The Star Spangled Banner - Verse 1
O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?*
The national anthem of the United States is phrased in the form of a question.
In the song, one hopes, one asks, if the flag remains visible through a night of battle. The song asks if, maybe, the explosions in the sky even the flag even more visible. The song suggests that the struggle for freedom shines its own light, that conflict brings out the best in us. In the same breath, it expresses doubt. Does the flag still wave? Can it still be seen through the ‘perilous fight?’
History tells us that war doesn’t often leave our symbols, or freedoms, intact. Democracies are difficult to maintain. They’re based on the idealistic notion that human beings should govern themselves, and not have their rules dictated to them by, well, an Emperor. As the Star Wars prequels mirror, democracies are rarely overthrown by outside forces. They rot from within and war is often the catalyst for that rot.
Vice Admiral Rampart, the villain of The Bad Batch’s two-part ‘mid-season event,’ represents that rot. He is the type of lesser leader left in the wake of a Republic: the self-interested functionary, negotiating in bad faith, with no interest in those who fought to give him the power to which he now clings. Earlier in the season we saw him unable to personalize the clones - he refers to them by their numbers not their names - and here we see him covering up their mass murder.
Representing the other side of the moral coin is the returning now-Senator Ryo Chuchi, a Pantoran who originally appeared in the first season episode of The Clone Wars “Trespass” all the way back in 2009. She rightly notes that the clone have no representation in the Senate and that the Act that Rampart, his allies, and seemingly the Emperor himself are pushing, does not provide for their long-term care after they have been decommissioned.
We know where this is going.
It’s fitting, unfortunately, that the character who shows disregard for the fate of veterans is named after a word in the national anthem. For a country that accounts for over a third of military spending worldwide, we are infamous for underserving our veterans, who all-too-often return home from our quixotic wars with PTSD, chronic illness, more likely to commit suicide than the general population, and accounting for over 10% of those experiencing homelessness in the US. While The Bad Batch isn’t a one-to-one analogy for the US (although we did replace conscription with a volunteer army after the Vietnam War), it’s echoes are real.