I’ve been having some conversations with toasterwaffel recently that I thought I should share with the rest of the world. Specifically we were talking about our shared history with radical politics, and about the character of Zarek on BSG.
There’s going to be spoilers, so if you’re not caught up on BSG, you should skip the rest of this. At the very least you probably won’t know what I’m talking about.
So, Tom Zarek is my favorite character on the show. Hands down. Because he perfectly encapsulates the personality of the radical. Even when he was incorporated into the power structure he was still the voice of the masses. He always knew the way the hammer would fall when it came to public opinion. We see this when he warns Roslin against putting Baltar on trial. And he’s not afraid to use every tool at his disposal to do what he thinks is right, which we see in the last two episodes he appears in.
Toasterwaffel points to the very first shot we see of Zarek. He’s standing amidst a rioting prison ship, legs set in a wide and manly stance. He’s in perfect control of the worst surviving humans. He’s the embodiment of street power. He’s the old Apollo, looking the new Apollo straight in the eye with the cocky assurance of someone who knows that he’s still the cool one.
Basically, Zarek is the Malcolm X of BSG.
And then we see him at the head of the coup. He stops looking like Malcolm X and starts looking a lot more like Stalin. The moment that he orders the execution of the Quorum is the greatest moment in television history. That’s the flip side of radical change, the violence that’s needed to enact change. Or more precisely, it’s the end result of giving ultimate power to someone who has spent his life in opposition to power.
The best part of it is, Zarek would have won. The reason he didn’t, is that Gaeta didn’t hold up his side of the bargain. Gaeta wasn’t willing to break those omelet eggs. Either Gaeta didn’t know how the world worked, or he was always just acting out his psychosocial compulsions, whereas Zarek was acting out the cold hard requirements of ideology.
We can imagine that Adama didn’t enjoy executing Gaeta. It was simply the step that had to be taken to regain control. But we know for certain that Adama loved watching Zarek get shot. In a series where alliances and friendships constantly realign, Adama would never have given up his uncompromising hatred for Zarek. Adama is a cop at heart, and cops will never, ever tolerate radicals. Radicals are the reason we have cops. Cops exist to keep people in their place, and radicals exist to shuffle the seating.
And toasterwaffel makes a great point, no matter how likeable Adama and Roslin might be, they are certainly not running a democracy. It was when they took actions counter to the will of the people that Gaeta and Zarek stepped in, arresting control from what amounted to a military dictatorship and re-empowering the elected representatives (until the Quorum wussed out and had to go). Adama is operating on the same moral authority that is the basis for the moral authority of cops everywhere: he has a monopoly on the use of force.
Which brings us to the real world.
Over the summer, a couple of Austin activists were arrested on federal charges relating to the Republican National Convention in Minnesota. As it turns out, someone they thought of as a friend was in fact an informant for the FBI. The Austin Chronicle has a fantastic article about this, easily the best story of theirs I’ve read.
The snitch’s name is Brandon Darby. For years he had been one of the loudest and most publicly recognized activists in the local community. And for years he had been narcing on his friends. The members of the local activist community are by turns furious and heartbroken about this revelation. A lot of people honestly thought Darby was their friend, someone who could be trusted.
Here’s a quote from the Chronicle article that cogently summarizes the character of Brandon Darby:
"At best, Darby might be just an ordinary and confused young person, fired with generalized idealism and stumbling through this world on his own tangled, misguided mission to save it. But at worst, he might have been – might have become over the last several years – a manipulator with a hero complex, bent on inflating his own self-importance in the comfortable guise of moral superiority."
The Chronicle article speculates that Darby didn’t become a narc until he broke under the stress of an ambassadorial trip to Venezuela. I can believe this. Once you make the decision to never compromise with the system, the course of action becomes increasingly extreme until you either run to the safety of the other side, or you find yourself assassinating the Quorum.
Darby was in Venezuela attaining relief money for Katrina victims from the Chavez government. On the one hand, this was a task that was clearly over Darby’s head. It’s easy to excede your paygrade when you’re a volunteer. But I also think that this is a parallel with the Zarek narrative. Zarek and Darby both found themselves with a lot of power, more than they bargained for. Where Zarek used his power to murder his colleagues for the greater good, Darby betrayed some kids for his own good (the FBI gave him the requisite pieces of silver).
In the end Zarek won. He got what every true radical hopes for: a martyrdom and an end to a life of constant struggle and gut checks.
Darby is still in the Austin area, despite being universally reviled. He seems to think that he has a career in law-enforcement ahead of him, not realizing that being a snitch doesn’t make him a cop. No matter how much he capitulates, cops were made to hate people like him.
