Death's Fantasy

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“He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.” ― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

As a little boy living in western New York poised almost exactly between the cities of Rochester and Buffalo I learned my adult sleeplessness. The sleepless nights began sometime around the age of ten or eleven. These were still the days when you had nuclear disaster preparedness drills at school. We were told where to find the bomb shelter in the basement of the school and how to move their in orderly fashion if we heard the air raid siren. An inquisitive and precocious child led to my unending questioning of my world. Every week, usually at night, I would hear the drone of B-52’s flying overhead. I asked my father one day, why the bombers were out flying at that time and where they came from. My father, not being one for sensitivity, immediately responded that they were part of the nuclear defense grid, or strategic air command that flew constantly in shifts carrying nuclear weapons as a deterrent against a Soviet first strike[i]. Right around this same time, my parents became friends with a couple just up the street. The husband worked for FMC or the Food Machinery & Chemical Corporation in nearby Lockport, NY. He, lets call him David, was employed as a geneticist researching new techniques to increase crop production. One night while eavesdropping at the top of the stairs, I heard David say, “if there was an explosion at the FMC plant, all of western New York would be wiped out.” The train that carried FMC petrochemicals traveled right through our small town and upon hearing the train I would lay awake in a soft panic hoping the train did not derail. Perhaps this is how DeLillo’s White Noise was born. So, between the nuclear threat in Niagara Falls, and the chemical threat in Lockport, not to mention the research on nuclear fusion taking place in Rochester, I lay awake at night a lot.

During this same time, the artists Ed and Nancy Reddin Keinholtz created Still Live (1974). The art was a work of theater where the viewer became the actor in something very real. The Keinholz’s built a set piece of a typical American living room and surrounded it by barricades and barbed wire. Before entering you were asked, essentially, to sign your life away, in effect liberating the exhibition or artist of any responsibility should something go horribly wrong.

I the undersigned am at least 18 years of age. I fully and soberly understand the danger to me upon entry of this environment. I hereby absolve the artist Edward Kienholz, the owner of the piece and the sponsors of this exhibition of any and all responsibility (morally and legally) on my behalf.[ii]

The reason for signing such a disclaimer was due to the high caliber rifle perched above the television in the living room set the Keinholz’s created, which was aimed directly at the chair in facing it. Allegedly (this was never verified) a black box controlled a random timer connected to the rifle’s trigger that could fire a live round at any time over the course of one hundred years. The Vietnam War was winding down but the country had endured more than a decade of war in southeast Asia with the networks carrying a scrolling list of the American dead, night after night during that time to the tune of 58,282. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8YCNFmWtYU&w=640&h=480]  The Keinholz’s forced violence from the virtual space it occupied for most Americans watching television to the real, by confronting them with the possibility of a very real death. In September 1974, Nixon had just resigned over the Watergate Scandal and the Symbionese Liberation Army had kidnapped Patty Hearst. IRA bombings were on the rise in London and fighting persisted in the Golan Heights of Israel. Inflation was on the rise with a deep recession unfolding across the country. This was the time of ‘generic’ foods and long gas lines. In the midst of this, Ed and Nancy Keinholz placed a work of art in the center of Berlin that directly threatened the viewer. Their goal was to deliberately disrupt and rupture the passivity Americans held toward violence and their complicity in it. “Keinholz’ theatricality was meant to heighten his critique of aspects of American society, and he attempted to construct situations in which the everyday became visible for his viewers to question and ponder—to create opportunities aimed at effecting significant change in behavior.”[iii] The Kienholz’s were interested in revealing the everyday persistence of violence and our incorporation of it as commonplace. An earlier piece The Beanery (1965) based on a Hollywood bar he used to frequent, the viewer walks past a stack of newspapers that read “Children Kill Children in Vietnam Riots” before entering the bar. Ed Kienholz’s confrontational perspective, later shared in collaboration with his wife, focused on shaking people loose from their dream state and forcing confrontation with the system they supported. Ed Kienholz said;

It is my contention that to the extent that the major networks intertwine, we, the viewing public, are endangered...In my thinking, prime time should be understood as the individual span each of us has left to live here on earth. It’s a short, short interval and serves the best quality possible. Certainly better than the boob tube pap we all permit in the name of bigger corporate profits and free enterprise.[iv]

It is hard now to recall the extraordinary violence of the time. I’m sure my sleepless nights were exacerbated by watching the CBS Nightly News with Walter Cronkite night after night and witnessing the scrolling lists of Americans killed in the conflict. In fact, another piece by Kienholz titled The Eleventh Hour Final (1968) speaks directly to that experience, with a death list permanently painted on a TV screen that reveals a decapitated mannequin head staring back at the viewer from inside the set. The 70’s was a time of fear, uncertainty and fractured psyche in America. I remember distinctly feeling a deep sense of loss and anxiety, even at 11 over Watergate. I had been raised to believe in the Constitution and our government as essentially functioning, despite their imperfections. In 1969 I watched the moon landing and found the hopefulness of science conquering our deepest problems. By 1974, Watergate was unraveling our government, the recession hit, crime was rising and we encountered defeat in Vietnam by a low-tech insurgency. In the midst of all of this was the ever looming threat of nuclear holocaust and biological warfare. The pantheon of American cinema during the 1970’s was filled with darkness from Andromeda Strain to Twilight’s Last Gleaming reinforcing what must have seemed at the time like a real threat of armageddon, not the phony Walking Dead gorefest on TV now.

Unfortunately, the Keinholz’s Still Live was even too intense for its German audience. German authorities rapidly shut down the exhibition and arrested Ed Kienholz on “unauthorized possession of arms” and “the suspicion, of a conditional, but intentionally attempted homicide.”[v] The piece was bizarrely rescued along with an intervention on Kienholz’s behalf by the American Consulate and relocated to Switzerland before the tableau was shipped back to the States in a crate and stored until 1982. It was briefly exhibited at the now defunct, Braunstein Gallery in San Francisco and then returned to its crate where it remains today in the possession of Nancy Kienholz.

Americans are not fond of self-deprecation or self-criticism. We like to think we are know it alls, who have all the answers and don’t need anyone, even our own calling us out on our shortcomings or bad behavior. Ever since Jimmy Carter said, “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns." in his sweater in his fireside chat in 1979, we have reacted violently against any form of reality. Kienholz’s dream of threatening Americans into confrontation with their violent, sexist, racist and classist ways disappeared when Ronald Reagan was elected president. On that day, Americans firmly rejected compassion and sensibility with the delusion of the American dream. The theatrics and conceptual groundings of 60’s and 70’s art was replaced with the blinding irony of the 80’s.

So today we find ourselves immersed in a world of corporate politics where our dreams have been replaced by consumerism and our productivity and inventiveness shipped offshore in favor of the sad theatrics of reality TV. The darkness of the 70’s, which was always couched in Kienholz’s idea of real threat has been replaced by fantasy threats—zombies and vampires. The art world has matched with its own kind of fantasia, selling its soul to the highest bidder in order to provide religiosity to hedge fund managers, or as the late Robert Hughes put it, "The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive." There are a few artists who continue to push the the ideas that the Kienholz’s instigated in those heady decades of the 60’s and 70’s, like Gregory Green and Wafaa Bilal, or Banksy, but the art institutions marginalize them. In the early nineties I had the pleasure of working briefly with Gregory Green in NYC delivering art and then visited an opening of his at the Dart Gallery in Chicago where I lived at the time. Gregory had a wonderful piece he installed there called Thirty Blade Wall Installation. He had directly mounted thirty circular saw blades on their own axels and they spun away in magnificent danger, free of any protective covering or roped off quadrant. Anyone could have simply reached in and watched their fingers fly effortless about the room in wondrous horror. Green had made a more minimalist and direct homage to the Kienholz’s and I remember being very moved by the piece.

It is important that we remain connected to the effects of violence and their aftermath if we hope emerge from the lessons of the 20th century intact. Our current obsessions are not idiopathic, but firmly couched in our inability to contend with our own past. We have never reconciled the deceit of Watergate or the trauma of Vietnam. It is no accident the 9/11 memorial is an inversion, a conceptual black hole that swallows both the living and the dead from that moment in time. It is an astounding representation of national shame that looks not toward reconciliation, empathy and hope, but toward an ever darkening cynicism and irony. After the trauma of 9/11 one could presume the nation would grow more empathic, more sensitive to the needs of others, as was witnessed in NYC in the weeks after the event. Unfortunately, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index that has been running since 1979 suggests quite the contrary. The 2011 study results found,  “almost 75 percent of students today rate themselves as less empathic than the average student 30 years ago.”[vi] There are certainly many contributing factors to this finding but one can’t help but think that ‘magical thinking’ is a leading contender. As a nation we seem consumed by it, otherwise how could one explain the dramatic reversal away from a solid middle class? Four hundred Americans now hold as much wealth as half of our entire population.[vii] And yet, the battle rages on against the poor. A key point in the Kienholz’s work is Ed Kienholz’s insistence on placing himself as an implicit participant in their own commentary and criticisms. Barney’s Beanery was a bar Ed frequented and he was the first to sit in front of the rifle in Still Live. His anger was directed as much at himself as it was at our collective passivity. He once took an axe to a desk at TWA as result of the airline’s disregard toward the mishandling of a Tiffany lamp Kienholz had shipped with them. He put himself firmly in the tableau, risking arrest and contempt to make an artistic gesture.

The interest in post-apocalyptic fantasies and immortality represented by the plethora of vampire and zombie movies, books and television shows is a desperate form of escapism for a country who has lost its sense of empowerment. If only we had heeded the words of Carter in 79’ and learned to begin using less and stop striving for more we might be closer to a true triple bottom line capitalism now. We might also have a more robust and meaningful culture, less interested in heroics and life after death scenarios and more involved with the real. I have written before on Francis Bacon’s rejection by many of the American art critics and I think the same could largely be said for the Kienholz’s. Ed and Nancy Kienholz’s form of intimidating and even angry art-making was sidelined and diminished by a market that preferred the promise of the sublime over the delivery of truth. Of course there is no absolute truth, but as with science, art at its best is interested in asking questions that can uncover a deeper sense of ourselves and our place in this world. In so doing, it reminds us of our interconnectedness and the fact that violence has consequences, like the rifle pointed at us from above the TV. We can only lay prostrate before the television, computer monitor or smartphone for so long before our own actions catch up to us and we realize that our fantasies have become nightmares, just like the ones I had as a boy.

[i] After a fair amount of research, despite B-52’s being housed at Niagara Falls International Air Field, I could find no evidence that nuclear warheads were involved. BOMARC defense missiles were stationed there until 1969 and may have carried a nuclear payload, but the air base was primarily a fighter base. The air bases with Strategic Air Command nuke’s were located in Rome and Plattsburg. In reality, during that paranoid time, it is hard to say what was housed in Niagara Falls. It was supposedly ranked 45th as a possible nuclear strike target, which given the scale would have unquestionably wiped out southern Ontario and Western New York.

[ii] Kienholz, Edward. Edward Kienholz: Still Live: Aktionen der Avantgarde, Projekt für ADA2. Berlin: Neuer

Berliner Kunstverein, 1975, n.p.

[iii] Willick, Damon. “Still Live.” In Art Lies, No. 60, Winter 2008, p. 23.

[iv] Ibid, p. 26.

[v] Kienholz, Edward. Edward Kienholz: Still Live: Aktionen der Avantgarde, Projekt für ADA2. Berlin: Neuer

Berliner Kunstverein, 1975, n.p.

Well Heeled

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“We are each born into paradox: the paradox of the infinite-imagining mind and the finite, cause-and-effect body. So much of our suffering arises from the fact that we can imagine ourselves as gods-immortal, omniscient, impervious to harm-but we cannot be them.”

—Dana Levin, The Kenyon Review

 I was walking home this week along one of my usual routes and happened to glance up when a woman in her thirties and her friend were walking up ahead. There was nothing particularly unique about either woman, a brunette and a blond, the blond pushing a baby stroller. Normally I would dismiss even the most compelling woman pushing a child for the obvious reasons but on this day I happened to notice she was wearing four inch platform shoes. The irony was bewildering to me. I felt celebratory for her command of her sexuality and power post pregnancy but also simultaneously felt she was teasing at loosening her marital bonds. Obviously, I was drawn to the heels and their sexual undertones but it was how they were worn that really got me thinking. I kept walking wondering what it is about heels in particular that illicit such strong reactions in men and why women across a broad spectrum choose to wear them, despite their often painful commitment. Why is it they are such a loaded form of expression? Can high heel ever just be shoes?

Since 2000 I have noticed a marked increase in the height of women’s heels. Even more intriguing is the continued hyper sexualization of younger and younger women with high heels playing a powerful role in that. The photo above was shot this morning through the window of a store called Forever 21. Aside from the idiocy of the store’s name, it is obvious the store is making a clear connection between youthful vigor and high heels. Of course on a very superficial level, heels provide height to women who by pure biology are predominantly shorter than men. Even the term high heels is now a reference to a range of shoes from stacked platforms to stilettos. Karen Kay of The Guardian UK says; "A pair of heels allows me to view the world from a different vantage point. I can look people in the eye, so those who previously looked down their nose at me must view me on their level – a psychological benefit that comes into play socially and in the workplace."

I’m not interested in using this venue for a discussion on the legacy of feminism, the male gaze or a dialogue on ‘taste’. There has been much written on those topics. If you want to read about them a simple Google search will provide a plethora of background. No, my interest is very specifically on the nature of power. The history of high heels goes back to at least the Egyptians 3,000 years ago. The high priests, kings and queens wore ceremonial leather stacks that were arguably the first high heels. In ancient Greece heels were used in plays to provide a clear distinction between character’s social status. In the 18th century, Louis XIV established an edict that no person in France could wear heels taller than his own. As a show of  belligerence, Marie Antoinette wore 2 inch heels to guillotine in 1783. Power and the high heel are fused at the hip. Clearly, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest it is merely status, power or physical height extension that is at play for women wearing high heels. Sex and titilation are the obvious elephant in the room and where there is power there is sex.

In speaking with a female friend of mine the other evening I mentioned my love of heels on women. It is often said women pay close attention to shoes on men, but the first thing I generally notice about a woman is her shoes. An artful and highly stylized pair of heels will get my attention every time. I’m not talking about what men derogatorily refer to as “stripper shoes,” but noticing the difference between a pair of Christian Louboutin’s or Manolo Blahnik’s. In contrast a pair of Keds or ballet flats causes an immediate dismissal on my part. For the record, I'm single. The anthropologist E. O. Wilson has said,

Based on comparative animal ecology and behavior one would predict that males should be advertising through the display of their assets (physical or otherwise). And while males do advertise in Western society, females also engage in equally conspicuous advertising and sexual signaling. Not only do we have male-male competition and female choice, but we also have female-female competition and make choice acting simultaneously...

Increased heel height creates an optical illusion of ‘shortening’ the foot, slenderizes the ankle, contributes to the appearance of long legs, adds a sensuous look to the strike, and increases height to generate the sensation of power and status.[¹]

It’s unquestionably unfair and a clear objectification of an otherwise unique and possibly fascinating human being, but there it is. For me this is no different than noticing the difference between a man who knows how to accurately tie a full windsor knot or a cheap Men’s Warehouse suit and a hand tailored one. As Flaubert said, "Le bon Dieu est dans le detail" (the good God is in the detail).

We are keen in America to wave the flag and point out how different we are than our Muslim counterparts but the reality is we are much closer than we care to admit. One of us is trapped by a religion of consumerism and it’s formal constraints and the other by the Islamic tradition of the 600’s. Women of means who wear burkhas in Saudi Arabia or the U.A.E. will wear Christian Dior or Yves Saint Laurent underneath. Despite the constraint of their dogma, the individualism is there and the need to assert individual power remains. In America women live by the law of The Gap, LIMITED, H&M or Charlotte Russe. These popular clothing stores produce the same mundane fashions year after year. To see women on the streets or in offices is to see compliance to a consumer sameness. But shoes — shoes can be the one standout in an otherwise bland world. It is a way to compete as E. O.Wilson stated. Even a knock-off pair of Louboutins, with their Catholic-red underbellies is enough to establish a subtlety of power even if the rest of the ensemble is jeans and a tee shirt. This, I argue is the underlying push toward ever higher heels in the U.S., our growing sense of repression in an ever more ironic world that asks women to simultaneously exhibit hyper-sexualized behavior while being good domestic, child-rearing, church-going wives and mothers. Stilettos may be an expression of a collective post 9/11 PTSD.

On a deeper level of semiotics, shoes are a fetish. As Marcel Danesi states in his book Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things, “The fetish is a sign that evokes devotion to itself. In some cultures, this devotion is a result of a belief that an object has magical or metaphysical attributes.” Despite heels being painful, causing deformities or several other generally negative health conditions, millions of women in western culture wear them every day. The economic restrictions of the recession coupled with the complexities of daily modern life, likely elevates our need for some kind of magic. As Elizabeth Semmalhack has indicated, heel height in the US and economic depression are a corollary[2]. High heels are a socially acceptable form of sexual expression, unlike the limited possibilities of tattoos or plunging necklines. Think Sarah Palin in the last presidential election. Indeed women can be the biggest promoters of their own high heel wearing;

Zoe Mayson, a business psychologist, suggests that I am not alone in valuing the heel as a professional asset. "There are a lot of people who think women do themselves a disservice by wearing heels, but I'm not in that camp. They are a psychological asset, and we can use them to our advantage. I work a lot with men in suits around a boardroom table, and I would never lead a session in flats. Heels give me gravitas that I would not have in lower shoes.

"From an evolutionary point of view, natural selection favours traits that increase our individual reproductive success. Heels get you noticed and give you physical stature, which in turn, gives you power, without compromising your femininity. So often, women have to take on male attributes to be successful in the workplace, and this is a great way of digging our heels in and saying no."[3]

I have no interest in creating more pain or difficulty for women. I can’t imagine the daily complications and difficulties encountered by women from the glass ceiling of workplaces and the inequality of pay to the simple biological issue of menstruation. It is indeed true most men wouldn’t last a week in a woman’s shoes (sorry for the pun.) In fact there’s a hilarious movie by the late Blake Edwards called Switch where Ellen Barkin plays a man trapped in a woman’s body that comedically highlights this very idea. I do think that owning one’s own drives, desires and compulsions leads us all to a healthier outcome. I am looking forward to the day when this madness of derisive punditry that pits one against the other will end. Repression has persisted a lot of bad things in this country beginning with its birth and the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans by English Puritans. Perhaps heels will come down in height and I’ll become less emphatic about their distinguishing qualities on women when we grow more open as a society. In the meantime I continue my search for the woman with the perfect pair of Christian Lacroix’s.

The desert of ideas

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As we depart the oughts and move squarely into the teens of the 21st century our collective conscious seems to bookend the one that I entered college witnessing. After watching Avatar for the first time this week, several things became crystal clear about the current state of affairs. There is much chatter lately among the punditry regarding the ineffectual state of the Democratic party and liberals in general. The right-wing might be crazy conspiracy nuts but they sure to do stay on point and get things done. On the other hand the Obama administration seems frozen in conciliatory conversation and aggressive compromise. Well, the pundits, satirists and talking heads should watch Avatar. It is obvious to me that so-called liberals are trapped in an ecotopian dream-state that envisions a fantasy world where fairness rules and the davids slay the Goliath's of the right. Cameron’s bleeding heart, indigenous loving fantasia mirrors in many ways the beliefs and actions of liberals throughout America. If only we could all get along.

I entered college with the shooting of John Lennon and the movie Blade Runner topping the box office. This during the powerful rise of the conservative Ronald Reagan. Before Ridley Scott started making vacuous movies about legends (the lousy remake of Spartacus called Gladiator and the soon to open Robin Hood) he made extraordinary, artful visions of a bleak future where we were imprisoned by technology and were forced to come to terms with the fierceness of nature. The acrid, orange air of LA is filled with billowing clouds of fire from oil refineries while hover cars push up above the constant rain and din in order to navigate the largely evacuated landscape. This is the vision of Blade Runner, a planet ravaged by centuries of industrialization and enterprise where the smart inhabitants leave the scarified surface for the “outerworlds.” This vision based on the paranoid genius of Philip K. Dick is the world of Blade Runner. Technology is viewed as a continuation of our current rapacious desires, where genetics runs wild and the wealthy simply abandon that which they’ve contributed to destroying. In my mind that is the reality we are headed for, not some ecotopian, blue-bodied re-imagined experience of ourselves.

I’ll do my best here to avoid commenting on the insipid dialogue and recycled plot lines of Avatar and focus on the visual aspects of the film. The CG & 3D is the dazzle that appears to be blinding everyone from thinking. As mythic-loving creatures we are prone to what’s called locked-in syndrome in software development. When technology was a stone tool or a copper sword, locked-in myths like Beowulf took hold, later replaced by the magic of Merlin and the visions of Hamlet. These are the stories that are the backbone of western society and they are the narratives that have been locked-in to our collective conscious (Joseph Campbell did an extraordinary job of revealing this in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.) This myth-making is now a dangerous achilles heel for us. Technology has raised the bar several orders of magnitude where myths now have the potential to be falsely lived through virtual environments, 3D movies, and HDTV. Even those forms would be benign enough on their own if they weren’t being expressed in warfare with pilotless drones, robotics and computer simulations. Video games have already been reinforcing something Avatar heralds — you can’t die. In a video game you re-spawn or are reborn to fight another day and try again to defeat the fill-in-the-blank. Avatar ends (and I’m sure I’m the last person on earth to have seen the movie so I’m not spoiling anything here) with the lead character being reborn into the body of his avatar Na’vi body.

The events of 9/11 were the early signals of a new paradigm shift. It provided a window to the roots of terror by the disenfranchised in a new century. Technology has equaled the playing field of conflict in unexpected ways because of our 21st century commitment to technicism. This is witnessed by the use of cell phones to trigger suicide bombers and roadside IED’s, the use of a plane as a missile and recently the hacking of our pilotless drone cameras. These are the strategies of the disenfranchised. They are actions built upon the anxiety that disproportionate access to wealth and a state of perpetual war have promoted. James Cameron gets it exactly wrong in his plot on how the Na’vi, led by a human insider would have responded to overwhelming force and the destruction of their sacred tree. The Na’vi would have assuredly used a kind of terrorism as response. This is absent in the movie for the very reason I stated earlier, Cameron is blinded by thinking the old paradigms of natural balance are still in place. The Cherokee despite early victories learned rapidly that a Na’vi-like strategy only results in your enemy (who holds considerably superior technology) will simply return in greater overwhelming force and greater technology. The absurdity that arrows, no matter how large are a match for modern day weaponry only adds to the delusion of Avatar. Violence begets more violence. Vengeance is a failed strategy.

There are of course exceptions to this rule. Vietnam serves as one of them. However, desire to maintain war is predicated on the value of the resources. Geopolitical positioning simply isn’t enough of a driving force to continue such a conflict. If Vietnam had contained the largest oil reserves on earth, we’d still be there. Of course in Avatar the entire point of the film is a corporations plundering of the natural resources of the Na’vi planet. What’s curious to me is, Cameron clearly is creating a political film underneath a visual spectacle but he’s not really interested in doing the heavy lifting that requires. Instead he thinks a dabble of commentary and a modicum of plot will be enough to enrich his political position. There are no journalist characters, as there are in so many good political films, nor is there any idea of the connection to earth. Several times throughout the movie the corporate demons and military commanders state their concern for the PR end of the genocide, but never is there any indication precisely how this information would get back to earth.

It is impossible to love technology and believe in an ecotopian future. This dualistic thinking is perpetuated throughout Avatar. On the one hand, Cameron is suggesting technology brought by the humans only serves their greed and avarice and on the other he believes the technology of the Na’vi is quaint and enlightening. Both societies are waring societies, they simply have different levels of technology. How long before the Na’vi take over some of the remnants of human technology? To me it is this language of hope that encourages complacency when it comes to understanding what stands in the way of us solving gigantic global problems that threaten our very existence. When Republicans in our government take on a unilateral attitude of “no” to everything, we as liberals, if we are true liberals must face it squarely and revolt. No amount of hope or reconciliation is going to suffice. Great things were not accomplished in history by committees but rather by the enduring and persistent efforts of individuals working toward a greater good. However, just as Cameron’s hero takes on mythic proportions in Avatar, we must be cautious not to blindly follow those individuals whose brilliance creates breakthroughs for us. As the British were wise to vote Churchill out of office once the war had ended, so must we be willing to vote those representatives out of office who do not pursue solutions but rather compromise. You can’t compromise with a corporation because its very charter is sociopathic in nature. We should pay attention to representatives who say they will reform corporations while they simultaneously accept money from them. Heed the words of Adam Smith, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…” We especially need to be cautious of being dazzled by 3D renderings and the promise of utopian solutions as a means to solving our problems. Naiveté is equal to apathy and ignorance when it comes to politics. Avatar has the political naiveté of a 7 year old while tackling very adult concepts.

If we realize the true extent of the damage we have incurred to our nation and the damage we have inflicted to the globe, only then can we begin to repair it. If we persist in wishing upon a star for some popular uprising led by a mythical hero that somehow manages to overthrow the military-industrial complex in favor of a new ecotopian paradise (the essential plot of Avatar) then we are doomed to failure. This wishing only leads to complacency and as Thomas Jefferson said, “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to = remain silent.” There is a deafening silence in the message of Avatar and worse it is being fed to 100 million viewers.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has much more thoroughly and eloquently described these ideas in his book “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”. Buy a copy and tell Mr. Cameron to buy it too.