Would you have funded the Death Star?

Welcome to Export Quality, your home for news by and about South Asian Americans and Canadians - and everything in between.

Mar 13, 2025

First, an apology for the inconsistency of this newsletter. It has much more to do with a somewhat soul crushing job search, the physical and emotional oddities of turning 43, and the state of the state, as it were, than any lack of amazing and important journalism by my diaspora colleagues. The horrors persist, but so do I so here’s to seeing Export Quality more often in your inbox!

Reading: Shockaholic by Carrie Fisher

Listening: Hostile Government Takeover by AGiftFromTodd and Vinny Marchi (A very 2025 story: this began as a short a capella ditty sung by an Instagram influencer, remixed by another one, and then reached #1 on iTunes - all within two weeks)

As Trump thoroughly and wholly embarassed the U.S. and somehow also himself when hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the other week, I was once again reminded of Star Wars. Or rather more aptly, the cinematic masterpiece of parody, Spaceballs. (If you haven’t seen the latter, please go now and come back here. If you haven’t seen the former, you and I will need to re-evaluate our entire relationship.)

Allow me a moment to wade into nerd fandom as I currently try to complete - my third - Star Wars cross stitch pattern.

Two of my finished cross stitch projects

It’s safe to say this is one of my Roman Empires, as the kids say — the thing that is a low, constant, and curious hum in my thoughts. Lately it’s just become far more prescient, rife with comparisons to the Empire, the Death Star as a grand project of the Empire, the Resistance, and the faded but present signal among the noise of a much-needed hope. I imagine that if we were in either of those universes, the thing we would need to ask ourselves is whether we would continue to fund the Death Star, the thing that would end up destroying us or threatening us into subjugation, or would we be a Princess Leia or a Mon Mothma, resisting in what ways we can?

Back in the day when I was a much more prolific reporter and when the horrors of Trump Part 1 began, I would label my Google Docs drafts and high profile figures with nicknames from the Star Wars canon. On those particularly infuriating days or for the more absurd characters of that political theater, I would draw from Spaceballs.

This isn’t to take away from the seriousness of ongoing disasters - the tangible distress and fear of conflict Ukrainians are experiencing, the looming famines without USAID’s help, the droves of unemployed federal workers who were once safe no matter what, the fear of immigrants writ large. It’s just that sometimes we need to add a bit of dark humor to these things in order to not turn away from the current, relentless pace of news as Americans are often able and wont to do without consequence. In other words, you laugh so you don’t cry or scream into the abyss or bury your head in the sand.

The labeling was my microscopic way of maintaining some whimsy and rebellion in a newsroom that was difficult for me to navigate and save some shred of sanity as a hustling freelancer.

Trump very quickly materialized as Jabba the Hutt, or Pizza the Hutt on the days when my anger at the insanity of that administration was harder to contain. Darth Vader, or Dark Helmet, alternated between Putin, Pence, and the Republican Ass Kisser de Jour. Golf Cart One at Mar-a-Lago was the Death Star, the grand project being maintaining the president’s presence on the golf course.

The Democrats were routinely Spaceballs characters, but when AOC and The Squad came around they had given people some hope and eventually became the Skywalkers and Solo in those drafts.

It looks like I’ll be bringing this practice back in some form, so here’s my revised 2025 list. You should feel free to use it in whatever way makes these daily, shameful, bitter American pills slightly easier to swallow before picking up your choice of weapon to fight for the day: a keyboard, organizing, community service, resistance-fueled art, protests, running for local office, a snarky newsletter, voting, etc.

Trump = still very much Jabba the Hutt(SW)/Pizza the Hutt(SB). Any physical comparisons are completely on purpose and totally accurate.

Vance is most certainly Dark Helmet, with aspirations of becoming Darth Vader.

But let’s face it, Elon Musk is actually Darth Vader. A once-heralded figure who has crossed over into the dark side only to cause mass destruction. His grand project, the Death Star(SW)/Spaceball I is DOGE. He doesn’t deserve a gif.

By that logic, Senate Republicans are Sith Lords.

Here is what Congressional Democrats, minus AOC and Jasmine Crockett, appear like at the moment [a scene from Spaceballs]:

I think we all know who Palpatine might be in this scenario. There is no laughing about this one, no parodied equivalent.

My current thought is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is President Skroob: an official who is, ultimately, of little consequence or maybe I just hope this person could potentially get trapped in a small space shuttle with an angry bear. Though I suspect this label will rotate between various Cabinet members.

I don’t know if there is a Mon Mothma just yet, the Senator who is secretly funding resistance activities at the risk of her family, but I want to believe there is badly enough to keep reading between the lines of bill votes and news reports.

And then there’s the rest of us, the working schmucks who want to do right by our people, the ones who depend on Social Security payments every month or a paycheck from what was supposed to be a steady job, the Ukrainians who want peace, the dying children who need food aid and suffering who need AIDS medication, the women who need reproductive healthcare to save their lives, the farmers who just want to keep their livelihood, the kids who just want to learn, the librarians who simply want to continue being superheros. It can feel like we are both the people on the destroyed planet of Alderaan and the horrified patrons of the space diner when that dancing alien popped out of the man’s stomach.

But, we are not passive observers from what I have seen. We are protesting in the snow in Vermont, in the streets of Cincinnati (because when did literal Nazis become acceptable?!) and Philadelphia (all hail Gritty), and at Trump Tower in NYC to save a man who has a green card and was - legally - standing up for his people. What destroyed me about Mahmoud Khalil’s story, what should break any of us is that his wife is eight months pregnant. As someone who held a green card for a quarter of my life, lived here for 41 years, and became a citizen months after 9/11, his story sends chills down my spine.

We are the Cassian, Jyn Erso, the Leia, Luke, Solo, and my personal favorites: Rose, Fin, and Poe Dameron. Some of you are Chewbacca, which is pretty great too.

This absurd little private exercise was one of the ways I maintained some semblance of sanity pre-pandemic and maybe it will work for you. It is not a shield blocking out the reality, but some sort of sunscreen, SPF 50.

Processing every piece of information in real-time is going to be near impossible for most of us who care about the country and our communities, so do what you can to come up with your own sunscreen, your light jacket, the thing that makes being exposed to the elements more bearable so you can keep going.

And now on to your required viewing….