The Rogue Scholar

Hurricane!

It's been an active week, and it's going to get a lot more exciting this weekend:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the United States' most populous city was bracing to experience at least tropical storm conditions and flooding starting on Sunday from Irene, which could hit Long Island as a Category 2 hurricane.

"We hope for the best but prepare for the worst," Bloomberg told a news conference, adding some evacuations could be possible. The city was positioning rescue boats and helicopters, working to minimize street flooding and gearing up at hospitals. Evacuations were possible.

"The city has already seen the power of Mother Nature once this week, and Mother Nature may not be done with us yet," Bloomberg said, referring to Tuesday's earthquake that shook the East Coast, frightening millions but causing no deaths.

Forecasters warned that even if the center of Irene stays offshore as it tracks up the mid-Atlantic coast, its wide bands could lash cities like Washington and New York with winds and rain, knock out power and trigger flooding.

Oil terminals, refineries and nuclear plants from the Bahamas to Rhode Island were preparing.

Four catastrophe bonds totaling over $1 billion could leave financial investors exposed to insured losses if Hurricane Irene makes a U.S. landfall.

Earth to Mike: Mother Nature is never truly done with anything, must less as recent a development as modern civilization.

If nothing else, librarians all over the five borroughs are even now going over their flood preparation policies to see what might be needed to prepare (as we are.)

All Hail the Public Library!

It's the last week of the MCNY semester and as a result I'm hopelessly backed up with cataloging and processing books, not to mention all the writing projects that are constantly being moved to one side. That includes a fair amount of material I keep for blogging, but at least that stuff is saved as drafts in my Typepad account.

Anyway, I came across this some time ago and thought it deserved a bit of eyeball exposure:

Fort Worth, you leave me speechless. You’re certainly correct about one thing. The public library is indeed an institution that has not kept up with the times. But given what has happened to our times, why do you see that as unhealthy? In an age of greed and selfishness, the public library stands as an enduring monument to the values of cooperation and sharing. In an age where global corporations stride the earth, the public library remains firmly rooted in the local community. In an age of widespread cynicism and distrust of government, the 100 percent tax supported public library has virtually unanimous and enthusiastic support.

This is not the time to take the word “public” out of the public library. It is time to put it in capitals.

This is the best public policy rant I have read in a loooong time, and here it is, courtesy of David Morris, by way of On The Commons. Enjoy!

 

Bill Moyers and the Memory Hole

If you've spent any time here at all then you've probably figured out that I'm a complete and utter Bill Moyers freak. So that's one reason that I decided to link to this keynote he delivered to the 2011 History Makers convention. The bit that hit me hardest was this:

George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that "like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket," this kind of propaganda engenders a "protective stupidity" almost impossible for facts to penetrate.

But you, my colleagues, can't give up. If you do, there's no chance any public memory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnesiacs who "make" their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America invaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of power. You will remember that in Orwell's novel "1984," Big Brother banishes history to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O'Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.

The thrust of Moyers' speech is that facts matter. Events matter. People, places and dates matter. Information and data matter. They can be twisted, turned, framed, or forgotten, but they still matter. They matter because they are real. They fly in the face of politics. Politics hates reality.

One reason why we're here, why we decided on librarianship as a career rather than say, accounting (other than the fact that not all of us are good with numbers) is that memory hole. Librarians hate that memory hole every bit as much as politics hates reality. Librarians are guardians of the stacks and the ideas contained within the volumes that populate those stacks. Yes, we're keeping the books and full text journals and e-Books and God knows what else warm for our patrons, but there's something else going on here.

A book exists. It contains content, therefore knowledge. Granted, that knowledge was filtered through a human being, and probably a great number of them if the book was the product of a publishing committee, as is often the case with reference books. It has value to the author, therefore a similar value to the reader is implied.

Orwell understood how the memory hole operates. It's not a small effort; in fact it takes an entire department of the Ministry of Truth to keep it active. If you want to wipe out an idea, you need to find the book/novel/article that articulated it; round up and destroy all copies in print; erase all electronic versions of it on all hard drives, e-readers, etc. everywhere; then you need a team of people who are able to track down every single reference to the contents of the source in question and wipe it out, or at least rewrite it such that it points to a reference that changes the meaning of the article.

Or, as Moyers says, you can just distract people and encourage them not to learn anything, ever. Science says that's the simpler objective, so it's the one that the real Powers That Be utilize.

Let's not help them succeed.

News Flash: We Still Need Public Libraries

I found this through Trina Keith, who is a friend and Tech Services librarian at the New York Academy of Medicine:

U.S. public libraries: We lose them at our peril

By Marilyn Johnson

July 6, 2010

The U.S. is beginning an interesting experiment in democracy: We're cutting public library funds, shrinking our public and school libraries, and in some places, shutting them altogether.

These actions have nothing to do with whether the libraries are any good or whether the staff provides useful service to the community. This country's largest circulating library, in Queens, N.Y., was named the best system in the U.S. last year by Library Journal. Its budget is due to shrink by a third. Los Angeles libraries are being slashed, and beginning this week, the doors will be locked two days a week and at least 100 jobs cut. And until it got a six-month reprieve June 23, Siskiyou County almost became California's only county without a public library. Such cuts and close calls are happening across the country. We won't miss a third of our librarians and branch libraries the way we'd miss a third of our firefighters and firehouses, the rationale goes … but I wonder.

I've spent four years following librarians as they deal with the tremendous increase in information and the many ways we receive it. They've been adapting as capably as any profession, managing our public computers and serving growing numbers of patrons, but it seems that their work has been all but invisible to those in power. I've talked to librarians whose jobs have expanded with the demand for computers and training, and because so many other government services are being cut. The people left in the lurch have looked to the library, where kind, knowledgeable professionals help them navigate the government bureaucracy, apply for benefits, access social services. Public officials will tell you they love libraries and are committed to them; they just don't believe they constitute a "core" service.

I'll tell you what a core service is: teaching kids how to read, how to write, how to do basic research. Getting them hooked on reading while they're young, thereby building a lifelong habit. Showing middle and high school students the difference between a textbook and a history book, or the difference between a "classic comic book" and an actual classic. Showing them that the same story can be told in multiple ways through different media, and what each brings to (or loses in) the translation. Teaching college kids what advanced research is. Giving them ideas of where the useful stuff in academia is to be found. Telling them that there are such things as public databases and instructing them in their use. Letting them know that we are always there to help them if they get stuck. And they will eventually get stuck--everybody does. You could conceivably close the public schools and keep the libraries and these kids of all ages would still get quality educations. Reading does that. (Not that closing all the public schools would be a good thing by any means.)

Read the entire article here. Enjoy!

Is David Brooks Really That Stupid?

I'm not a fan of David Brooks. By which I mean that I slogged through Bobos in Paradise years ago, found the argument wanting and finished the book unconvinced of his premise. I sometimes read his Op-Ed column in the NY Times. (Sometimes I even agree with him.) That said, I don't have any real problem with him.

So I thought that Byard Duncan of Alternet was being over the top when he described Brook's column in the Times as "the stupidest thing you will read all year." First because no matter how stupid something may be, there is always the chance that something even more stupid will emerge, that's just life. Second, come on, Duncan, you're a pro, you can do better than that.

It was at that precise point in reading that I stopped looking at Duncan's piece and clicked on over to Brooks' and read it.

Jesus. H. Tap-dancing. Christ. Duncan was right.

Brooks is writing an opinion piece. That's fine. I get it. As such, the column doesn't have to include a crapload of data. But sometimes I wonder whether Brooks is even trying to put the pieces together. Sometimes I wonder if he even knows that there is a puzzle to be put together. Or does he just write what his ideology determines that he must write in order to maintain his own political integrity? Believe it or not, I'd prefer that second answer be the correct one, because if it is, then it just means that Brooks is a mere party hack in a great wide sea of party hacks. Disappointing but not unusual. 

If however, he writes after processing, then wow, what a mind. And not in a good way. Not in a way that seems based on the same world I walk around in every day.

Duncan's article has already focused on two aspects of Brooks' argument--that reporters are too nosy and mouthing off to the agents of the Commander In Chief is no different than complaining about one's boss over beers at the bar after work, so I won't rehash that here. Two other points--that Stanley McChrystal is a jerk and that he represents a clear and present danger to the civilian authority that general officers owe their loyalty and livelihoods (made by James Kunstler and Ray McGovern respectively--have also already been made.

Here is the bit that I found most amazing about Brooks' argument:

General McChrystal was excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.

I'm not sure what standards Brooks used to evaluate the worth of a general to find him "excellent" but let that slide--after all this is opinion. I would like to know why if he was so fracking excellent we haven't  won Afghanistan yet. But that's just me.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.

The culture of exposure has triumphed, with results for all to see.

It's all that damned reporter's fault. Yeah, right. Congratulations, Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone. You have somehow commanded god-like attention from god-like individuals in a god-like government and are apparently personally responsible for destroying the career of a brilliant general officer. You cad.

Is Brooks that f---ing stupid?

The Sum of Bad Ideas

I'm behind on several writing projects already (sorry, Caitlin!) but I've gotten into four separate online discussions about the Mavi Marmara in as many days, and I might as well post my thinking here as anywhere else. My head-meat refuses to lie still until I do. Damned head-meat.

I'm not even going to bother to try to explain my point of view in some manner of clear-headed analysis, because this is more visceral than that. Some things are just plain wrong, not because it's written in stone, or because my parents would disapprove, but because they offend my conscience.

In the interest of disclosure, I'm Jewish. It's not what I am, so much as who I am and if you've been reading this blog for any length of time this comes as no surprise, since I've mentioned it here before now. I'm not observant. I don't consider myself religious or even particularly enlightened, and the fact that I was bar-mitzvahed two years late should tell you how serious I was about that event (as if flat out refusing to go to Hebrew School after my second year at the Forest Hills Jewish Center wasn't evidence enough.)  Seriously folks, I don't even keep kosher on Passover. I'm a crappy Jew in every measurable way, at least in terms of orthodoxy.

That said, I believe in the Torah. Not as a historical text or anything even vaguely divine but as a road map. It has some good ideas. (It has some crappy ideas, too, but for the moment I'm thinking about the good ideas.) Those ideas were generally meant to be pragmatic--a way to explain to readers around 625 BCE why the southern kingdom of Judah had survived the test of time and the northern kingdom of Israel had not. It's not modern pragmatism by any means but good ideas remain within the front and back covers, many assembled from writings and teaching from all over the region. That stuff about helping out the poor? That was ours. Those bits about a day of rest? Ours.  The wacky points about avoiding idolatry and not screwing with your neighbors? You guessed it, us. You know who values those ideas today? Everyone, at least in principle.

From what I can tell, the situation that we've been seeing is what a lethal combination of bad ideas looks like in real time. Israel's blockade of Gaza was a bad idea. The decision by the Free Gaza types not to include any Jewish peaceniks on board the Mavi Marmara was a bad idea. The decision to provoke the Israelis into an armed confrontation was a bad idea. The decision by the Israelis to assault the ship in international water was a bad idea, and their decision to send armed commandos when a more subtle resolution was almost certainly available was a bad idea.* Finally, the decision by some of those passengers to beat the crap out of the troops as they descended onto the deck was definitely a bad idea.

My point: there were no shortage of bad ideas to go around in this instance. And with another such incident growing more possible every day, this shit will not fly twice.

Surely we as Jews can do better.

I don't write that because I think that Jews are demonstrably better (or worse) people than any other race on the planet. (Apparently we are a race--who knew?) I don't subscribe to any particular theory of Jewish exceptionalism. I say it because at least one of those good ideas within the Torah--specifically the one about Justice, truth, and peace--tell us that we are supposed to be better. When we refer to ourselves--or are referred to by the goyim--as God's Chosen People, that doesn't mean that some imaginary man in the sky reached down and tweaked our DNA in a certain way and made us different, even if that's what it may look like genetically. What it means is that yes, we are different--we're different because we have learned to be better. As Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Nothing Sacred, "We, God help us, are the adults here."

When they were old enough to understand, I explained the Ten Commandments to my godchildren as simply as I could: "Try your best not to be an asshole, today." That's it. That's all those rules say when taken together: "Try not to be an asshole. Today." The emphasis is on the fact that you should try every day--as every day is today in its turn--to be a mensch. Occasionally, or ideally, more often than that, you should succeed. Without that constant attention to the larger goal, the effort means nothing.

Back to that naive crap about Justice, truth and peace. Peace . . . all right, peace is elusive. Perhaps eternally so. With nearly seven billion people breathing the air down here, things happen, and people fight. There were wars before there were nations. Truth is similarly difficult to pin down, and the idea that there is a grand, unifying truth that binds the universe together is probably not the sort of thing we'll be finding any time soon.

Justice, however, is different. Even if you and I have different ideas about what constitutes it, we probably both agree that is is a worthwhile ideal. It's measurable. It's observable. It's empiric. It can be verified. And it's ours. Judaism has a lock on Justice in a way that no other major religion has. Think about it: Jesus was all about love--see how far that got him--and is Christendom a particularly happy place? I think not. Muhammad was about how God is One and submission to him was everything. That worked for about 1100 years but hasn't done so well just lately. The Buddha believed that desire caused suffering and we haven't done much with that, either. Face it, folks, fighting for justice is almost easy compared to pushing love, submission, or doing away with desire for longer than a few minutes at a time. It's what we mean when we stand up in a crowd of people and declare that we are Jews--we believe in justice, not just for ourselves, but for everyone. That's what we were chosen for, if we were chosen for anything. To push justice above all other considerations. It's our job to convince everyone around us that it's worth achieving. (You think it's an accident that so many American Jews become lawyers? Think again.)

In this respect, and only in this respect, I identify as as a Jew. (That, having created a kick-ass recipe for chicken soup,  and a huge collection of Marx brothers movies on my laptop's hard drive. And yes, my bar mitzvah and extremely Jewish wedding.)

And that, friends, and neighbors, brings us back to the events of May 31, 2010, which I think can be summed up (again) as "bad ideas all around."  I've already identified the bits that I think were bad ideas, and you've followed this drek long enough. Simply put, starving the Gazans into submission will not work and gives them the political upper hand. I don't think the Israeli  government gets the long-term implications of the situation. Maybe they've decided that if it kills just one more terrorist, it's worth it. Maybe they think that since the world already hates Israel, a few more bad news bulletins won't hurt. Strangely, I can see the validity of both points of view, but I don't share them. The tighter Bibi closes his fist, the faster real criminals will slip through his fingers. That's a fact. If it weren't, we'd be living in a very different world.

We are supposed to be the Good Guys. The least we should do is try not to be assholes today.

-----

*Seriously, how difficult is it to imagine sending a small submarine--Israel has several--to move into the Mavi Marmara's six o'clock (that's directly behind it for you without pretensions to military knowledge), plug it with a torpedo to the engine room, and then be on hand to offer assistance when the ship radios a mayday? Alternately, why not just let the damn ship make port, surround it with armed guards and physically search any and every person who debarked? It was good enough for Olmert to allow them to do that in 2008.

More Facebook Follies

According to the EFF, Facebook has once again made it easier for your personal information to slip into the cloud without your knowledge or consent. There are ways around this, of course: put all fake data into your FB profile, for example. I suppose telling FB that you're under 18 is another way to beat the system. Or you could simply not use FB.

Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information

Commentary by Kurt Opsahl

Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook's privacy policy once promised, "No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings."

How times have changed.

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.

George Washington's Late Fees Forgiven

From today's Daily News:

George Washington racks up late fees at NY library

Sat Apr 17, 11:38 pm ET

NEW YORK – If George Washington were alive today, he might face a hefty overdue library fine.

New York City's oldest library says one of its ledgers shows that the president has racked up 220 years' worth of late fees on two books he borrowed, but never returned.

One of the books was the "Law of Nations," which deals with international relations. The other was a volume of debates from Britain's House of Commons.

Both books were due on Nov. 2, 1789.

New York Society Library head librarian Mark Bartlett says the institution isn't seeking payment of the fines, but would love to get the books back.

The ledger also lists books being taken out by other founding fathers, including Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and John Jay.

The entry on Washington simply lists the borrower as "president."

Who knew?

2010 Health Care Legislation Implementation Timeline

And now I present you with a timeline of the just-enacted health care bill so that interested folks can see what portions of the law kick in when. If you feel compelled to debate the various facets of the legislation here, go ahead (keep it civil) but this is meant more as a giant FYI.

For what it's worth, I'm one of those commie bastards that wanted single-payer . . . but the legislative process is what it is and this is what we have. Let us hope we get something better at some point in the not too distant future.

James Cameron's Avatar as an Exercise in World-Building: A Review

I saw Avatar over this past weekend. I liked it. A lot. And not just because Jeff Gomez’s production company developed the transmedia angles of the story. And certainly not just because Jeff and I have been friends for over twenty years. (Your people call this name-dropping; mine call it full disclosure. And, yes, there are spoilers in a couple more paragraphs. What of it?)

Science fiction has always had a special place in my heart because of the rigorous level of detail writing it well involves. The writer needs to build a world that makes sense to a reader as an integral part of the job. Writing, it’s been said many times, is an awful task but world-building is nothing less than an act of birth. There’s this thing inside you, gnawing at your nerve endings like a tapeworm, feeding you idea after lunatic idea. The only way to get it to shut up and go away is to write it out. So when I examine a work of science fiction--see a film, play a game, or read a book or short story--the main question I take with me is “Do I like the world? Would I want to visit or live in it? What made sense? What didn’t make sense?” and most importantly, at least to me: “What happens next?”

For me, that last one is the key. If it’s a world with room to grow, I immediately start thinking of new stories that might take place in it. Boring details like licensing agreements and copyrights mean nothing to me when that happens. If it’s a world with nothing to spur me to that point, I consider it an okay story and I forget about it. (Fanfic writers know exactly what I mean.) 

Worse, when considering those types of questions there's a bigger one that appears when a problem presents itself: "Would the offending element nullify the story if it were changed or removed?" If the answer is no, it represents a difference of opinion between the reader and author, not a flaw. If it's yes, then it's a real flaw that has to be dealt with.*

Getting the mundane details concerning the mundane infrastructure of a new world--the technology, the history, the social and economic rules, the politics, etc.--consistent is especially obnoxious, even in a story that has no non-human characters or influences. Including aliens makes everything much more complicated. The worst thing about telling a story about aliens is the need to make them, well, alien. That's tricky, because they need to be recognizable enough for your entirely human audience to identify with, and like or dislike as the case may be, but they also need some quality strange enough to make the reader really think about their own assumptions regarding what it means to be a three-dimensional person. The Na'vi, for all their hippie-dippie living-within-nature lifestyle and worldview, are alien. I'll get to why in a bit.

The movie's story has been covered elsewhere so I’ll keep it as brief as I can: Earth wants an energy source called Unobtanium** which is found only on Pandora, a moon orbiting the gas giant Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri system. Pandora’s aboriginal native population is a  race of sapient nine foot tall cat-like creatures called the Na’vi. The Na’vi want the “Sky People” to go home and leave their world alone. Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-marine who takes the chance to pilot a genetic Na’vi-like construct called an Avatar which was meant to be used by his deceased twin brother. The base's military commander wants inside information to facilitate the Na’vi’s removal/migration/destruction), which Jake agrees to give in exchange for his legs back. Jake wends his way into Na’vi society and with the help of a Na’vi princess named Neytiri spends three months learning everything about their way of life, at which point he also decides the “Sky People” should go home. The humans realize their tactical disadvantage but enormous military superiority and attack, Jake leads the Na'vi in a surprisingly effective counterattack, and the humans decide to leave after all. Jake’s reward is an ascension into his Avatar body. Roll credits.

I’ve read several reviews of the movie since I saw it, and a lot of them dwell on comparing the events therein to real world conflicts. Comparison with the war in Afghanistan in terms of military involvement against a mostly defenseless native population is apt but it misses that fact that our conflict there is a political one; we’re not taking anything out of the ground (although we might well be guarding installations built and operated by those who are). Comparison with the war in Iraq makes more sense to me because in both Iraq and Pandora’s case, the U.S. army is defending and enabling a mission of resource extraction—the violence and destruction it visits upon the natives has more to do with keeping the money safe and the bills paid than any ideological purpose, despite what our past and current rulers have announced.

I haven’t seen anyone compare Avatar to Lawrence of Arabia yet. I think there’s a lot to compare between the two films if you want to look at Avatar as a Soldier Gone Native story (and you sort of have to because that’s what it is). The trouble there is that Lawrence was a soldier and acted like a soldier throughout the movie--his real choices boil down to not whether to wage war but how to do it--while Jake Sully starts out acting as a soldier and sort of phases in and out of the role. Apparently James Cameron couldn’t quite get the point that you can both act and think like a soldier and still identify with the enemy. (Sometimes being a good soldier compels you to do so.)

On that particular point, one problem from a story POV I noticed is that if Sully is so damn smart a Marine why doesn’t he ask that the Na’vi infuse him into his blue body as soon as he knows it’s possible to for them do so? I understand that by that point in the movie time is a factor; a massive air assault on the Na'vi homeland is imminent and it looked as if the infusion/transfer ritual took the entire tribe’s attention for at least a few hours. But strategically, it would have been something to address. If nothing else it would remove his biggest vulnerability in the Avatar program—the fact that when anyone hits that big red button on the capsule, he migrates back to his own body and his Avatar falls asleep until reactivated. In a combat situation it’s not what a marine should quietly accept if he knows what he’s doing, and the first real scene between Jake and the base military CO show that yeah, Jake Sully knows his stuff. It didn't detract significantly from the story, but it bugged me.

I had other other pet peeves. The human base on Pandora seems to be using the Air Cavalry model of engagement pioneered by the U.S. in Vietnam: large semi-permanent bases supplied by air, and utilizing choppers to ferry troops and equipment wherever they’re needed. Did the Na’vi never get the idea to place snipers around the base perimeter? Even if they can’t hit gunships and bulldozers with bows and arrows surely they can hit unarmored troops disembarking from shuttles now and then. (The final battle sequence made it clear that a large number of Na’vi warriors are able to maneuver their flying mounts right down an enemy’s throat, bury a poisoned arrow in his heart and then fly away without a scratch.)  We’re not even sure what or who killed Sully’s twin brother—had it been a Na’vi arrow at point blank range during a scientific jungle expedition, it might have given rather more weight to Jake’s willingness to help the military achieve their goals in the first part of the film. The movie is already intentionally tilted against the humans by making the extraction mission essentially a military one—would it have hurt to have a bit of counter weighting while Jake is trying to come to terms with how he’s going to make amends for the crimes of his people? More importantly, would it have hurt to give Jake that extra bit of conflict? (“Dude, that native princess you’re so hot for? Yeah, well, she murdered your brother for being in her part of the jungle at the wrong time. How do you feel about her now, huh? Huh?”)

But the thing that really severed the comparison to Iraq or any other real life conflict for me, the deal breaker, the part where the analogy broke down entirely and what made the story worthwhile--the alieness-- is that the Na’vi have something no human can reliably claim: empirical proof of their deity’s existence.

This is a big deal, both to me personally and as a plot point so I’ll dwell on it a bit.  When we talk to each other about belief in God we generally mean one of three things: yes, I believe in God but it’s not like he’s giving me instructions; or yes, I believe in God and he is giving me instructions (and my doctor has prescribed medication for that); or yes, I believe in God because it’s politically/socially/economically expedient or beneficial to do so. In any of these cases, the level of belief espoused doesn’t begin to approach, for example, that of the typical Medieval peasant who believed that God and the Devil actually existed and that Heaven and Hell were places as real as the earth under their feet. The reason for this is that we just plain know more about the universe than we ever have before, and we know that religious scripture doesn’t explain the world and the universe in which it rests nearly as well as empirical knowledge does. Scripture, no matter how much you want it to be true, is still a myth, a fairy tale, and not a very coherent one at that. That doesn't mean it has no psychic value to those who do believe, just that it tells the observable story of our history and planet poorly.

The Na’vi are exactly the opposite. All the trees and many of the higher animals on Pandora are neurologically linked, forming a limitless pool of psychic energy for the Na'vi to draw on. Their Earth Mother goddess Eywa isn’t merely as real as the ground they walk on—she is the ground they walk on. She is the animals they hunt, the trees they live in, the air they breathe, the water they drink. More importantly, she makes herself available to them. The Na’vi use trees as repositories of collective memory:  the Tree of Wishes collects the hopes, dreams and goals of countless past and present clan members. The Tree of Souls retains the entire clan experiential history of all the Na’vi who were ever born or died. More importantly, the psychic contents of these receptacles are available to any clan member who wishes to access it. Forget about a concept as abstract as faith for a moment: what if you could talk to your great-great grandfather to ask him a question about a problem you’re having today? What if you knew that no life ever really ended, but got stored in a mass collective that every human on the planet could access pretty much at will? And what if empirical investigation backed your belief up? The world would be a very different place.

That’s the reality of the Na’vi culture postulated by James  Cameron. The problem in the telling of this portion of the story is that even the humans who are in a position to get it (read: "the scientists"), don’t seem to. One example of this I saw in a scene where Sigourney Weaver’s character is trying to dissuade the human leadership of the need to not escalate the conflict. Her effort is based on scientific evidence of the massive collective neurological activity that the whole planet seems given towards. But she’s limited by the fact that she’s using this information as knowledge but not as experience—possibly because she’s never had the experience of connecting her Avatar to those special memory-storing trees the way Jake has. To her the fact of trillions of trees sharing bioenergy with each other across the planet is fantastic and amazing, but not spiritual. (She does become spiritual about it later, but too late to prevent the destruction.) In either case, her persuasive technique fails for an obvious reason: the curiosity about the natural world that propels the scientific mind is not what businessmen and soldiers are prone to sharing or understanding. That might have come from what I thought the scene needed to really make the point—the language of conflict. If you want to make a point to a soldier, fine; speak in terms he can comprehend. Say: this world is entirely connected at a psychic level and it responds or at least has the potential to respond in kind to any massed conflict. Make war on one clan, you make war on the whole biosphere. Any escalation that big has to end in the planet’s swallowing our forces up. You go in, Colonel, you're not coming out. And you, Money Guy, are going to have to explain to your bosses why their expensive army disappeared without one extra kilogram of Unobtanium to show for it.

I realize that in order for the movie to proceed, the business and military types pretty much have to ignore that argument, but at least the point gets made on screen. When an American general claims that his God is bigger than the enemy’s, he’s really just expressing his belief that his side has better weapons and training than theirs does. Yet those better armed and trained soldiers get their asses handed to them at the end of this movie, to standing ovations all over the country. A living, breathing, loving Goddess-planet who rises up to defend her children makes all the difference. Without her, the natives lose, and that’s not the point of this film.

This too, is the sort of thing that only exists in a fictitious world: in real life the Gaia Hypothesis remains a hypothesis (if a fascinating one) and if the Earth is actually planning humanity’s demise, then it will happen at such a slow speed that it will take us generations to figure it out. But Harry Harrison used that strategy in writing Deathworld, where on the planet Pyrrus, all native life is in fact psychically linked, and quite honestly, has been trying to eradicate a colony of violent humans for a couple of centuries when the novel opens.  Worse, the native wildlife is winning the struggle. The only reason the hero figures this out is because he, too, is a low-level psychic and isn't  emotionally invested in the Pyrran colonists' struggle.

The film’s conclusion made sense from both a writing and a character development POV: Sully’s reward for having organized a successful defense of Pandora against an invading army is to literally become a Na’vi, which is both logical and works within the story.*** And he gets the beautiful native princess and he gets a big rep boost for having been the first war leader in recent memory to unite the various Na’vi clans, and so on. I don’t agree with those who call that part of the film racist. I do agree with the possibility that Jake and Neytiri are involved in an inherently dishonest relationship. Let's face it, he's a human and she's a giant blue cat. Her entire biology is poisonous to him. That doesn't resolve until the moment in the film near the end where they are actually holding each other--their real bodies, her head the size of a furry basketball and his breathing mask keeping him alive--and then they declare their love for each other. That scene could not have played out any earlier or differently and still mean anything.

Now, if Jake he’d gotten all those wonderful things while remaining a human, or if he had somehow convinced the Na’vi to abandon their culture (or even their home tree) and adopt a more human-like material existence--no doubt under the thumb of the U.S. military--then it would deserve the criticism.

So . . . what moral or ethical messages to take away from this film?

First, if you would orchestrate and implement the death and destruction of native populations, hire Barfbacks rather than the truly talented. A Barfback is Dean Ing’s term for an engineering student who memorizes everything he’s taught, can recite it back from memory on demand, and will never have a creative or original thought. Those are the guys you want to use to get into the native populations’ head, and report back as ordered. A Barfback will mimic their teachers well but will never integrate any of their experiences. Empathy-laden whiners like Jake Sully are losers who learn a few tidbits about their enemy then start thinking of them as people, and then, oh the vapors.***

Second, do not attempt to make war on the entire biosphere. Hyperbole aside, the Industrial Revolution’s disciples, despite all the material comforts they've developed--indoor plumbing, air conditioning and antibiotics to name a few--have been having their way with our planet for over 200 years and she’s pissed. Between global warming and peak oil, the Earth has closed her legs and is now reaching for the Glock in her purse. The results will be painful.

Third, under no circumstances should you ever acknowledge that the enemy’s God is real and your God is a fairy tale backed up by tanks, gunships and the not-so-free market. Hell, soldiers tend to lose focus if they even go so far as to believe their enemies are human beings, forget having a tangible Goddess that defends them in real time.

I can easily imagine what happens next. I don’t buy the film’s statement that “the invaders went home.” Invaders don’t go home; they either win and displace the natives, they lose (and are generally wiped out in the process) or they are faced with a draw, come to some settlement before either side is wiped out, and stick around for the long term. Besides, it takes six years to get to Pandora from Earth and even as the main mining base is being closed, other starships en route are due to arrive shortly and their captains won’t have the fuel or the desire to turn around and go home. Plus, there’s an extra angle to look at for a sequel: Eywa is real and I guarantee that the news will reach Earth one day. When it does, human converts (or wannabe converts) will do everything they can imagine to migrate to Pandora and try to become part of her. I can easily imagine a horde of Na’vi who are at their wits’ end trying to manage a crowd of eager humans who want nothing more than to lie down at the roots of the Tree of Souls and take off their breathing masks in the belief that their deaths will be subsumed by the great tree goddess. And of course, some would-be converts won’t be quite so peaceful in their attempts to become part of Na’vi culture.

I’m looking forward to seeing if James Cameron’s story developers and I think alike.

-----

 *It's one thing to ask your audience to temporarily suspend disbelief. It's quite another to insist that they sit down, shut up, and watch the damn movie.

 **Unobtanium means, "the element that can't be acquired." Sort of gives the ending away on page one, doesn't it? Granted, the ending was clearly inevitable, but still . . .

***Physical transformation as a metaphor for spiritual transcendence is as old as story-telling itself: for modern examples think of Clarke's Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Asimov's Andrew Martin in The Bicentennial Man. It works the other way, too: Gregor Samsa's morphing into a bug in Kafka's The Metapophosis remains an excellent example of a metaphysical demotion.

****One thing I did not see in the film and wish I had: what's the army's slang term for the Na'vi? Every enemy has one, and I refuse to believe the culture that spawned such favorites as "Wog," "Chink," "Jap," "Kraut," and "Raghead" and "Haji" cannot come up with something similarly derogatory.