me Luke."

"I see, Sir Luke."

See Threepio to Luke-Skywalker - Star Wars¹

It's the Tomorrow Show' and Tom Snyder is talking to Gene Roddenberry about the enormous success of Star Trek, the only TV series in history that was brought back to a greater popularity than when it was first run.
Snyder: "And they have Star Trek conventions, and they have Star Trek bumper stickers and they have all these culty things that follow this program. And let's go a bit beyond Star Trek and find out why people have this fascination for Star Trek."

Roddenberry: "I think the crisis right now is a crisis, a search for - people seem to be searching for something to follow, something to believe in, a leader, an idea. It seems to me that in science fictionish-type writing, that if there ever was a time for a Messiah or a phony - or both - I suppose it is now."

Snyder: "Why this enormous fascination for Star Trek?"

Roddenberry: "We still get an enormous amount of mail on Star Trek, and I'm surprised about the amount of it that is really talking about following. . . hero worship of the people that were in it, because at least
they were people who believed in something enough to die for it, they kept their word, they were images that were worth emulating. And I think there's an enormous hunger for that."²

They believed in something enough to die for it.
They kept their word.
Images worth emulating.

An enormous cultural hunger for heroes.

We've had a pretty full plate of anti-heroes over the last two decades.
The good guys were just as rotten as the bad guys.
Sometimes the bad guys won. Sometimes nobody won. Sometimes nobody was sure what happened. A whole lot of times, the whole thing just ended without ending, and you had the irresistible desire to go and kick in the TV tube or throw a popcorn box at the screen, because it didn't tell you what happened and you knew you were never going to find out -
ever.

Every now and then, someone came out with a movie that had a hero of sorts.

There was Danny Kaye, as Walter Mitty, who was a hero of great situations, even if they were all only in his mind.³
There was Tony Curtis, as the Great Impostor4 who managed to bring off some astonishing accomplishments, even though he was criminally ignorant and deceptive in doing so -
And of late we have had our Dirty Harrys5 and Barettas⁶ and Popeye Doyles⁷ of The French Connection, the violent, loose-moral led or sewer-mouthed heroes, believing in no one but themselves and taking pains to make sure everyone else died who happened to get in the way.

Images worth emulating?

Then, it came to our galaxy one summer.

Star Wars.
And with it, Luke Skywalker, farm boy, crack bull's-eyer of womp rats, genuine hero.

Of course, he could hardly avoid it. His father was the best pilot in the galaxy. His mentor and friend, the noble Obi-wan Kenobi.
His dry and desolate home planet of Tatooine a great character training ground for a boy with dreams and a strict Uncle Owen.
So what with a message from a beautiful princess -
A commission from the last remaining Jedi Knight General in the Galaxy -
A callous empire annihilation of all that remained of the only family he had ever known -
And the classic motives of
Awakened love
Adventure
and family revenge

Sir Luke Skywalker, or just plain Luke to you, began his odyssey.

In order to be a hero you must undergo great danger, run great risks
and still come out the winner

Luke Skywalker has indeed his share of same.

Star Wars is one continuous battle, broken only by a few short interludes to explain to us who the new characters are, who they are about to fight or run from, and/or to set us up for the next battle.
During the one hour fifty-nine minutes of running there is a terrific death toll -
This includes

Forty Imperial Stormtroopers⁸. (who are all terrible shots)
At least six Tie fighters
Ten rebel ships⁹
Two ornery space barhops
One uncle and aunt¹⁰
Eight Jawas¹¹
One pea-green hit man¹²
One planet, fully populated¹³
One Death Star

Not counting R2-D2 who is shot twice¹⁴
Nor Sir Luke our Hero (almost too many times to count) including attacks from One Tusken raider's gaderffii as¹⁵
One "Wayward Eyeballs" barroom bullies' blaster¹⁶
Assorted energy bolts from Tie fighters
Stormtroopers
and backlash from a too-close bombing run¹⁷
And bypassing for the moment,
Obi-wan Ken6bi, whom we will simply label as "gone."

All in all, you don't have time to get philosophical about things.

If you did, you would discover an awful fact:

If all we are is the partial product of a blind, staggering series of collisions of matter, time and chance
If we came from disorder millenniums ago
And go to disorder a few scant years or hours from now
There really is no justification for heroes
There is really no intellectual place for them at all.¹⁸
Or for that matter, dignity
Or value
Or anything, at that, worth
living
dying
being a hero for.

You see, though the last two decades of movies may have been amoral and unhappy, they often were really only trying to be sensible.
Given their philosophical premises, they were actually quite logical.
The only trouble is, the life-styles they portrayed were usually quite horrible.

Is it true that we only have two alternatives -
Honest films, without truth or hope or joy
Or fantasy films, with morals and purpose and
heroes?
Or is there another alternative?

Long before our generation was born, two men stood at the gate formed by two narrow rocky cliff-faces.
Ahead of them was the first sentry-post of the largest army ever assembled for battle against them in their memory.

They had come overnight, and now stretched in mind-boggling and numberless military might across the plain in front of them.¹⁹

Their coming was not exactly a surprise. When the defending army heard of their arrival, they took steps to meet this emergency.
Their record shows how this was done:

"They hid themselves in caves
thickets
pits
rocks
and high places."²⁰

Some bought out costume shops for opposition uniforms and practiced an enemy accent A few just lit out to parts far, far away And a pitiful few hundred followed their leader - trembling.

All it took now for a very bloody annihilation was a couple of foolhardy heroes.

Enter two heroes.
Sizing up the limited access situation, the king's son said to his friend "Come, let us go over . . .
It may be that the Lord will work for us:
There is no restraint to the Lord to save by many or by few."²¹

It all depends really
On how big your Leader is
And just how much you count on Him when
the chips are down.

These two had no precedents, No computerized counsel would have advised what they did,
No one had ever launched a battle with these odds before and won.
No analysis of the enemies' weaknesses would have ever turned up a victory prediction.

And against all odds, In contradiction to all possibilities, They launched an attack that triggered a victory.

It is recorded that only twenty fell before them in that first incredible onslaught.²²
But other things happened simultaneously that no one could quite explain either -An earthquake out of nowhere, creating mass confusion;²³
The enemy suddenly turning on each other, possibly suspecting disguised attackers -And in the glorious confusion, all previous cowards coming back to join the heroes.²⁴

There is something about an all-or-nothing conflict
That tends to create in a culture a hero out of even a Han Solo.
There is something brave and touching and beautiful about the little X- and Y-wing fighters that closed up the gap and threw their machines in front of the raiding Tie fighters to give the lead men a crack at the thermal exhaust port.
When the chips are down -
When defeat means total and certain annihilation -
When you have to fight and win, or die trying You tend to forget the sad, impersonal ideas by which you were told to order your life and make all your decisions.
When men and women face impending death
They tend to forget their theories and begin
to live in reality.
And reality is this -

At the heart of the Universe is not only justice, but mercy.
Beyond the limits of time and space and matter is Truth and Life and Direction
And it is not sin to dream of goodness being real and winning out over rottenness.
It is sane
And factual
And Inevitable.

Earth now faces its own final conflict. All the curves are about to start crossing 25 and we've got to have something more realistic than fantasy.

The embodiment of all dignity, reality and beauty is alive and waiting for His Team And in their thousands, on farms
in inner cities
and out-of-the-way small towns

Are the missing Jedi Knights-in-the-making
Dreaming dreams of great battles yet to be fought in the heavens,
the needed salt to help stop the rot of a collapsing, corrupting civilization bent on pushing its stupidity and selfishness out to the far reaches of the Universe.

And I heard a Voice saying

"Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?"²⁶

Sir Luke, we need you now.

Chapter Five - May the Force Be With You