Blue man scoop

Grand Admiral Thrawn's return; and this and that from the week

“What was first just a dream has become a frightening reality, for those who may oppose us.” What a line! What an entrance! Never mind chills, I had tears.

We should back up. As the 1990s opened, Hugo award winning novelist Tim Zahn inaugurated the Star Wars Extended Universe (“EU”) with a trilogy of novels, Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command. All your favorites from the movies were back, and this time their antagonist was a character of Zahn’s own creation, Grand Admiral Thrawn. The latter would swiftly escape Zahn’s books into the broader franchise, playing a major part in TIE Fighter, one of the earliest “plotted” games. 

It’s easy to declare that a character is a “military genius,” but the maxim for writers is “show don’t tell,” and that’s tougher because that requires the author to be something of a military savant themselves. (As Zahn would observe, writing Thrawn diligently and fairly “provides the intellectual challenge of trying to come up with new, clever, and (hopefully) workable tactics and strategies.”) Zahn showed us a Grand Admiral who had several hallmarks of effectiveness. He was a curious, astute, and engaged student of his enemies, keen to learn not only their battle tactics but the cultural assumptions driving and limiting those tactics, particularly by studying their art. Without a trace of the arrogance we saw in other Imperial officers, Thrawn respected his adversaries. He was a prudent steward of his resources, including his personnel, who were accordingly loyal and effective; he might sacrifice a man, but he would not waste one, still less murder one in a fit of pique. (Compare and contrast Vader.) And he was an adroit, unconventional tactician, using everything to hand to his advantage. He’s the sort of man that his literary contemporary Tyrion Lannister would admire, and Thrawn, in turn, would admire Tyrion’s chain.

Thrawn was not literature’s first soft-spoken sympathetic antagonist, but he was arresting and became a fan favorite. Like Thanos years later, he was the antagonist positionally, relative to “our” characters, and functionally. But you couldn’t help but like him. You sympathized. In a weird way, you almost rooted for him; say it softly: He deserved to win. Whisper it: Deep down, didn’t you want him to win?

Out here in the real world, Star Wars has encountered headwinds since the EU’s heyday. Disney acquired Lucasfilm and Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson did what the Emperor never could, breaking Luke Skywalker. The three sequel movies, taken as a trilogy, pleased no one; there are many who liked one or two of the movies, but few who liked all three. Disney also jettisoned the entire EU, relegating it to a deuterocanon labeled “Legends,” which is a nice way of saying “we’ll take your money if you want to buy them but we won’t honor them as canon.”

But Disney’s a mill in constant need of grist. One of its offerings was an animated show called Star Wars Rebels, and showrunner Dave Filoni needed an antagonist. Filoni, the, uh, not-evil opposite of Johnson, has an appreciation and respect for the fans and the franchise, and as he discusses in this, took the view that if there is an EU character who can serve your purpose, and if you treat that character with respect, why not bring them back?

Thus, somehow, Thrawn returned (to canon). Voiced by Lars Mikkelsen, this version of Thrawn was not quite as I had imagined him in the ’90s. Filoni’s Thrawn was an anti-villain but he was a villain, more callous than Zahn’s and less restrained. The claim that Thrawn is “ruthless” matches neither Zahn’s nor Filoni’s Thrawn, but it much more closely matches the latter. In some ways, I must admit, Filoni’s was the more fitting Thrawn; he still resonated with audiences, but you could see why the Emperor (who, after all, in-universe, made this fellow a grand admiral) might “follow [Thrawn’s] career most closely.” And Mikkelson was a triumph. He nailed it, perfectly capturing Thrawn’s calm, above-the-fray patience, adding the barest hint of a lisp. Thereafter, you can’t but read Zahn’s Thrawn in those same dulcet tones. 

The mill ground on. In the live action space, Disney gave us two good seasons of Jon Favreau’s space western The Mandalorian, which seamlessly imported characters from animation into live action: Bo-Katan Kryze had appeared in two animated series, Clone Wars and Rebels, voiced by Katee Sackhoff (fond to us as Battlestar Galactica’s Starbuck), and when Bo-Katan removed her helmet in The Mandalorian revealing Sackhoff within, I recall audible cheers from the audience. Similarly, not so long ago in a franchise less far away, the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks invaded the live-action Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. To almost universal acclaim (including from curmudgeons like me who don’t like Lower Decks) the animated characters Brad Boimler and Beckett Mariner, voiced by Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome, transit a portal (as you do; “an average Tuesday for the infantry, I assure you,” a rueful Col. Rutherford remarks in my WIP) emerging in Strange New Worlds’ live action, incarnated by Quaid and Newsome, who look passably like the characters they voice. It sounds goofy, but it worked great. In a weird way, it was emotional, and I can’t explain why.

Toward the end of The Mandalorian’s second season, who should show up but Ahsoka Tano, previously animated in Clone Wars, voiced by Ashley Eckstein. Ashoka was looking for Grand Admiral Thrawn, and since it was no secret that Ahsoka was getting her own show, my ears pricked up. But I didn’t get too excited. After all, in live action, Ashoka was not played by Eckstein but Rosario Dawson. To be sure, Dawson is terrific, but the substitution deprived it of that nebulous emotional punch of Bo-Katan or Boimler/Mariner.

Ahsoka’s spinoff is now upon us. It is titled Ahsoka; no imagination was expended in the making of that title. Rebels mainstays Sabine and Hera return, but, just as Dawson replaces Eckstein, Sabine and Hera, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead replace Tiya Sirca (beloved to us as The Good Place’s Vicky the Demon) and Vanessa Marshall in live action. Both are fine actresses, but again, something is lost in translation.

Nevertheless, Ahsoka—which is again helmed by Filoni—is proving to be everything the Disney sequels should have been. Six episodes in, I am very impressed. It is also clearly a continuation of Rebels. You don’t have to watch Rebels first, but it would help; I think you’ll grok most things from context, but Ahsoka reads most naturally in that context. And just like The Mandalorian, it’s hard to not be struck by the arrogance, fecklessness, and uselessness of the New Republic authorities. In a weird way, you almost root against them. Say it softly: They deserve to lose. Deep down, don’t you want them to lose?

So here’s where we need to talk spoilers to get you up to speed. Rebels ended with Thrawn’s flagship, the Chimaera (distinguishable by the monstrous artwork on its underbelly) meeting a fittingly mythic, nautical end, grappled by enormous kraken-like monsters and dragged down into the deep. But since this is space fantasy not the sea, they were space kraken, with an ability to swiftly travel vast distances, and so it wasn’t Davy Jones’ Locker for Ezra (a Rebels’ main characters who was stuck on the Chimaera), Thrawn, his ship, and his men. Rather, they were—well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

Years after the end of Rebels and some time after Return of the Jedi,¹ Ahsoka is seeking Thrawn. Many believe him dead, but Ahsoka notes that the remnants of the Empire are acting like he’s alive. She and Hera think that the space krakens took the Chimaera to another galaxy, impossibly far away. If Thrawn survived, he could be a threat to the New Republic (as Hera notes, and she would know), if not heir to the empire (as Ahsoka says, and that line lands less clunkily than you’d think), and if Thrawn survived, Sabine hopes (as, unknown to her, Thrawn prophesied), whatever happened to Thrawn also happened to her friend Ezra.

As episode six rolls around, Thrawn remains as he was when we first re-met Ahsoka in The Mandalorian: Just a name murmured fearfully. But in episode six, finally, Disney and Filoni pay off their promises. We have traveled far, far away from the galaxy far, far away. There heaves into view a ship. A big ship, bearing a lot of not-recent damage, as if it had long ago been in a fight with a kraken. Emblazoned on its belly is a worn but familiar artwork. The ship comes up on our travelers, who are brought aboard. We cut to the receiving deck—and then Lars Mikkselson strides into shot and utters that chilling line quoted at the top of this newsletter. Thrawn incarnate.

I waited nearly thirty years for that entrance. It was worth it.

§

Last week, several candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination held a “debate.” The leading candidate, whose support is well north of 50% (barely south of 60%, really, was missing. Nothing of significance happened and no one cared, and by unanimous consent, we have all agreed to never speak of it again. Acta est fabula, plaudite.

§

And if that sounds futile, wait ’til ya getta loada this. Some Republicans don’t want Trump to be the Republican nominee. Now as in 2016, they keep hoping that some other candidate will catch fire; none has, so what’s to do? Why, hold the matches up to yet another damp squib, of course.

Adding one more candidate won’t solve the basic problem. Unless or until Trump’s numbers drop below 50%, it doesn’t matter how fragmented or consolidated is the anti-Trump vote; he still wins. To be sure, there’s light in here, though not necessarily from an end to the tunnel. Trump’s nationwide support among Republicans is around 57%. Though the cult has surely expanded since 2016, that 57% must be the sum of the cult plus some number of non-cultists. Of the latter, some number (I’m optimistic enough to think most) haven’t bought in; they’ve simply decided that he’s inevitable, and, taking that as a given, they want to skip a messy primary and get on with beating Biden. They could be detached—in a closer race, they would be up for grabs—but not without dulling Trump’s luster of inevitably.

What’s the split between the cult and the rest? No idea. It could be miniscule. But for sake of argument, let’s assume that the Trump Cult is 40% and the remaining 17% are persuadable.

As if to underscore the idea that this is like a re-run of 2016, there have been rumors (more hopeful than real) of a DeSantis/Haley joint ticket. Set aside that this was already tried in 2016 with Cruz/Fiorina; the proponents of a joint ticket argue, correctly, that timing matters and the 2016 deal came too late. Even now, however, the math doesn’t work. Assuming that the deal itself loses them no votes (it will), combining DeSantis’ and Haley’s voters gets you one campaign that still has less than 20% of the vote, to Trump’s 57%. Even if the deal persuades the Seventeen Percenters that it’s a real race so it’s safe to defect (it won’t and they won’t), the joint ticket still has only 37%. Trump wins again. Actually, it’s worse than that: The joint ticket will likely galvanize Ramasmarmy supporters to jump to Trump. (And Trump-leaning DeSantis people to jump to Trump, for that matter, but we’ve no rational basis on which to speculate about those numbers, so we’ll ignore them.) That takes Trump’s numbers back up to 47%. Trump wins comfortably. And once the Seventeen Percenters do that math, they spook and return to Trump.

The only way to make the math work is to instantaneously consolidate every non-Trump vote behind one candidate. Everyone else except Ramasmarmy withdraws on the same day and endorses our draftee, industrial magnate Tony Stark. On day one, it’s Trump 57%, Stark 36%, Ramasmarmy 7%. Now we have a race, and on day two, the Seventeen Percenters abandon Trump for Stark, so on day three it’s Stark 53%, Trump 40%, Ramasmarmy 7%. On day four, Ramasmarmy’s people and a few erstwhile Trump-leaning DeSantis supporters get behind Trump, so on day five, the race is fifty fifty. At long last we would have a genuinely close, competitive race. But the only way to get there is with two fanciful acts of imagination: Recruiting a consensus candidate and folding up every other campaign (giant egos, cozy grifts, and petty bickering notwithstanding) behind that candidate. Neither is plausible. There is no figure who could stand in for Stark—no grandee ready to swoop in.

Funnily enough, there is one person in America who could directly make a meaningful contribution to the situation. Kamala Harris could substantially change the race. If she announces her withdrawal from the 2024 race, she frees Biden to select a new running-mate—one who, unlike Harris, is more popular than him and, unlike Harris, is a plausible President. And that in turn frees him from the age problem. Hitherto, however, that would have required of Harris both moral seriousness and self-awareness, and alas, a cretin and a pathological narcissist, she has neither. Ghoulish though this may sound, the death this week of Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.) provides a plausible and face-saving path forward: Governor Newsom should offer Harris reappointment to the Senate, and Harris should take it, con brio. That gives Biden a do-over in picking a viable veep.

§

In Riding the Asymptote, I insisted that the appropriate position for pro-lifers as to direct federal abortion policy post-Dobbs remained the same as it was pre-Dobbs: “Abortion is a state matter.” I was, uh, sharp with people who abandoned the ground they had occupied previously. A few more words about that.

I don’t fault politicians for not having a well-considered, shovel-ready abortion policy on the day that Dobbs overruled Roe. Even those of us who had been sure that Roe–Casey would fall eventually did not expect to wake up one morning in May 2022 and learn (from an unprecedented leak, no less) that the Court had voted to enucleate and explicitly overrule Roe. For years, everyone had expected a majority lead by the Chief Justice to chip away at Roe’s borderlands, piece by piece, overruling the shell only after no one cared. People can’t pivot on a dime and politicians had long been used to abortion as a wholly abstract issue; you had strong opinions about it, sure, and insofar as it stirred strong opinions among voters, your opinion had better align with the opinion of your voters. But until Dobbs, it wasn’t real. It didn’t merit the careful, policy-oriented consideration of, say, solid waste management or whether to retire or upgrade the A-10.

I do, however, fault the bluster and bravado that has been substituted for the kind of appropriately serious consideration due to a weighty and complex issue. I fault the willingness of people to abandon positions they took before Dobbs that now stand revealed as rhetorical facades. And I fault, with increasing intensity as time goes by, the wrongness of the positions on which they are converging. In particular, I’m scornful of those who for years said that abortion is a state issue yet who now demand federal action, I’m contemptuous of those who for years decried Roe as antidemocratic yet who now favor all manner of procedural chicanery to get their way, and I’m dismayed by the unwillingness of anyone to moderate and seek practical solutions.

All that said, I remain optimistic. When Dobbs came down, I predicted a decade of ferment in which each side would overreact, overreach, and overreact to the other side’s overreaction—but, I said, a consensus position would gradually emerge in most states. I still think so.

In blue states, Democrats will largely win the abortion fight, for now, and in red states, Republicans will largely win the abortion fight, for now. But after that initial paroxysm there will be reevaluation. There will be horror-stories in the blue states and there will be horror-stories in the red states, and the more extreme positions of each side will come under pressure to moderate.

Somewhere in this vast country, those who oppose any given policy can always find some hard-luck story or marginal case that will play on public sympathies. Those who have strong opinions will be unmoved by the stories athwart them and they will pretend to be outraged by the stories in their favor, but the American people at large do not have strong, consistent opinions on abortion. They are somewhere in the mushy middle. This frustrates people active on both sides of the abortion-AKA-reproductive-rights issue, who naturally have strong, consistent opinions and cannot fathom how and why anyone would disagree with them even in close-grained detail and intensity, let alone hold different opinions. Nevertheless, there will exist out there the kind of emotive stories that move people and many people are amenable to being moved.

The possibility of moderation, of finding a middle ground that’s incoherent, unprincipled, and infuriating to the activists and extremists but nevertheless palatable to overlapping interests that can compose irregular majorities, is a virtue of overruling Roe–Casey. Courts have to be principled and consistent; legislatures don’t, and may “roam at large, confined only by the Constitution.” Commissioner v. Beck’s Estate, 129 F.2d 243, 245 (2d Cir. 1942) (Frank, J.). And legislatures have only inertia to overcome, not stare decisis; even if I shared the Casey plurality’s notion idea that courts moderating under fire is bad, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 865–68 (1992) (plurality), there’s nothing at all wrong with legislators changing course in light of experience. To the contrary, it’s recommended. And I think that states will in fact do so. The extremes tend to suck up all the oxygen, but I would like to be optimistic that over the long-term, the center of gravity of policy bends toward the middle.

I cannot predict or prescribe what that policy should look like, but I do have a few broad comments as to parameters and considerations.

In my view, the necessary basis for all criminal law is either third-party harm or, without such, a proximate and adequate societal interest. (For example, if you voluntarily burn down your own house, harming no one, the state could prosecute you for arson in furtherance of its obvious interest in deterring arson.) If abortion kills a child, obviously criminal sanction could stand on the former ground. If not, it might conceivably stand on the latter, if more shakily. The regulatory law, however, cuts a broader path, and an act could be morally neutral yet still unavailable in most situations because of valid regulations on the doing of it.²

What the last paragraph sets to one side, however, is what pro-lifers often slight or ignore: The child’s interests (and/or society’s interests) are not the only thing on the balance. The pregnant woman has valid interests, too. Women are no less free and autonomous actors than men, and while a pro-life woman who chooses to carry her rapist’s baby to term may or may not be morally praiseworthy, society demanding that she do so, backed with all the coercive power of the state, is an enormous and extraordinary imposition on her. If it can be justified at all, it can be justified only by the most enormous and extraordinary needs. To repurpose Carl Sagan’s words in a way he wouldn’t like, “I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Broca’s Brain 73 (1979).

Life obviously begins somewhere between conception and birth. Abortion rights advocates don’t support killing children; they don’t argue that the killing of a child is acceptable because the mother’s right to live as she pleases outweighs the child’s right to live. Rather, they say that abortion is acceptable because the mother’s right to autonomy outweighs the potential life of a bundle of cells that may become but is not yet a child. Yet, this approach continues to leak dissenters because of its obvious shortcomings. If those who speak that way can’t answer when that bundle of lifeless cells becomes a living child (they can’t), and if those who speak that way cannot even discipline themselves to speak and act consistently with those contentions (they won’t), they will continue to give rise to the impression that the “life line” is determined in a wholly arbitrary and fuzzy manner, on a case by case, basis according to the desires and preferences of the people involved. And you will find that people who are not antecedently convinced by an overriding necessity that whatever needs to be thought to secure legal access to abortion must ipso facto be thought, that’s not persuasive.

Few people believe that the state has no role to play vis-a-vis the deliberate taking of a human life—and if the pro-life side is correct, that’s what abortion is. Nor do many people believe that the state may casually deprive half their citizens of their freedom to choose their own destinies—and if the pro-choice side is correct, that’s what banning abortion does. This irresolvable conflict of important but immeasurable interests is what makes abortion such a fraught issue. And when a question boils down to “judging whether a particular line is longer than a particular rock is heavy,” Bendix Autolite Corp. v. Midwesco, 486 U.S. 888, 897 (1988) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment), that question is quintessentially one for legislatures to answer.

Notes & Queries.

• Today’s cover image was created by the awesome Brick Ninja and was released for use under a CC BY-SA license.

Cornucopia.

• We don’t really believe in redemption, do we; not when the crime is heinous enough.

• How the internet crosses oceans.

• OSIRIS-Rex, NASA’s sample-return mission to an asteroid, returned its booty last week.

• Could the sun have a companion black hole? Sure. Does it? Doubt it.

• No boom today. (Boom tomorrow, always.) But this game will continue as long as the Matt Gaetzes of the world have power, and the only reason that they have power is because all those other Republicans—accounted “the sane ones” by the stockholm-syndrome-suffering “normal” Republicans who still, even now, expect to regain control “after the fever breaks”— who are content to let him stand on their shoulders. That is to say: Even if it is true, as Michael Warren and Liam Donovan argue on The Dispatch’s podcast, that this issue’s forced by the five craziest, trumpiest, least tractable members of the House GOP, the problem is not the five crazies, it’s the 222-5=217 whose complicity is a sine qua non to the five’s power to force the issue, and the millions of people who continue to vote for those 217 even though they profess to spurn and despise the five. Gaetz intends to try his next attention-seeking stunt this week. The 217 should spurn him and McCarthy alike and find some candidate acceptable as Speaker to both them and two hundred Democrats.

1. Not for nothing, but I do wish these shows would take the time to establish when in the sprawling timeline they take place. That’s why The Racetrack Chronicle and Evaded Cadence go out of their way to expressly relate their events to established canon, to orient the reader.

2. For example, even if the First Amendment precludes the banning of making pornography, which I doubt, cf. United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460 (2010) (dubitante), it does not preclude, say, California adopting non-pretextual health codes governing its making, health codes that in their specificity, detail, and burdens would extinguish the industry. After all, the industry could leave California, and other jurisdictions would have strong incentives to be inviting to so lucrative an industry. Cf. Hart, The Relations Between State and Federal Law, 54 Colum. L. Rev. 489, 542 (1954) (a federal system with separate spheres and local experimentation “maximizes the opportunities for coping effectively with the problems of social living”).