Well, it’s Monday and I’m back home in Austin for three whole days before I set off for another conference in Fort Worth. I think I left my sunglasses on the plane last night (either that or they’re on the floor under my seat in the Phoenix Airport – if anyone happens by gate D1, would you check under the seats in the boarding group B area?). I called the local baggage office to see if anyone had found them, but no dice. It was a long shot anyway. This, of course, is why I never pay more than $20 for sunglasses. I’d be hysterical if they were actually expensive.

Anyway.

I had an interesting meeting at work today – well, it would have been more interesting if I’d been more awake (I got home around 11 last night), and in the mood for pointless speculation.

The question at hand was: how do we increase the level of understanding between the United States and the Middle East? More specifically, is there a way to convince the Arab world that we’re not the bad guys?

The short answer is “no,” because the question is one sided: we can only offer information, but we can’t alter the lens through which it’s taken. That’s something completely out of our control. We can better understand that lens, but the bottom line is that we, as the United States, cannot influence or alter perceptions in other parts of the world simply because we’re the United States and there’s a whole lot of baggage associated with that.

This is a long conversation boiled down to its salient points, and I hate to be the pessimist on things like this since global understanding falls into my job description somewhere, but you can’t make people like you. You can’t make people care. And you can’t easily convince a people with a long history of being dominated that this time it’s going to be different.

And then I got home and flipped on the TiVo and watched the third season premiere of Battlestar Galactica. It aired on Friday night, but for all of the amenities at Harvey’s casino and resort in Lake Tahoe, the SciFi channel wasn’t one of them.

If you’re not watching Battlestar Galactica, you’re missing out on something rather profound on television, and that’s not a word that I tend to use when describing TV shows. If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking of the late 70s scifi show with the weird robots running around with the LED lights on their helmets muttering in monotone and Lorne Green acting all weighty and melodramatic. It’s certainly what I had in mind when Ray got hooked on the show and slowly convinced me to start watching.

Strike that. The series has been re-invented as an edgy, moody, politically relevant drama. The human race has been reduced to a population of just a few thousand (events played out in a two hour miniseries that plays out far more realistically than the end of the world scenario in recent dogs like War of the Worlds) in a battle with the Cylons, a race that humanity created to serve them. Originally robots with artificial intelligence, the Cylons have developed into — cyborgs? It’s not entirely clear — humanoids who are indistinguishable from their human parents.

Where the series becomes frighteningly relevant is in the setup that occurred at the end of the last season: humanity had settled on a marginally habitable planet, only to have the Cylons re-appear a year later and occupy the planet.

In the third season premiere, it’s half a year later, and an insurgency is raging. Security restrictions have the population’s movement controlled. Suicide bombers strike with no warning. Those who are believed to be in collaboration with the occupying forces are also targets for the insurgents. There are elements of a holy war at play with the missionary Cylons who preach obedience to One God, while the humans are led, in part, by a president who views herself as the fulfillment of a religious prophecy. Sound familiar? At all?

The episode was actually painful to watch — there are rumors that the occupation will only last a few more episodes, and then the whole program moves back into space to continue the cat-and-mouse game that took up the bulk of the first two seasons. Then we can get back to other interesting questions such as: with humanity so greatly reduced in numbers, should abortion be legal? Producer Ronald D. Moore has even promised to figure out how to addressed homosexuality in the new season (and it would be even better if it somehow involved the hunky captain Apollo, although that’s a pipe dream if ever there was one).

I’m telling you, Battlestar could take on The West Wing as the most politically relevant show on television any day. And you should be watching.

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