More On That

In my youth, fundamentalist Christians had a lot of tribal behaviours that marked them out as "specially enlightened."  They had a symbol (the Christian fish, seen on bumper stickers, t-shirts, wrist-bands and flags) to mark them out as being more clued in and virtuous than regular, run-of-the-mill folks.  Someone might say "We're so excited. We're going to see [insert 90s band/rapper here] next week!" and they'd have to say "We saw [insert Christian ripoff of same here] last month. They really rocked" to show that they were part of a different tribe.

And when they got mocked or generally treated like outsiders by anyone, they got a slightly proud, stubborn glint in their eyes. They knew, deep down, that beyond all the social stuff, the lack of understanding, the everyone not getting what was cool about what they were part of, THEY at least could be (spiritually*) above all the social stuff, have a deeper understanding, and just know that what they were part of was, in some special way, FAR more cool than what all the other folks were enjoying of a weekend.

And they were continually wanting you to join them. Wear their merch, listen to the music, go to see guest speakers parrot the slogans they'd heard taught by a charismatic speakers they'd paid to see. They weren't good at conversations. (Not ones where people got to leave, amicably, with differing opinions, anyway.)

Well, I'm seeing a whole lot of this again, but this time it's not fundamentalist Christians who are doing it. They're not the main tribe subjecting the rest of us to smug, endless preaching. They're not the ones with all the tribe identifiers, available for sale now. (There's nothing wrong with joining a tribe.  Tribes can do good. But they're not intended to be for everyone, and mostly they're about fitting in and feeling in some way better than outsiders.)

Back in the day, we used to claim to get enlightened, we used to claim to see the light or get born again. Which we thought really set us apart from regular, unspecial folks who hadn't yet been awakened to what we were so into.

Nowadays? We get woke. (White straight people do, anyway.  Black people can't. Gay people can't.)

Unpopular thoughts for white, straight people in particular: Please, to bowdlerize Jesus here: don't rebrand yourself/market/advertise yourself as especially supertolerant. Don't. Just "be excellent to each other." Let the gay and trans people you encounter decide how well they thought you treated them, rather than wearing anything that announces you as a New York Times Best Seller, Blockbuster Hit of the Summer, Gold Standard of tolerance/Superfriend ally. Don't teach kids that civil treatment of people who are different from they are is in any way special, or somehow worthy of some kind of pat on the head.

Above all, please don't make a profit selling anything that lets as many people as possible go out and feel like they're making the world a better place by doing just that. Because to make a thing a Thing often makes it a fad.  And fads are very short-lived.  Instead, let's actually make it a thing.  Just a regular thing. An everyday thing. An unremarkable, unremarked upon thing. Like recycling. Or not smoking. No t-shirt needed.

If you're gay, you might enjoy a parade to go spend time with your tribe. I will respectfully wish you a good time there, but not try to score any tolerance points by advertising some bogus, groundless claim of peripheral connectedness to that tribe. Catholics do mass. Leafs fans cheer for goals. Scottish people do Highland Games. Indigenous people do potlatches, sweatlodges and powwows. Gay people do PRIDE. That makes sense to me. I'm going to be over here not wearing a crucifix, war bonnet, Leaf jersey or rainbow wristband.  (I'm not even going to wear a kilt or go to Octoberfest or the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day, though I have some claim on that stuff being part of my actual culture.)

Simply being a Christian doesn't make it not bragging to wear a shirt announcing a special level of spiritual correctness, devotedness, awareness, involvedness or enlightenment  It's still obnoxious and transparent. I feel the same about people being gay or trans and advertising themselves are being on an elevated level of tolerance and understanding. Let's not do any of that.  Let's be a whole bunch of different people who enjoy being different and leave each other alone. Let us be excellent to one another without ushering in the dawning of the age of Aquarius with a marching band, t-shirts, armbands, school songs, secret handshakes and membership lists. Let's just treat each other well without bragging about it or making any special announcements.

Recycling? Not really something to brag about anymore. Because we just all do it now, most of us.

That's what I think, anyway.

* spiritually: in one's imagination

They Are Not Amused: Underlying Religious Impulses

Does anyone read blogs anymore?  Hard to know.  Leave a comment?

I was thinking again. And I read this thought-provoking article by Andrew Sullivan today, and had that old familiar feeling. That feeling of having been thinking the same sort of thing myself for some time, and not knowing if anyone but me was on the same page.  I don't have anything quite the same to offer, but here is an account of my own related experiences:

As I've written about before at length, I grew up in the kind of Christian church where it was not ok to say "Merry Christmas."  In fact, though I grew up in a Protestant church whose doctrine wasn't terribly different from any other such place in practice, there were definitely some oddities people raised Mormon or Jehovah's Witness might recognize:

Avoidance of the word "church" and "pastor" and "sermon" and "Christmas" and so on were all How It Was Done. This meant that we certainly went to church every Sunday and listened to sermons by men who were functioning as pastors, but we didn't call any of it that.  Predictably, this meant all of it happened in a cloud of deniability George Orwell would have recognized.  The sentence "I didn't agree with what the pastor said in his Christmas sermon at church this week" simply couldn't exist.  You'd be left with "I didn't agree ____ this week."

Needless to say, not only were "Christmas" and "church" on the list of words that decent, clued-in, accepted insiders did not use (about our own activities anyway, having "holiday" or "winter" events, rather than "Christmas" ones like other less spiritually enlightened groups), but the usual swear words, racial epithets and body-function words were all of course verboten as well, especially if you wanted to keep your status as a public figure.

Our group was status-based, like any other human group, and so there were all of these words and ideas that were viewed as "problematic" and would end up getting one de-platformed and publicly shunned and shamed and generally cut out of the dating pool. (I know of what I speak) I grew up seeing the thing happen, where guys would tour around the country, teaching our non-church church groups their understanding of Christianity, but then a single misstep in terms of word choice or concept, a fair or unfair association with someone or something deemed problematic, and that man disappeared from public view, within that church world, reputation irrevocably destroyed. "Bad teaching."  "Bad doctrine."  "Heresy." It was always a man speaking as it was a patriarchy, but it was the sort of patriarchy in which women had an equal opportunity to be offended by anything, and character assassinate people right along with the men.  And character assassinate they did.  Humourlessly.

It was like a contest in which those who found the most things offensive or problematic were the who'd woken up spiritually, and those who didn't claim to feel that offence were manifestly spiritually asleep, and obviously, troublingly part of toxic, befouled mainstream society, rather than our enlightened subgroup.

Humour was a particularly sticky area.  Humour was never really used much for sermons, which were about reverence and correctness and sacrifice, and were not about our entertainment or catharsis. But in personal life too, one had to be in very carefully chosen company to get away with telling or repeating jokes with a sexual, religious, drunken or body-function based punchline. Being witty or funny did not really gain one any status as a public figure in our group. Sisters, cousins, aunts and friend's brothers might alike suddenly get the serious face and "have a word" about the incorrectness of one's speech and deportment.

Of course, in theory you could always do or say whatever you liked, but you had to be ready for some gimlet-eyed person to bring a truly Victorian attitude into the conversation, and hint broadly (or state plainly) that your speech or your humour was evidence of you being a bad person, and clearly too much a comfortable, unthinking part of the evil, flawed system that was society, rather than carefully separate from it, in our church that we didn't call church. That you were poisoning and corrupting the conversation, if not the room itself with your toxic contributions.

I'm sure you can see where I'm headed with all of this: In my 20s, I "wandered" into the evil system that was late 20th century Western society, with its music and alcohol, its rape and theft and addictions and mental illness and toxic, corrupting content in movies, music and television, all ready to enjoy the freedom I thought would be out here. I thought I'd be able to listen to whatever songs I liked, watch whatever TV shows and movies I wanted, and talk to or hang out with whomever I liked, even publicly talking about religion, sex, body-functions or whatever, without someone going sour-faced and telling me they saw certain evidence that I was a bad person, and clearly part of the evil system that is society. Without anyone deciding I was unfit to have respect, a voice, a job, a relationship.

Well, I'm not sure I need to write the rest of this. I think you know how the world outside my prim, censorious, stiff, culty little church looks to me, now that I'm out here.

I'll just say that noted atheist and wit Stephen Fry's main complaint about the language policing of modern society is that it is sanctimonious, anti-humour and dryly pious. Takes itself terribly seriously and punishes anyone who laughs at it or anything it has decided is sacred.  Well, I'm seeing neo-Victorianism all around, with things like gender and sexual orientation replacing the old issues of sexuality as Things Best Not To Talk About and Certainly Far Too Important To Use Humour To Explore Our Feelings About.

I'm seeing an enforced consensus of a particular brand of social uprightness that neither I, nor anyone I know, got to vote upon.

Sobering fact: I sacrificed acceptance in my birth culture, with its clear nostalgia for/insistence upon Victorian propriety, hymns and sermons (and Elizabethan translations of the bible), in order to get something new, and to get room to breathe.  To taste more freedom. To taste life. The one thing I thought I could count on about life in the world outside my church sect was that it would not be careful, humourless and boring.

Well, it doesn't feel terribly different out here now. Not nearly different enough. And none of this "new wokeness" feels at all new to me. Quite the opposite. Little has changed. They are not amused. Still.

Faith and Trust in the Mob

This was a long Facebook post, so I decided to put it on here:

I think that our society was built by a whole lot of people, including ancient Greeks and Romans, Arabs and Africans, Celts and other indigenous peoples. I think we have kept most of the good stuff, and are still in the process of getting rid of some vestigial bad stuff.

I believe in metaphors of roots and foundations. I think one of the worst things that happened during the transatlantic slave trade was that African people were cut off from their roots so that even now it is hard to rebuild any of that for anyone. I suspect Alex Haley would agree.

So the idea that we flail around and lash out blindly without forethought or plan, and just smash the old seems like a really bad idea. The idea that we call 2018 Western society as a whole “the patriarchy“ is hugely disrespectful to all of the women (like Marie Curie, Jane Austen, Queen Victoria, the suffragettes and all the other women throughout history) who worked to make modern society what it is. And to women currently devoting their lives to The System. Women with impressive titles and qualifications earned in it. Science is pretty useful, and is hardly 100% the creation of male people or European colonizers. Same thing with democracy and psychology and philosophy and economics and mathematics and literature and drama.Society shouldn't be lightly dismantled with no real agreement as to what to build in its place. Pretty sure no one wants to lump Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres into the terms "privilege" or "patriarchy," yet they are part of Western society.

So what I would like to see is the goal of including more people, rather than the smashing of what has been built. And I firmly believe that it is possible for us to include more people, and that it is equally possible, and historically far more likely that we could start a second Victorian Era, Middle Ages, or Stone Age, by misusing our wonderful technology or democratic or economic systems. Be careful with that stuff. Some of us are still using it to feed ourselves. And its a bit of a game of Jenga. (Please don't get me fired for having written this blog)

One of the things that a hard look at the much more problematic parts of the world reveals, is that the outcome of overthrowing a somewhat oppressive, “mixed bag” government can be far worse than leaving it alone, if one isn’t careful. In Iran and Russia and countless South American and African nations, the mob (sometimes incited by a foreign government like Britain or America) rose up and overthrew a slanted, inequitable society, destroying everything and resulting in chaos, confusion, pain and death(leaving the country unlivable), only to have tyranny then take advantage of the chaos and start the whole process over again, only worse. Chile, Cuba, Rwanda, Argentina, Iran etc.

France, even. Do we want The Terrors again on any scale at all?

I guess I have limitless faith in the human predilection for going WAY too far, and not knowing when to stop. I have NO faith in the mercy of mobs out looking for payback. It is very easy to get angry and outraged and stirred up into a mob frenzy and smash a mixed bag of good and bad things into a useless bag of broken things with sharp edges. I am not optimistic about outrage or mobs crying for change.

I am not hopeful as to the potential of mobs to create. To be fair. To heal things. To be wise or sensible. To make anything that will last.

People are telling and hearing different narratives.  So, which one has deeper emotional resonance for you?:

     a) people are at heart mean and oppressive and selfish by nature, and laws and witnesses, courts, committees and accountability need to be maintained. The future holds more of that ugly stuff we know from the past, given what has not been expunged from out history books. The vulnerable being forgotten at best and oppressed and exploited at worst. Mobs tearing down structure, only to have worse tyrants with better technology and strategies replace them.  A new, scarier, more subversive form of control. Bad news all around. (we were raised with this one)

     b) people are at heart, good, and anything else we see is mainly from upbringing and social conditioning.  The future holds better information, better socialization, and a whole lot more inclusion and equity all around. A kindler, gentler kind of human being. We will win because our ideas are fresh and right, while they are old and will die out with their outmoded dinosaur nonsense.  Good news all around. (we were not raised with this one, but it’s popular right now.)

Things are comparatively good right now, in the context of the entire world, in the context of all of human history. To say otherwise is the definition of privilege. To say we can make it better? We had better.

And I think it’s relevant, when trying to create a more equitable future, to ask what Nelly McClung would think of it.

Core Virtues

I'm bingeing Jessica Jones Season Two, and I noted two episodes in, that the central theme (just as Season One's was "consent") is clearly "dealing with the past/your shit." (and "keeping self-control so you don't repeat past mistakes" and "women being vicious and men being weak.")

    It strikes me that this "dealing" thing is a sacred cow of mine.  A core virtue.  And core virtues can make us stupid. We put our pet virtue up above all other considerations, and we get tipped off balance. By something important, but not all-important. 

    We can prioritize "rights" so much that we lose sight of the necessity for "responsibilities." We can prioritize "diversity" so much we lose sight of the importance of "unity/being able to work together."  For many of us, there's only room for one sacred cow. Being balanced and open is hard.

    Thing is, when we follow one core virtue and neglect all the other ones, we are easily, as a society, polarized into two or more warring groups who can't even talk to one another, let alone work together.  We rally around the flag of "free speech" or "the family" or "social justice" and we fail to notice that that flag is in a little livestock pen.  That we've been penned in.  Divided, we fall more easily.

    One time, I was troubled by a person who clearly didn't deal with anything problematic, whose life axiom is "Think happy thoughts. If it's not a happy thought, don't think about it and it will likely go away. It does no good to think about troubling things." And so I spoke of needing to "deal."  I felt pretty responsible and adult pointing that out.  Because I've seen m any, many TV shows about people fleeing their troubled pasts.

   But right away, I was asked what "dealing" even means.  ("What even is "dealing"?)  And I realized I was having trouble even thinking, let alone explaining to a closed-minded objector, about what my core virtue ("deal with problematic stuff, or it will become your Jungian nemesis figure") really meant. I just believed in it passionately without knowing why.  And people who don't deal with anything make me very uneasy.

    This is very cultural.  It's my growing up strenuously objecting to a church culture in which one wasn't to ever discuss anything we didn't already know we'd agree upon, lest there be "discussion." "Discussion" (but not communication or "dealing") broke out in my church and it blew up.  It was successfully quelled in my family by my father, who had seen discussion and trying to speak about troubling stuff break out in his own family growing up, and watched it all end in acrimonious divorce.  The lesson, he felt, was "there's no use arguing." So to this day, we don't talk much. It's my watching generations of not dealing with anything reach critical mass and implode.  It's watching situations at jobs and more social ones go nuclear because of a collective policy of passive aggression and snark over blunt directness, of adhering to a long list of topics not to be broached or in any way dealt with. Of fearing "dealing."

    But it's a personal core virtue.  A sacred cow.  Something to watch out for.  Because there's other stuff.  Other stuff that's also important. 

    Back to Jessica Jones and her superheroic jeans.

What the Urge to Create is Fueled By (According to G.K. Chesterton)

    "Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I have often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of our modern world. I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it.

     The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself."

    And I remember as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell" [Insane Asylum]. I said to him "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

    He said mildly that there were a good number of men after all who believed in themselves and were not in lunatic asylums.

    "Yes, there are" I retorted, "and you of all people ought to know them. That drunken poet from who you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consider your business sense instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote [a self-proclaimed religious prophetess of the Victorian era]: the man who has it has "Hanwell" written on his face as it is written on that omnibus."

    And to this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?"

    After a long pause I replied "I will go home and write a book in answer to that question." This is the book that I have written in answer to it."

-G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy"

And yet, sometimes it's healthy to pursue madness.  Because there is a form of grey, ground-down, deathly sanity that is far worse than any madness.  Better to let that madness coalesce into some shareable, forwardable, downloadable, streamable form and spread it to the world. 

(But to be fair, Chesterton wouldn't have called that madness, really.  He was a fan of expression and creativity. I just felt for those untalented hacks who believed in their own work and yearned to share it with an uncaring world.  Because I used to and I miss that.)

Why I Liked the Individual Bits that made up "The Last Jedi," but Hated the Movie Pretty Hard

needless to say, SPOILERS.

This isn't a blog post.  It's a copied and pasted Facebook comment that seemed to keep growing:

The Last Jedi was FULL of really fun bits which all added up to inconsequential nothing or transparent and pointless stalling to fill out the time, and often felt like nothing less than a targeted attack upon/dismantling/strip-mining/fracking of the original movies. It felt like it was always rushed in presenting things that ultimately didn't matter anyway. Many of the scenes could simply have been cut with no effect whatsoever on what passed for an overall story or direction. There was nothing holding the characters back from enacting the space climax scene at some point before the movie had started/before all the casualties became necessary.

The main thing that many viewers felt, without even going all analytical on it, is the fact that movies of this kind are built on dramatic setups, followed (sometimes in the next film) by satisfying, climactic payoffs.  The Last Jedi started by rubbing the viewers' noses in the fact that it was going to be built around a large number of dramatic setups, including ones brought forward from the previous movie... followed by a series of jumbled letdowns. You could almost hear the sound of a balloon deflating with each one.  And sometimes, rather than a hugely disappointing payoff, there was just a whole lot of nothing.  No payoff at all.  

Now, that's just bad storytelling. Subverts expectations, alright.  By not delivering on a promise, thereby pissing viewers off and leaving them feeling tricked and misled.  And by a bad storyteller, not by a genuinely innovative, creative or clever spinner of space yarns.  One whose story somehow made less sense than The Phantom Menace.

Worst failing of all, Rey, the film's protagonist, is lovely and charming and well acted, but the characterization is boring as hell.  At least we knew little Jake Lloyd was going to grow up to be Darth Vader.  Rey seems like she'll never grow to become anything, neither bad nor good.   She seems to think she is Mary Poppins, already perfectly perfect in every way.

Writing 101: Rey needs conflict.  She needs to at least have the risk of maybe losing.  At some point.  She needs to have to try again after failing, for example, having a hand cut off.  (almost every interesting Star Wars character is improved by having a hand cut off.)  

What Rey does not need is to be tediously right all the time about everything, and beat everyone at everything all the time. She can beat Kylo Ren at light saber duelling.  She is wiser than Luke or Yoda and doesn't actually need either of them.  She doesn't need jedi lessons.  When the time comes, it seems she ought to be the one training Luke.  (I know, in the age of millennial falcons, she's "just special" like all girls are special, and her gender is supposed to be deeply empowering, all on its own.  Like Jonathan Pageau points out, she's the best at everything, from the beginning, and better than all the guys, just because she just is.  She came like that. No lessons need to be learned. She simply needs to be freed and she'll empower herself, once toxic male Fynn stops grabbing her by the hand and trying to save her, not seeing her unique value and the fact that she never needs to be saved. (Not like him, Kylo, Luke and the other dudes).  Success at no cost. No austere Jedi lifestyle here. Just free, inborn empowerment. The millennial dream.  What an important lesson for girls!) 

But meanwhile in movieland, the character is crying out for some depth.  Not just an empty McGuffin.  Right now she's failing to keep up with Watto and Boss Nass for depth.  In fact, she's tied for last place with Bossk, IG88 and Salacious Crumb.  At this point her parents might as well be Female Rebel Soldier #3 and Bespin City's Lobot for how much we're able to care about them.  It doesn't matter.  The "Rey's parents" thing is as boring and pointless and misleading as everything else.  The fact that we're supposed to care about a backstory that's being withheld years longer even than "Who is Luke's father?" is ruined  by the fact that the movie isn't explained by, and does not require its characters to have backstories.  It's too busy whizzing around in CG space, in a terrible mad rush to tell us... nothing much of anything at all.

In a good movie, like Empire, the Empire strikes back... and wins.  And the hero fails.  In this movie?  The New Order strikes back.  And... boringly, fails.  After all the buildup, Snoke fails.  Kylo Ren fails. Luke fails. Poe fails. Finn fails. You know who doesn't fail?  The hero.  Rey. And, even more boringly, she doesn't really win either. She just... nothings. The Vice Admiral wins hugely, overshadowing Luke's shadowplay, by topping him for being right and being a martyr and saving everyone.  Now why didn't she tell Poe she was going to do it, and do it before the film started?

In 1977, Star Wars: A New Hope was a movie full of subverted tropes and unexpected reversals and innovated gender roles, especially for its time. But the Gen Xer one-trick pony's only trick is to reverse or flip expectations. And that's it. The troll, pirate, vampire, robot, witch, serial killer or demon is actually a supa cool brooding anti-hero you'll be cheering for. The charming prince, noble knight, helpful priest, heroic vampire-hunter, hero, cop or military general is actually... the Bad Guy! (this was surprising for the first decade or so. Until it became Every Time.) And all of the 2 dimensional characters' genders could be inverted without changing anything else about the characters whatsoever. 

Post modernism. It's all about flipping everything.  Mother Knows Best in Tim the Toolman Taylor's house.  The reptilian ninjas from the New York sewers are pizza-scarfing saviours rather than the terrifying unnatural threat. The werewolf plays basketball. Starsky and Hutch are buffoons. Charlie Brown and friends swear and fart instead of being sweet and telling the true meaning of Christmas (South Park). Give it a try: think of something pre-90s, and turn everything on its head.  Dorothy is actually the villain of Oz, and the "witch" is the hero. The Sheriff of Nottingham is a fair ruler with a dangerous outlaw bandit to contend with, troubling his woods.  Tarzan is an African tribeswoman descended from a line of female chiefs, but who is shipwrecked in England where she needs to run a corporation. The Hardy Girls are sisters who narrowly escape being caught smuggling counterfeiting plates.

George Lucas was ahead of his time doing this "subverted expectations" stuff in the 70s, when The Princess Bride and Shrek and Spawn, Twilight, Dexter and Deadpool wouldn't hit the screen for a decade or so. He was at least fifteen years ahead of most of his peers in the industry. He was doing Oedipus instead of Prince Charming. Luke was in danger of killing his father and marrying his sister (and the prophet/oracle figure wasn't warning him, even though it hadn't happened yet and Obiwan and Yoda both knew. Weird.)  Now, a Gen Xer is going to feel all edgy "flipping" all of that.  Flipping Oedipus.

But: If you try to flip Star Wars: A New Hope and the next two movies upside down, you simply turn it back right-side-up again, back to a much more traditional fairy tale. You get more old-fashioned female characters. One-dimensional male heroes and villains. Galactic senators are all males again. The Empire isn't a racist and sexist tyranny anymore, but has become an oddly diverse, equal opportunity group of space Nazis. Vader is secretly Luke's evil uncle, who killed Anakin Skywalker (Luke's father and the rightful king). Greedo shoots first, and Luke gets shanghaied off Tatooine to slave away aboard the Colonial Falcon, under the shifty pirate bootlegger Han Solo and his bestial first mate, Chewbacca, who wields a space whip. Luke has to kill the treacherous Han Solo and does, defeating his henchman Chewbacca first, to escape and continue his adventure to kill his evil uncle Vader, and marry the princess. R2D2 doesn't understand anything and therefore needs everything explained to him by the smarter, sensible C3P0, which is all supposed to be very cute.  The witch/Emperor is female again, and merely assists King Vader rather than being his superior. The wise woman/oracle isn't Yoda anymore. The princess doesn't use a weapon and doesn't run the war anymore. Alderaan is saved in the last act. The Rebellion is run by a man again, instead of the venerable Mon Mothma. Luke is secretly a prince, and gets the girl (Leia) in the end, and she isn't his sister. Luke has to kill Vader in a light saber battle, and does.   Jabba is an empress/madam/evil queen/female trader.  The helpless Ewoks need to be saved from the Empire entirely, rather than just being helped out a bit. 

If you "flip" Oedipus, you get the story of a young woman who is killed by her mother and whose father doesn't, therefore, marry her.  (Or something else that doesn't work. That is trying way too hard to be clever, but lacks the gears to get up that hill.) 

Not terribly helpful if you want to make the true threat to the Resistance/Rebellion Lite the evil "toxic masculinity" (toxic Star Wars masculinity: running around with sabers and blasters, flying too fast, risking your life and disobeying the overcautious, controlling older adult figures who don't get it, which one would recognize from any other Disney movie, and, say, Harry Potter).  

Here, for your edification are two articles celebrating 2017's use of nerd properties to throw a preachy, tedious spotlight on toxic masculinity: First, second.

And... if you flip things, it's not a star war anymore. It's fleeing refugees and suicide bombers, rather than rebel soldiers with military attacks. Rey doesn't get to be "Commander Rey." Vice Admiral Holdo can't be bothered with boots, medals or a uniform with insignia. Star Wars becomes Star Trek, with mostly talking/arguing, and insoluble ethical dilemmas.  Kirk/Vice Admiral Holdo opts for not sending out a fighter craft with the hopes of the movement resting on the shoulders of one lone hero, but instead, prefers to do things like sacrifice the Rebel base ship Enterprise, set on self-destruct, to blow up the enemy ship/threat to the Federation.  In Star Trek, this threat is usually the work of less evolved, testosterone-poisoned neanderthal aliens who can't stop raging long enough to sit down and talk/work things out. Beings who haven't been told that the future, and the past in a galaxy long long ago and far, far away, are alike female.  After saving everyone, Spock/Luke/Holdo dies, with the possibility of appearing in the next movie anyway. Star Wars III: The Search for Luke. (Put a Gen Xer on the job of jawa-ing the movies and Kirk sacrifices his life for 3 minutes instead of Spock dying for real, and instead of Leia being shot with a stun blaster by a stormtrooper while talking with R2D2, Leia shoots her best rebel soldier in the head with a stun blaster and R2D2 doesn't have anything much to say about anything at all.  What a twist!)

So, Star Wars, it turns out, is beyond the scope of a Gen Xer's hack job. Especially one with all of Kylo Ren's understanding of and respect for the past.  Jawas don't build new droids. You can't just flip everything, guys. Can't just jumble the pieces and put your Star Wars Lego minifig's heads on random bodies and  subtly change the spaceships' shapes a bit with a few pieces swapped out here or there, or some new colours.  You have to make something.  You'd need to actually bring in something new. You'd actually need to know something about human history, psychology, philosophy, religion, Jung, fairy tales and ancient myth, and then subvert or flip that newly-acquired source material, not try to flip the already-flipped Star Wars rehash of mythology that you inherited.   You'd need to be capable of doing Star Wars again, yourself, rather than just recycling it.  You'd need to be able to create. To invent more Star Wars.  (Like they did somewhat in the two computer-generated cartoon series, which are both far less derivative than the big budget Hollywood sound and fury signifying nothing shows.)

The best symbolism in The Last Jedi is when Anakin/Luke's light sabre from A New Hope is being fought over by "I'm searching for hope, insight and spiritualism" and her opponent "the past must DIE... just 'cuz" and that saber represents Star Wars: A New Hope itself.  And between the two of them, they tear it in half so it doesn't work anymore. That torch that Luke churlishly tossed over his shoulder instead of passing it to Rey.  Just as the new guys have done with the franchise. The past must be chucked over one's shoulder. It's 2017.  And that stuff's toxic and old.

Oedipus is very old, yes.

The best-written, complex, unmuddled character of The Last Jedi was the erstwhile Ben Solo, Han's very own all-too-millennial falcon. In a movie that came out in 2017, even Han Solo and Leia Organa were naturally going to have spawned a lazy, whiny, conflicted, angry baby with no respect for the past, and a cynical, pragmatic (yet somehow naive, starry-eyed) nihilism to offer the world in lieu of hope. He's a destructive, angry victim, mirror to Poe's quipping, privileged competence. Kylo's pain isn't the loss of his mother, or having no father; it's his sketchy uncle/Jedi camp counsellor coming in and being inappropriate at night when he's sleeping, unsheathing his... saber. #kylotoo

And it's people who are my age who are to blame for Hollywood right now. The movies. The scandals. The complicitness with sexual exploitation. The cover ups of same. The hypocrisy regarding it. The backlash to it. The backlash to the backlash. We-a culpa.

Has Dating Changed Much Since the Middle Ages?

I'm taking medieval longsword lessons.  I'm also taking an online Chaucer course.

I'm doing a research paper on "Troilus and Criseyde," comparing Pandarus, who sets them up and encourages their affair, with Tinder and online dating sites and services.

I need people with modern dating experience to do my 15 question anonymous survey. You can just click boxes, or type in text. Zero knowledge of Chaucer required. I won't have any idea who responded to it.

Please lend me a hand by sharing this so single friends will consider doing it?

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/G7CD622