In its early, scrappy days, Twitter captured the hearts of Americans with a seductive promise: famous celebrities tweet, you can tweet back at them, and if you’re lucky, they might read your tweet. Such interactions seemed to offer a peek behind the curtain into the world of Hollywood spangle. We thought it’d be fun.
It turns out, alas, that celebrities use Twitter to do the same things the rest of us humdrum U.S folks do: engaging in dumb fights over dumb politics through egregiously humorless burns. But Hollywood types have one weapon in their Twitter arsenals the rest of us lack: the ability to press-gang their beloved intellectual properties into service.
For most of the age of Trump, Twitter’s most prominent offender has been J.K. Rowling, who has decided to use her role as the most beloved author of her time to lock down the position of presidential dunker-in-chief. Oh, you thought that the torturing, racial-cleansing, occult-meddling Lord Voldemort was bad? J.K.’s on hand to assure you Trump is worse.
This weekend, a yet more embarrassing flare-up occurred over the Trump administration’s repeal of net neutrality, a complicated issue involving how the Federal Communications Commission regulates the Internet that became a pearl-clutching cause célèbre among talking heads on the left.
It started when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai filmed a video celebrating the end of net neutrality that involved Pai dancing while wielding a lightsaber. (If it had ended there, it would still have been the dumbest story of the week.)
But it didn’t end there: Pai attracted the ire of lightsaber enthusiast Luke Skywalker, or, ummm, Mark Hamill, who tweeted that Pai was “profoundly unworthy to wield a lightsaber” because “a Jedi acts selflessly for the common man” instead of lying to “enrich giant corporations.”
Hamill’s rosy assessment of the Jedi is more or less the opposite of the view Skywalker himself has been pushing these days, but that does not seem to trouble him. So thank God there’s a sitting U.S. senator who’s willing to come in and set the record straight.
.@HammillHimself Luke, I know Hollywood can be confusing, but it was Vader who supported govt power over everything said & done on the Internet. That’s why giant corps (Google, Facebook, Netflix) supported the FCC power grab of net neutrality. Reject the dark side: Free the net! https://t.co/nARkMvIEYk
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 17, 2017
Cruz is of course referencing the famous deleted scene where Vader laughs evilly as the Imperial government institutes his master plan to stifle market innovation by increasing the regulatory burden on internet service providers.
Who enjoys this? Whose idea of a good time is arguing over where our pop-culture icons would line up on the most tedious political conflicts of 2017? What person, reading that interaction, comes out of it thinking more highly of Pai, Cruz, or Hamill?
A weary public has long lamented our bloated political discourse that swells to engulf all our cultural institutions, from movies to music to sports. That’s a course unlikely to reverse itself so long as celebrities and politicians make a habit of throwing fictional characters at one another on the Internet.
