Class Warfare on Battlestar Galactica
I knew going into watching the entire series of the new Battlestar Galactica that I’d be dealing with the issues of the day. I had heard about the parallels to the Iraq war and such, but I wasn’t prepared for episode 3.16, “Dirty Hands.” It’s not often that a television show surprises me, but this episode did it. I was slapped in the face by what seemed like an hour long dramatization of Das Kapital. A work of Science Fiction finally did what the genre has always promised: It made me think about our world, right here, right now.
Spoilers below the fold.
Labor v. Capital. Marx couldn’t get enough of this battle. How about Proletariat v. Bourgeoisie? Heck, let’s throw the Aristocracy in there, too. Even better. BSG had addressed the idea of labor unions before, but this episode ripped off the scab.
There are those who do the dirty jobs, the hard work. And there are those who rule and perform more satisfying jobs. Thus it has ever been, thus it shall ever be. The Chief is given the job of vocalizing the question of why this should be accepted practice. Why should the crappy jobs always be done by those from the poor colonies? Any why should the professionals come from the rich ones?
It’s left to Gaius Baltar to pen the polemic. He gets his manifesto smuggled out of his jail cell, and people are receptive to the message. They can see the state of affairs. Sure, he’s probably the worst person on the show, the most culpable for the holocaust. He has harnessed something here, though. I couldn’t believe the show’s writers were able to shift the perspective (the paradigm, if you will) so that I was viewing the President and the Admiral as being born with a silver spoon in their respective mouths.
I’ll be honest: I’ve always been a sucker for leftist political theory. I think Chomsky, Zinn and company probably have it right. Those with money and power use it keep an unfair advantage over those that don’t. Now, I realize there’s no way their principles will ever find electoral cache in these modern times, so it doesn’t make for much of a practical outlet. An episode like “Dirty Hands” reminds me that the children of the poor are destined to be poor, and the children of the rich are destined to be rich. Destiny might be too strong of a word, but as they say in the military, “It is what it is.” No one is a slave to predestination, but looking at the majority of outcomes, you’d never know it.
I wish I could forget this episode, and go back to my obliviousness. I think I’ll go buy something on Amazon to help this process along.
