Jedi Midwit Tricks

I encountered a new-to-me acronym the other day, and because I continue to shoulder the burden of informing my readers of the latest iterations of the ever-evolving woke lexicon, I offer it to you today.

Justice. Equality. Diversity. Inclusion.

Or, in case it wasn't obvious - J.E.D.I.

I do recall seeing it before, but it triggered my synapses today because my encounter coincided with another encounter: a meme of a George Lucas quote:

When I did [Star Wars], I said, 'This is a film for 12-year-olds, and it's a kids' movie.' But then somehow over the years, people have sort of drifted away from that and tried to make it into something other than what it actually is...[Star Wars] is a Saturday afternoon serial for children. People forget what the movies actually are.

I first saw Star Wars (as in what later became known as Episode IV: A New Hope) when it came out in 1977. Thirteen-year-old me went with a friend and his older cousin to the then-famous Loews Astor Plaza (largest movie theater in the city at the time) in Times Square, NYC, where we stood in line along with 1500 other eager moviegoers.

We liked the movie so much we just stayed in our seats to watch it again.

You could do that back then.

I kept up with the Star Wars product across the ensuing decades, but felt an increasing level of disappointment with almost every new offering. The breaking point, for me, was The Mandalorian. That's the show that cleared the clouds and affirmed that Star Wars was written for kids. Twelve year olds, was my conclusion. Lo and behold, I drew the conclusion that Lucas wanted me to draw, decades after my first wide-eyed viewing of that which he created, and before I read that quote.

The confluence of J.E.D.I with the Lucas quote prompted the conclusion that the pantheon of Woke is by and for the intellectually immature. For those whose critical thinking skills are that of a twelve year old. That many of its proponents have graduate-level educations from the nation's most prestigious universities does nothing to dissuade me from this conclusion.

J.E.D.I. is not just a theme. There are indoctrinating training programs all over the place, and there is an organization that seeks to:

frame the business case for embedding justice, equity, diversity and inclusion into our entire food ecosystem.

Oxford comma omitted by them, not me. I suppose they haven’t gotten to that level of “language arts” education yet.

Read the ‘About’ page if you want more woke-o-drivel. The page doesn't allow copy-paste, and I'm not in the mood to type it all out.

While the Collaborative is about food, J.E.D.I. goes beyond. It has infected Hollywood, with obvious results.

It is at the heart of something called B Lab:

As an organization, B Lab stands against all forms of oppression, including racism, transphobia, classism, sexism, and xenophobia.

I wonder if they stand against the “oppression” of those who don’t align with their political views. Oh, wait, no, I don’t.

An internet search returns J.E.D.I. pages from all over Corporate America.

And, in classic "never woke enough" fashion, some geniuses over at Scientific American argued that the acronym is problematic. Because:

Through its connections to Star Wars, the name JEDI can inadvertently associate our justice work with stories and stereotypes that are a galaxy far, far away from the values of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.

Seriously. Here is some "publication-worthy" prose denouncing the acronym.

The Jedi are inappropriate mascots for social justice. Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”). Strikingly, Force-wielding talents are narratively explained in Star Wars not merely in spiritual terms but also in ableist and eugenic ones: These supernatural powers are naturalized as biological, hereditary attributes. So it is that Force potential is framed as a dynastic property of noble bloodlines (for example, theSkywalker dynasty), and Force disparities are rendered innate physical properties, measurable via “midi-chlorian” counts (not unlike a “Force genetics” test) and augmentable via human(oid) engineering. The heroic Jedi are thus emblems for a host of dangerously reactionary values and assumptions.

I am prompted by this word salad to recall the "audacious hoax" that James Lindsay and a couple other iconoclasts perpetrated on academia. ICYMI, they authored twenty fake research papers chock-full of woke terminology. Many of them made it through peer review and got published.

I also imagine a lexicon checklist, where writers typists tally points for every wokeism and every form of identity-based oppression they manage to shoehorn into their blocks of babble.

The people who create wealth by getting things done, by offering goods and services that people want to buy, don't go down this rabbit hole. Those are the actual smart people, the real achievers of our society, and they have the chops to compete for their success.

By contrast, DEIESGJEDIeieio has become a refuge for midwits clutching ‘woke’ style guides.

The old adage "If you can, do. If you cannot, teach. If you cannot teach, administrate," would benefit from substituting "administrate" with "woke-bloviate."