As I correctly explained about Avatar - the movie is twisted to make several
interpretations:
1. America is bad - evil plunderer of civilization
2. Modernity is bad -- leave the ancient tribal and spirited lands alone
from plunder (Dances with Wolves)
3. Technology is bad -- turns us into evil people
Etc etc - the movie was visually amazing but am surprised that Cameron took
such an obvious position given his films of past -- a Canuck at that.
Blue Christmas
By James Howard Kunstler
on December 21, 2009 7:05 AM
As the end-credits rolled for James Cameron's new movie, *Avatar*, the
audience burst into rowdy applause. It seemed to me that they were
applauding the sheer computerized dazzlement of the show -- but in the *
story* itself they had just watched the US suffer a humiliating defeat on a
distant planet. In the final frames, American soldiers and the corporate
executives they had failed to protect were shown lined up as
prisoners-of-war about to embark on a death march.
More to the point, the depiction of our national character through the
whole course of the film was of a thuggish, cruel, cynical, stupid,
detestable, and totally corrupt people bent on the complete destruction of
nature. Nice. And the final irony was that Cameron had used theatrical
technology of the latest and greatest kind to depict America's broader
techno-grandiosity -- as the army's brute robotic warriors fell to the
spears and arrows of the simple blue space aliens. Altogether, it was a
weird moment in entertainment history, and perhaps in the American
experience per se. No doubt audiences overseas will go wild with delight,
too, but perhaps with a clearer notion of what they are clapping for than
the enthralled masses of zombie Americans.
The infatuation with technology, and the disgusting cockiness that goes
with it (so well-captured in *Avatar*), is but one facet of the psychosis
gripping the nation -- and by that I mean the profound detachment from
reality. We have no idea what is happening to us and, naturally, no idea of
what we are going to do. I sat in a bar Friday evening with a financial
reporter from a national newspaper, trying to explain the peak oil situation
and what it implied for our economy. He had never heard it before. The
relationship between energy resources and massive debt was new to him. (It
also came up in conversation that he could not tell me what the Monroe
Doctrine was about, despite a history degree from Yale.) There you have a
nice snapshot of the mainstream media in this land.
This year, America can look for a nice lump of coal in its Christmas
stocking. That lump will be called "the recovery." This recovery consists of
a massive self-deception, made up of accounting tricks and falsified
statistics, with a sugar-coating on top of sheer disbelief that the outcome
could be anything but a particular happy ending -- namely, the continued
levitation of the unsustainable. What is most amazing about Mr. Cameron's
holiday blockbuster is the explicit message that America is a society that
deserves to be punished (and humiliated!) by others who manage their own
relations with reality better than we do. I wonder how much that will
secretly account for its popularity. I wonder what the leaders of China will
make of it.
The other current embodiment of national character failure, Tiger
Woods, golfer, has also dazzled the American public. Personally I find it
much more interesting to learn that he was a really lousy tipper than that
he got a lot of action on the side with opportunistic bar girls, porn stars,
and other denizens of the sports-entertainment netherworld. Is it not also
amusing that golf is even taken seriously as an athletic pursuit? I mean,
why not pancake-flipping? Or dice? Or shooting rats at the landfill? This
is the kind of knucklehead culture we have become after six decades of the
softest life imaginable. Anyway, I'm not shedding any tears for Tiger. Even
if all his endorsements dry up and his ex-wife takes him to the cleaners for
a hundred million or so, he'll still be left with enough cash to pay for
porn stars and lobster tails until the end of time, especially if he keeps
his tipping policy at its current level.
Next week I'll put out my forecast for the coming year, 2010. But for
now I'd like to leave readers with this Christmas present:* A PREVIEW SCENE
FROM THE SEQUEL TO MY NOVEL OF THE POST-OIL AMERICAN FUTURE,
*<http://www.kunstler.com/Christmas_excerpt09.html>
*WORLD MADE BY HAND <http://www.kunstler.com/Christmas_excerpt09.html>**....
* <http://www.kunstler.com/Christmas_excerpt09.html>
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/12/blue-christmas.html#more
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
