Meeting Timothy Zahn: How Comic-Cons predict the future of politics

It’s no different from predicting the weather or an upcoming earthquake.  Some measurements are quite scientific that can be used to measure cultural ability and political sentiment.  For me, those measurements don’t come from the nightly news cycles or the hours of daily talk radio and podcasts, but I learn a lot from places like comic book stores and Comic Cons, such as the one they recently had in Cincinnati during September of 2021.  My daughter is a well-respected artist, and she was at that show and invited me to come on her opening day to help out, which I love to do.  It exposes me to different kinds of people where my age group is not well represented.  Most of the Cincinnati Comic-Con of 2021 were in the 20 to 30-year range.  Last year the event was canceled due to Covid, so I wasn’t sure what we would see.  Happily, the event was a great success, well attended, and there were lots of great costumes elaborately displayed, which I think is wonderful to see.  Mythology at work, where ideas work in people’s minds driving to manifest some form of reality.  From the mind of fantasy to the existence of at least a costume.  When I see that, it tells me that the participants recognize something in these fantasy stories that are attractive to them and care enough about those things to make them into reality.  As I think about the world and the problems that we have in it presently, many of the people in a comic con are at least doing the first step in solving those problems, recognizing that there is one.  Now their recognition may not be rooted in a realistic solution, but the first step in situation solving of any kind is in seeking alternatives to the present reality.  If the world is messed up and these people find comfort in fantasy, well, that says something to me, and I discovered that the Cincinnati Comic Con environment is full of great young minds looking for something positive in their lives.

I have written extensively about Star Wars in the past and how the future progressive problems for the political class currently at work in the world would fall apart.  The latest trilogy of films that have upset Star Wars fans is a perfect barometer for how progressive woke policies are destined to be destroyed in the coming years, especially in the United States.  The America First movement will only pick up steam. The Disney strategy of seeking market expansion in places like China and other places in the world was already showing signs of falling apart before Covid hitting in 2020, paving the way for the United Nations Great Reset.  People, the kind of people who go to Comic Cons, see through a lot of the nonsense.  They don’t care if Disney sells its products to China or some other communist country.  But if they screw around with characters and make them political, well, then there will be trouble.  When Disney and Kathy Kennedy at Lucasfilm decided to kill off Han Solo in the first movie of the new trilogy, they wanted to kill off toxic masculinity and put in his place a girl.  That didn’t go over too well, to replace the gunslinger of space and replace him with a person who had no idea who her parents were and what her job was.  The mistake of Disney to erase the Star Wars past and replace it with some woke, warless future wasn’t going over well with fans.  And they rejected Star Wars sending the studios into a frenzy trying to repair the damage.  Because ultimately, that’s what it always comes down to.  That will undoubtedly be the case in the world regarding electric cars, windmills, health care, and taxes.  Progressive intentions might sound good in an academic setting, but people ultimately decide what they want when it comes to reality. 

A few booths down from where my daughter was, I could see the great Star Wars author Timothy Zahn signing books, all of which I’ve read.  He had his latest book, which I hadn’t yet, book II of the Thrawn Ascendency series, so I went down there to speak with him and talk to him a bit.  It was a rare opportunity, and I couldn’t pass it up.  Now Timothy Zahn is a great guy and a great ambassador for the Star Wars brand with Lucasfilm and Disney, so I’m not going to reveal the contents of our discussion. He’s the creator of the expanded universe.  He started the novel-writing after the movie Return of the Jedi, so I had to ask him how he felt about Disney coming in and screwing it all up by changing the entire story with their dumb movie The Force Awakens.  But I’ve read his Thrawn books since then, and I know where he’s going with this recent series, and after talking to him at the Cincinnati Comic-Con, I am just glad that he’s out there. He’s a great dude, and he and some others now at Lucasfilm with Kathy Kennedy, now pushed into the background, are going to fix up Star Wars and win back their fans.  Listening to him talk only confirmed what I had said about everything 5 or 6 years ago.  And here it was, all happening, just as I said it would.  Zahn held his nose like a lot of people do when they work for big corporations.  I know many people who work at Disney; some are very dear friends who have done the same.  But what I know and have known, which these people suspected also, is that they’d wait out the storm until the corporations learned their lesson and had to adjust to the market conditions. 

Globally, the political hacks think they are in charge and utilize various methods of communism and socialism to regulate all existence.  But when I go to events like these comic cons, it just reminds me that the mind of humankind is still in charge.  The kinds of things people decide to spend their money on and the type of stories they find attractive still indicate what the rest of the world will do.  For instance, even with all their woke corporate policies and insults to Uncle Walt and his frontier America, Disney bent the companies back to facilitate communist China.  But when Disney tried to release their new Marvel movie Shang-Chi to China, the communist country turned them down.  Disney has gone way out of its way to appease China, even sticking Asian characters into Star Wars not because they needed to be but because Disney was sucking up to China.  Well, China sees the wave of the world, and they know that they are in trouble for their part in manufacturing the Covid crises and election fraud, and they are lashing out.  And Disney is the one getting slapped.  Was it worth nearly ruining Star Wars to get a communist government to play nice?  Well, Disney learned too late.  Their actual audience is in America, and they need to cater to that audience.  As I was talking to Timothy Zahn, I saw many Star Wars characters coming up to him looking for an autograph.  I even saw Mara Jade.  But you know what I didn’t see.  Nobody was dressing up as Rose, the Asian girl from The Last Jedi.  The movie that Star Wars fans hate.   What is evident at these kinds of events is that the rest of the world will follow politically.  And the direction will not be toward more totalitarianism.  But to freedom, justice, and the American way. 

Rich Hoffman