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Jesus Christ, Avatar?Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009 4:07 AMLeave it to the stellar (?) intellect of Jonah Goldberg - the man who brought us the premise that liberalism = fascism (as opposed to fascism being the province of unrepentant warmongers like our former Vice-President Dick Cheney) - to take the well-produced, visually stunning epic that is James Cameron's Avatar and render it as a piece of left-wing propaganda. According to Goldberg, Avatar is about a soldier who goes native and rallies the Pandoran aborigines (i.e. primitive, tree-dwelling savages) against a 'thinly-veiled 22nd century combine of Blackwater and Halliburton.' Then, expounding on theories (not his own) that the human brain seems to be wired in favor of the transcendant (that is, we were made or evolved to believe in a god/God), Goldberg wonders why the Na'vi ... aren't Catholic. Because 'moral norms' that benefit society and promote its continuance are the province of religion and religious groups, so the whole universe, really, should be of the Judeo-Christian mindset. It's clear that Goldberg's ignorance extends to the basic concepts of storytelling, which is conflict (man vs. nature, man vs. animal, man vs. technology, man vs. man), as well as the literary device of allegory - stepping outside our own experience and environment to examine it from a different perspective - thus, the perfect observer for a technological, militaristic society is the agrarian society living in harmony with nature. Otherwise, Avatar would be the compelling tale of corporate Christians fucking over tree-dwelling Christian aliens for their very non-Christian and entirely non-sacred precious mineral.
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