He Snored Through Darth Vader

Banff, Canada. First wedding anniversary. The Rocky Mountains. We hiked on a glacier. Walked on actual ice older than civilization. If you ever get the chance, go. Nuff said.

It was May 2005. Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was opening that week. If you know, you know. This was THE one. The one where Anakin becomes Vader. The whole trilogy was marching toward this exact moment. I had been waiting my entire life. Every birthday. Every Christmas. Whatever. This was the moment.

The night before, our hotel was running a Star Trek Voyager marathon.

I sat through six episodes.

Six.

I happen to like Voyager. Captain Janeway is a force of nature. Coffee in one hand, a pip on her collar, telling boys what to do in deep space. I respect it. But six episodes was a love offering. A peace treaty. A first-anniversary wife saying honey, I see you, I am married to you, I will sit on this hotel bed and watch the Delta Quadrant negotiate with yet another misunderstood race of foreheads, because tomorrow is mine.

The next day we went to the movies. Tiny theater in Banff. Packed wall to wall. Lights down. John Williams up.

I was enthralled.

Twenty minutes in I glanced over.

He was asleep.

I cannot tell you exactly when my rage started. Somewhere between the lightsaber on Mustafar and the lava. This was not a Tuesday rerun. This was the cultural event of my generation. I had just given him SIX EPISODES OF VOYAGER and he could not keep his eyes open for the most anticipated film of the decade.

I let it go.

(I did not let it go.)

Then came the scene. THE scene. Anakin on the volcanic shore. Burning. Broken. Every dream of his cracked open and pouring out. The camera holding tight on his ruined face. The theater silent. The audience holding its breath. My whole life pointed at this exact frame of film.

He snored.

Loudly.

In the silence.

People turned around. I will go to my grave knowing that the man two rows back made eye contact with me with the pity reserved for war widows. Brother in arms. Some kind of cross-aisle solidarity from a stranger who understood the weight of the moment and the sadness of my marriage.

I was furious.

I was embarrassed.

I was twenty something years old and I had just married a man who could sleep through the birth of Darth Vader.

Cut to twenty plus years later.

He has not converted. Not once. Not even a little. To this day I cannot tell you with confidence that the man has watched a single Star Wars film all the way through without going horizontal. He owns a t-shirt that says SET PHASERS TO STUN. He wears it in public. On purpose. There is a photograph in our house of the three of us. Me in a Star Wars tee. Our oldest in a Yoda hat with the ears flopping over. My husband front and center in his phasers shirt, smiling like a man who has won. We framed it. It hangs on a wall. I look at it every day.

I love him.

I do.

He did, miraculously, stay awake for The Mandalorian. The whole series. Eyes open. Volume up. Something about Pedro Pascal in a beskar helmet adopting a green baby cracked through whatever generational anti-Star-Wars gene runs in the Ricks bloodline. This is the Way, he would mutter from the couch like he had been a Mandalorian his whole life. My one light. Twenty years of marriage and we found one common altar and it is the size of Grogu and made of green ears.

I once took our oldest to The Last Jedi when he was about two months old. Two month. Tiny 4 pound premie. His fist movie (and yes my husband wore his “Set Phasers to Stun” shirt). I packed the diaper bag, fed him in the lobby, sat down in the back row in case he cried, and waited for the crawl. He slept through the entire movie. Didn’t twitch. Didn’t fuss. Snored softly into the carrier on my chest while Luke Skywalker rode space horses across a salt planet.

Like father, like son.

I have wondered, in my quieter moments, if there is some recessive gene I cannot overcome. The Snore-Through-Star-Wars allele. Generations of Skywalker drama and Ricks men sleeping clean through it.

But here is the thing nobody tells you about Star Wars. The thing that crept up on me in twenty years of marriage and twenty years of legislative hallways and forty plus bills passed and one volcanic anniversary movie.

Star Wars is not a space opera.

Star Wars is a documentary about how a Republic dies.

Go back and watch the prequels with grown-up eyes. I dare you. The Trade Federation blockades Naboo because corporate interests bought enough senators to make the blockade legal. A no-confidence vote is engineered by a quiet man in a hood who keeps showing up at the right meeting. Palpatine gets elected as the moderate compromise. The reasonable choice. The grown-up in the room.

He manufactures a war. Then he asks for emergency powers to fight the war. Then he asks for the emergency powers to be extended. Then extended again. Each time the Senate claps. Each time it is for the children. For security. For the front lines. For a temporary measure that will be reviewed in due course by the appropriate subcommittee.

By Episode III the Senate is so used to clapping that it claps when he declares himself Emperor.

Padme has the only good line in the whole prequel trilogy. “So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.” Three senators in that scene didn’t clap. Padme. Bail Organa. Mon Mothma. They lost the floor vote. They lost the chamber. They lost the Republic. And then very quietly, in offices and hallways and back rooms, they started the Rebellion.

The Rebel Alliance was not founded by farm boys and smugglers. It was founded by senators who lost.

Let that one sit a minute.

Okay I am about to nerd out for a minute. If you have no idea who half these people are, stay with me. The point lands either way. I promise.

Star Wars’s heroes are a moisture farmer with a haircut. A junker scavenging a dead empire on Jakku. A deserter stormtrooper who couldn’t shoot a kid. A street kid with a slingshot. A Mandalorian artist with spray paint. A pilot with a leather jacket and a smart mouth. A protocol droid. A WOOKIEE. A princess who at nineteen years old refused to give up her position in a chair while a man in a black helmet choked the air around her.

You do not get a Jedi Academy admission letter in Star Wars. You get tapped on the shoulder in a cantina. You get told the Force runs strong in your family. You get handed a saber by a green muppet in a swamp who tells you to lift the X-wing out of the bog using your feelings and your faith.

And listen. Harrison Ford is still my favorite. I love you, Han. I know. Pretty much my favorite man in any galaxy, including this one. Don’t tell my husband.

The freedom fighters in Star Wars are not perfect. The Rebellion gets it wrong constantly. They got crushed at Hoth. Mauled at Crait. They sent every single one of the Rogue One crew to die on a beach for a set of plans. Poe mutinied against Holdo and was mostly wrong about it. Andor radicalized one slow blood-soaked decision at a time and never once felt heroic about it. Luke turned his X-wing off and trusted his feelings and his feelings were RIGHT but I want you to imagine being the guy in the next ship over watching that.

They fail. They regroup. They show up tomorrow.

That is the whole thing. That is the entire franchise.

And here is the part that gets me, twenty years into this work. The Rebellion is not one team. It is not one clean army with one uniform and one motto. It is dozens of cells who don’t always agree, don’t always coordinate, sometimes don’t even know about each other, scattered across a galaxy.

You’ve got the Mandalorians out on the Outer Rim quietly raising kids and saying This is the Way. You’ve got Bail Organa working diplomatic channels in plain sight on Coruscant. You’ve got Cassian Andor running ops in the shadows. You’ve got Saw Gerrera off the reservation and too radical for everyone but still effective. You’ve got Leia building the official military arm. You’ve got Luke chasing the Force in a swamp. You’ve got the Ghost crew from Rebels stealing supplies. You’ve got Ewoks. EWOKS. Tiny furry creatures armed with rocks and logs taking down stormtroopers because the Empire underestimated what mothers and grandmothers in a forest could do with a few sticks.

Mando says it. This is the Way.

Leia says it. Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night.

Yoda says it. Do or do not. There is no try.

Rogue One says it. Rebellions are built on hope.

The Last Jedi says it, and I will defend this scene to my grave. We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the First Order down.

Different groups. Different methods. Different tactics. All pointed at the same Death Star. Nobody quitting.

That is the Rebellion. That is also, if you have eyes to see it, what is happening in this country right now. The mama bears at the school board meeting and the constitutional sheriff in Idaho and the homeschool co-op in Polk County and the senator who keeps filing the bill that keeps dying in committee and the pastor who won’t shut up and the journalist working out of her kitchen and the lawyer taking the case pro bono. None of them coordinated. All of them aimed at the same thing.

The Rebellion is alive. It is just spread out. On purpose.

Trek is the Federation. Trek is what humanity could be if the system worked. Dress whites. Prime Directives. Replicators. Counselor Troi reading your aura before you have to ask. Negotiation. Diplomacy. Peace through structure. Earth united.

Star Wars is what humanity actually is. A senate that can’t pass anything. A council too cautious to act. An emperor rising one standing ovation at a time. And somewhere out in the Outer Rim, a kid looking at two suns wondering if there is something more.

Star Trek is what we could have.

Star Wars is what we have.

Receipts, just from this week, in case you missed them while you were sleeping:

The U.S. Senate failed for the sixth time to act on the Iran War Powers Resolution. Sixth. Vote of forty seven to fifty. The 60-day deadline under the 1973 statute hit on May 1. The Defense Secretary told the committee with a straight face that deadlines “pause” during ceasefires. That is not how deadlines work. That is not how the statute reads. Padme would have lost her mind.

Pentagon put the Iran war tab at $25 billion so far. Gas is $4.30 a gallon, four-year high. The Strait of Hormuz has actual dueling blockades. We are inside the cold open of Phantom Menace.

The Supreme Court issued a Voting Rights Act ruling on Thursday that gutted a Louisiana map. Alabama and Tennessee filed new redistricting plans inside forty eight hours. Florida is in its own special session redrawing congressional lines. The map of the galaxy is being redrawn while everyone watches the lava.

The longest partial government shutdown in American history finally ended. DHS reopened. Not with a hero. With a procedural vote nobody is going to remember by Christmas.

Padme. Bail. Mon Mothma.

This is how it always goes. The Republic does not fall to an army. It falls to a chamber too tired to notice what just got voted on.

Mark 13 says it cleaner than I can. “Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.”

That is the assignment. Watch.

Watch the floor. Watch the calendar. Watch which senator stops voting and starts clapping. Watch which committee chair won’t agenda the bill. Watch the language they smuggle into the budget at 2 a.m. on a Friday.

You are not going to save the whole galaxy. You might save your kids. You might save your block. You might be the unlikely hero. The mom who reads the actual page and line and walks into the committee meeting in a Target dress and a coffee cup and says no, ma’am. The dad on the school board. The grandma who shows up to every county commission meeting because the rest of you have soccer practice.

The Rebellion never had the numbers. It had a princess who wouldn’t sit down. A smuggler who showed up anyway. An old Jedi who decided one more fight was worth it. A green baby in a floating crib reminding a tired bounty hunter what he was actually fighting for.

And yes. It had a man asleep on the couch in a SET PHASERS TO STUN t-shirt.

I love him.

Some of us have to stay awake.

This is the Way.

May the 4th be with you, friends. Yes I know it’s corny. No I will not stop saying it. Twenty plus years and counting.

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If this made you laugh, or made you mad, or made you nudge your spouse and say honey wake up, share it with the friend who needs it. That is how Ricks Ramblings finds the people it is meant for.

P.S. If you want the actual bill breakdowns from this week, the page and line citations of what just got voted on while you were watching the lava, that’s what Capitol Cappuccino is. A cup of coffee a month. I read the bill so you don’t have to. You get the receipts.

Peace in the chaos. Grounded in Christ and way too much coffee. ☕

Rebekah

Winter Haven, Florida. At the kitchen table. Obviously.