Rough Drafts

“Sacred and Undeniable”

In 1974, three years before the movie was released, George Lucas’s early screenplay for The Star Wars included a character named Luke Starkiller saying bits of dialogue like “May the force of others be with you.”

When coming across this recently, I was reminded of two other rough drafts most people don’t know about. First, I thought of guitarist Darby Slick who, in 1965, wrote a song actually called “Mind Full of Bread”, a musing on giving love that was destined to be forgotten… You’ve heard this song, later released by his band Jefferson Airplane under the title “Somebody to Love”.

Then I recalled how, two centuries before both of those, Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence had us holding these truths to be “sacred and undeniable” rather than “self-evident”.

As it turns out, underlying most of what we read, watch, listen to, etc. is a substantial unseen collection of trash. The same is true for the products we use every day, the services we pay for, the experts we quote. This is the stuff that’s shoved into the closet, the part of the iceberg under water, the rough drafts that no one sees.

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