For over four years, I’ve had a show-crush on Battlestar Galactica.
Yes, there are interstellar dogfights. Yes, a sizable portion of the bad guys are robotic babes who blink red lights when they’re feeling amorous. Yes, there’s a whole lot of yippity-yap about jump drives, tylium ore, something called a DRADIS, and all kinds of other sci-fi jargon-slobber. But it’s what Battlestar Galactica says about the world today that makes it the best drama on television. It’s ballsy stuff.
I mean, what other show has the hairy knuckles to craft situations in which our heroes support suicide attacks on unsuspecting civilians? What other series but one with a lawn dart the size of a Cadillac Escalade would allow the president to outlaw abortion against the will of the people and successfully argue that it’s the right thing to do?
But alas, Battlestar Galactica is in its final season; my favorite series of all time will soon come to an end.
However, I do not weep. I know that one day there will be a show that takes Galactica‘s place in my heart. There will be another crush. As has often been said on the show, “All this has happened before and will happen again.”
Which brings me to the current state of things. People today are talking an awful lot about change. About the dawn of a new day. About hope. But not me. If history has one lesson to teach us, it’s that nothing ever changes. Everything stays the same. Humanity is on an endless cycle of wash, rinse, and repeat.
Consider the recent vote confirming Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. No one doubted that she would be confirmed. In fact, the vote was completely one-sided — 94 to 2. As it happened, one of the naysayers was none other than Sen. Jim DeMint. As for why DeMint voted against Hillary, well, it had little to do with her views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Or Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Or the increasing aggressiveness of Mother Russia. Nope. DeMint didn’t mention that stuff in his speech on the Senate floor prior to the vote. However, he did mention Clinton’s stance on abortion. In fact, DeMint devoted somewhere around 200 words in his speech to this very topic.
While this might strike some observers as strange, for DeMint — a politician who counts Bob Jones Land as his home turf — it makes sense. He needs to keep his fundie base happy. The same old agitprop works time and time again.
And then there is Katon Dawson, the head of the S.C. GOP. Right now, Dawson is in a heated race for the chairmanship of the national Republican Party. And if reports are correct, he just might win. This is not a good thing. In fact, a Dawson victory will do nothing to change the image of the GOP as the party of white bigots and fat-cat elitists. See, until September Dawson was a member of a whites-only country club. Even worse, he had been a member for 12 years.
But nothing assures me that history repeats itself more than the Jan. 14 column by Beverly Gadson-Birch in The Chronicle, the Charleston-area’s African American-centered newspaper.
The commentary began like this: “Last week, I had my say about Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and how the campaign was going to get ‘dirty.'”
This struck me as a particularly odd way to start a column that would be published a week before Obama was sworn in. I mean, why “Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama” and not “President-elect Barack Obama”? And why mention the campaign when all campaigning stopped in November? Weird.
I read on through the opening paragraph until I came to a line that only further added to my confusion. It read: “We are once again called to the State House on Monday, January 21, 2009 for a King Day rally.” I stopped. Jan. 21? But Obama was confirmed on Jan. 20, a Tuesday, so that would make Monday, which was MLK day, the 19th, right? And if my calendar is correct, it was Jan. 21, 2008 that was on a Monday. What’s going on?
And then it occurred to me that perhaps change hadn’t come at all. Perhaps America didn’t elect its first African American president. Maybe history is just repeating itself. Maybe we can’t escape the past. Maybe the Galactica crew is right: “All this has happened before and will happen again.”
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