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cultures.' Take the wildly popular movie E. T. whose central message goes something like this: "Little American children, if you ever meet a strange alien from beyond the pale, by all means hide him from your own freely elected tribal elders!" I reiterate, no other society preached such a lesson to its offspring.

    Now let me admit, where this strange suspicion-of-authority propaganda campaign comes from I don't know. Even after talking about it publicly for years, I don't have a good theory! Yet, its effects are inarguably spectacular, underlying most of the accomplishments of modern-enlightenment civilization. Half of our prodigious creativity may arise from a restless need to be different in order to prove a sense of individuality that we absorbed from an early age.
    Alas, it also results in an occasional Timothy McVeigh ... the kind of malignant obsessive who never gets the overarching irony-that his own proud antiauthoritarianism was suckled at an early age from the very society he despised, spoon-fed to him and millions of other youths by a civilization that does everything possible to create wave after wave of rambunctious rebels.
    Rebels. No wonder A New Hope (ANH) had such resonance. The Empire's bad, so fight it!
    Moreover, nostalgia for the Old Republic wasn't yet tainted with the utter contempt for democracy that would pervade Episodes I-III.
    Indeed, this rebel spirit continued in The Empire Strikes Back (TESB). Even though we met Yoda-an authority figure to whom our hero had to bow-neither the Jedi Master nor the Force were yet the cloying, oppressive things they would later become. According to critic Stefan Jones, "In the first film, the Force was a kind of martial art/Zen archery kind of thing. Rather egalitarian: Obi-Wan even offers to teach scoffer Han Solo the ropes, implying anybody can do it. Goofy comic-book mysticism, but kind of charming and innocent, in a Hong Kong kung-fu movie sort of way." And even though Yoda starts throwing his diminutive weight around, in TESB, the lessons are still pretty benign.
    Stay calm and focused. Um, sure, sounds good. My kids learn the same thing, at their karate studio.
    Anyway, Luke even rebels against that authority figure! Yoda warns: "If you go and help your friends, lost everything will be!"
    But Luke goes anyway... and lost everything is not! (Whereupon, faced with awkward questions, Yoda performs a handy escape trick. The old "death" fadeaway!)
    Alas, as the Ubermensch Effect took over-starting in Return of the Jedi (ROTJ) and worsening with every film that followed-the Force grew ever more elitist. You had to be born with it! No, not just born with it, you had to be a mutant. No, make that a fore-ordained by destiny, preselected long ago, out-and-out messiah. A bona fide Chosen One. A demigod.

    In a progressive universe, Yoda and his competitor sages would set up Jedi-arts studios in every mini-mall on Coruscant-the way karate saturates suburban America-giving millions of kids exposure to a little discipline and fun, plus a chance to better themselves through hard work. Maybe outperform what cynical grown-ups expect of them. But Yoda thinks he can diagnose at age nine who's got it, who hasn't. And who is destined to fail before they try.
    Only demigods need apply... and only those demigods Yoda likes.
    But more about the nasty green oven mitt anon.
    MORE COMPARISONS
    Again, is all of this serious rumination just spoilsport grumbling? Or worse, sour grapes? Why look for deep lessons in harmless, escapist entertainment? While some earnestly hold that the moral health of a civilization can be traced in its popular culture, don't moderns tend to feel that ideas, even unpleasant ones, aren't inherently toxic in their own right?
    And yet who can deny that people-especially children-will be swayed if a message is repeated often enough? It's when a "lesson" gets reiterated relentlessly that even skeptics should sit up and take notice.
    Don't be fooled. The moral