December 24, 2009

"American blood is not worth more than the blood of others..."

The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.
-- President George W Bush, 2004

The Most Neo-Con Movie Ever Made - Forbes.com:

...James Cameron's new sci-fi film Avatar is exhilarating fun in the darkest days at the end of a depressing year, but it also says quite a lot, in an inchoate, American way, about the cultural moment. You should see it especially if you are "right of center" or conservative. Forget the sneering reviews--this is the most neo-con movie of 2009, or perhaps ever, because it illustrates, rather than argues, the point we neo-cons made in Iraq: that American blood is not worth more than the blood of others, and that others' freedom is not worth less than American freedom.

How universal are the values we Americans cherish? Avatar says they are completely universal--extending to another planet called Pandora. What is the responsibility of an American and how far does it reach? Avatar says, again, across the universe. Are we all brothers and sisters under the skin? Avatar answers yes, in the most concrete way, when protagonist Jake Sully decides to enter his Na'vi body permanently and stay on Pandora rather than returning to Earth...

I think there's a lot of truth in this. On the surface of course it is full of horrid wicked ideas. Pantheism, obviously, which is a spiritual toxin. Fluff-brained Hollywood Rousseauism (the movie's a sort of Pocahontus with blue redskins), anti-Americanism, blah blah blah...

But it may be, that, on a deeper level, it says something quite the opposite. A rebuke to the fake-liberals and fake-pacifists who think that Arabs and Afghans and Iranians are just sand-niggers who are incapable of enjoying freedom and democracy, and should be left under the heels of tyrants, so the rest of us need not be bothered with them. (Or worse, with the idea that there's anything worth fighting for.)

...Like the election of a black man as president of the United States, and like its great precursor Bladerunner, Avatar presents a physical answer to a philosophical question. Barack Obama's election was seen by many, both Democrat and Republican, as a way of bringing the American conflict over race to an end. (Of course it couldn't do this, no matter what you think of Obama--and I think very little.) Bladerunner was an attempt to cover some of the same ground, asking who is human in the context of an "ersatz" race hounded by bounty hunters...

....Avatar is actually both pro- and anti-military, but in an insider's way. Even the scenes that raise some reviewers' hackles as the most gooey, where the Na'vi gather in circles around a sacred tree and plug their braids into its roots, read to me as a metaphor for the networked military. Speaking of which, Avatar gets the look and mood of military environments just right. Everything from the unapologetically claustrophobic space travel and Avatar-driving pods to the laconically witty banter rings true to what I've seen on five embeds in Afghanistan and various bases here....
Posted by John Weidner at December 24, 2009 1:25 PM
Weblog by John Weidner