Dear Mr. InsertPun,
As the somebody you're referring to, perhaps I might offer a sincere but good-natured answer. I'm not going to touch anymore on the immediate issue of ROTS' politics, since I've said my piece on that. I'd like to get more general, and at the same time more personal, if you'll permit me...
First, I don't believe that Lucas, assuming your proposal is the case, is the only one with the balls to say what you feel he's saying. There have actually been a good-sized line-up of people, some with a great talent for doing what they do and using it to help them say "it." For instance, Michael Moore gets over-mentioned, but he's a talented man and he did a good job with his work, whatever my feelings on what he had to say. There's really no shortage of people who say that current events are not to their liking. At least half of the people on this thread say that, and I don't feel any of them needs to screw up their courage to do so; they type with the assurance that no one's going knock on their door late in the night to ask about it.
Second, I am sure that most of us understand very well that a major plot arc of the saga is about the decline and fall of freedom due to fear, neglect and apathy, the rise of a tyranny under the guise of national security and the higher expediency, and the struggle to restore that freedom waged by determined and resolute beings. Trust me, I.P., I get it. I made in-depth studies of Hitler and Stalin, to cite just two examples, partly because I saw
Star Wars at the right age to learn some lessons and get caught up in the subject. My interest in history owes a great deal to what Lucas has said and is still saying. Hell, the character I've been most interested in all this is Palpatine!
Also, I feel that what defines a classic is whether or not it lasts beyond the interests of the audience it is contemporary with. A creation that fails to outlast that specific audience is called "dated," and more often than not dies, resurrected only for the purposes of nostalgia. But, in the event that I missed the point you wwere trying to make, let me take a different tack now:
What you may be referring to is what Tolkien referred to as the difference between applicability and allegory. He hated allegory, but liked applicability because, he said, "the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author." If anyone reads Bush, 9/11, the Iraq War or any other current into anything, let alone
Star Wars, that may simply be because they find it applicable to the film. But it is not because anyone is outright suggesting we do so within the film itself. Lucas may say this is what he meant in interviews, but the film itself does not; if it did, if it was too far on the nose, it would not survive the current generation, as I have said above. It would not be a classic. It would become boring, and unapplicable, not long after the current events I listed above become no longer current.
At some point these events will end, to be replaced by others. One way or another, Iraq will cease to be a current event, and so will Bush, the war on terror, and anything else whe are familiar with today. They will be superceded by events and names we can scarcely guess at now. When that happens, Star Wars will still be a classic, not because of what it says to us alone, but because of what all generations can find in it for themselves.
That, by the way, was what I believe Lucas was doing before anything else: dusting off the old classic myths and find a way that they applied to him, and moreso, to us: the generation that was raised on
Star Wars. And it will impart those lessons to the next, and the next, or else something else will do the same when the time is right (some say the Matrix series tried the same thing). In the end, that matters more to me than any ever-so-brief political issue.
Hope I helped entertain you, at least, I.P.
Best regards!
