Avatar: the war against humans

The New Neo Posted on by

I decided to go see the movie “Avatar” even though I knew that, as a futuristic action film loaded with special effects, it probably wasn’t going to make my top-ten list. The idea of a 3-D movie intrigued me, though, and it seemed absolutely necessary to see that sort of thing on the big screen.

And so I went. And so there was some pretty nifty technical wizardry indeed going on, with many attractive imaginary foliage and landscaping and astronomic visuals. But, even though I thought I was prepared beforehand by my son’s admonition “you’re not going to like the politics,” I was nevertheless surprised at how very far this particular film went with those politics.

In case you’ve been on a desert island for the last month or so, let me mention that “Avatar” features life on Pandora (an earth-ish moon in another solar system) in the year 2154, a place where aboriginal tall thin blue (very tall and thin; most people say they’re catlike, but they reminded me most of blue Barbie dolls with ET faces and tails) creatures called the Na’vi have reached a wonderfully respectful symbiotic relationship with each other and the world around them, and are threatened by rapacious and greedy mankind.

There’s a war of sorts, and just guess who fares poorly. In the meantime, we’re treated to statements on the part of the human soldiers on the Pandora outpost that go something like this (I’m doing this from memory, so it might not be verbatim): “We must fight terrorism with terrorism,” and “Let’s give them some shock and awe,” as well as a reference to “daisycutters.”

In addition to finding it odd that people in the year 2154 would still be referencing the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars of a hundred and fifty years earlier, I found it especially odd that this movie takes human-hatred many steps further than previous movies ever did.

In my youth (not so very long ago), the natives were often the bad guys and the cavalry good. That wasn’t quite right, either, as we children intuitively knew (and as I, who sided with the Indians partly because I looked somewhat like them and partly because my brother and his friends used to place me unwillingly in that role when they tied me and the other girls to neighborhood trees and war-whooped around us, most definitely knew).

But a few years later, cinema corrected that imbalance by providing us with films that advanced a more sympathetic view of native Americans, and then later offered a reversal in movies such as “Dances With Wolves” (another one I hated; way too long and way too violent for me) in which the US cavalry was for the most part the bad guy (what would Rin-Tin-Tin say?).

Same with extraterrestrials. First they came to kill us, then they came to entrance us (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind“), then to befriend and amuse us (“ET“). And, although they still come to kill us now and then (“Independence Day“), in “Avatar” it’s we who come to kill them. Humans are most definitely the bad guys, except for a few kind souls who cross over and defend the noble Na’vi (combination of Navajo and Hopi?).

That means that this film is the first I’m aware of in which, except for a few human heroes who are the exceptions, we’re meant to root and cheer for the destruction of humans in general. And destruction there is, aplenty. This fits in so nicely with the current notions of many of the AGW and PETA folks—that humans (especially of the first-world variety) are the scourge of an otherwise wonderful earth—that it makes me think the idea of humankind as a cancer on the planet has gone mainstream.

Yes, yes, I’m taking a frivolous movie too seriously. It’s just a fun romp with a lot of fine visuals, right? I suppose it is that. But movies have messages that reach many millions of people, and this one’s only just begun what promises to be a long and lucrative voyage around the globe.

New Year’s resolve

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, I broke my first New Year’s resolution of 2010 before I even got out of bed today. The idea was to keep more reasonable hours. How about you? Any resolves, broken or un?

As far as kissing the decade of the twenty-oughts goodbye, I might want to say “good riddance” to a decade that began for me with the very painful aftermath of a surgery, segued right into the breakup of my marriage (shortly after my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary), and featured 9/11, various wars, and the election of President Obama. On the other hand, I’ve been blessed by the fact that I finally did recover from that surgery, had some fun in the aftermath of that breakup, and of course (of course!) entered the blogosphere with all its many pleasures and rewards.

Here’s to the twenty-teens!

David Broder, tool

The New Neo Posted on by

David Broder, tool:

It came as no surprise to anyone who knows her that Napolitano handled the [Flight 253 bomber) incident and its aftermath with aplomb. In the years I have known her, she has managed every challenge that has come her way with the same calm command that she showed in this instance. If there is anyone in the administration who embodies President Obama’s preference for quiet competence with “no drama,” it is Janet Napolitano.

I would say her competence is very quiet.

New Years Eve: what are you doing?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited version of a previous post.]

I have a confession to make: I’m not extraordinarily fond of New Years Eve.

Oh, back when I was a very little kid I remember liking it very much indeed. It was an opportunity to beg my parents to be allowed to stay up, and often I won that battle and had the thrill of watching the ball drop on TV.

Back then each year had seemed almost endless, and the punctuation of that last day, with its celebrations and dramatic turning of the number of the year into one we’d never seen before (wow! 1959! next, 1960!) was exciting and fresh. It also meant I was growing up, gaining in privilege and stature.

In high school it was still sort of fun—we went out in big packs, once or twice to Times Square to watch the whole thing in person. In college it became more problematic because I went home for Christmas vacation and was away from the boy friend de jour.

Then later on I was married. What do married people do on New Years? Parties still happened, but they were starting to end earlier and earlier (New Englanders don’t tend to be nightowls or wild partygoers, I’m afraid). For me they functioned mostly as an excuse for getting dressed up. It doesn’t help that I don’t drink much. Watching others get drunk has been an interesting spectator sport over the years, but not really my favorite activity.

As for that “growing in stature and privilege” thing—well, I’m kind of on the other side of that particular slope. Gaining in wisdom, perhaps; at least, that’s a consummation devoutly to be wished. And the passage of time seems to have accelerated at an alarming rate.

This year? Going out for a while, then coming in. Friends and loved ones it is.

And then on New Years Day: resolutions galore! Will they last more than a day this time? And the fervent hope that 2010 will be a much better one than 2009 was for this country, and the entire world.

So folks—what are you doing New Years Eve?

Shelby Steele on Obama’s emptiness

The New Neo Posted on by

Shelby Steele writes another impressive article about President Obama. In it, he offers the following analysis:

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Our new race problem””the sophistication of seeing what isn’t there rather than what is””has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale…Mr. Obama’s economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen…

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness””not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world…

…[H]e has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots”””thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

I think this is very finely put, but I would add the following: I do not believe that Obama’s political emptiness is real. Rather, I think he is quite full—of leftist ideology, that is. This political emptiness was (and still is, although the extent to which he can still manage to pull it off has diminished over time as his actions have begun to speak more loudly than his lofty words) a strategic pose that he adopted in order to get elected. His truer and deeper emptiness is an emotional one which, to paraphrase Steele, has been “nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the world in which he found himself as a child and young adult.” That, perhaps, is the most frightening part of all; I believe he lacks an inner core, and has filled the vacuum with an ideology that he plans to impose on this country if he possibly can, whether we like it or not.

That’s what “yes, we can” was all about.

Voting over—I’m still regent

The New Neo Posted on by

Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote in the Grande Conservative Blogress Diva contest. Voting has closed and Pam Geller has won (she’s really more the diva type anyway, don’t you think?). But thanks to all you stalwart voters I’ve managed to retain my regent crown with a nice comfy margin. The whole thing is just kind of fun, and I get that cool logo for my sidebar.

Can Scott Brown become the forty-first Senate Republican?

The New Neo Posted on by

Scott Brown, you ask? Who’s that?

Or maybe you already know who Brown is, because you’re such a bunch of political junkies. Right now he’s the best (although perhaps least-known) hope of throwing a wrench into the Obamacare works.

Brown is a Republican running for the Senate in (gulp) one of the bluest states in the union, Massachusetts. If that seems like a longshot—well, it is. But Brown’s personable and telegenic as well as fiscally conservative, although he’s been all but abandoned by the GOP in his quixotic quest.

But maybe his dream of taking the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat from opponent Martha Coakley isn’t so impossible after all. I can’t find a single poll, although I bet he’s considerably behind. But my guess is that even voters in Massachusetts are getting fed up with what’s been going on in Congress lately, and he might have a chance. If you want to take a look at his website and maybe even contribute in some way, the cause seems worthy.

The curve of an Instalanche

The New Neo Posted on by

{NOTE: I got an Instalanche yesterday for the Obama disfluency post, and the response of my sitemeter reminded me of this article, which originally appeared on Dec. 1, 2008. I thought it would be fun to republish a slightly-edited and updated version of it, since I noticed the same exact phenomenon when I looked at the traffic resulting from the most recent ‘lanche.]

An Instalanche—that’s a link from blogger Glenn Reynolds, who’s otherwise known as Instapundit—can drive a huge amount of traffic to a blog. Glenn’s own blog traffic hovers somewhere in the vicinity of 450,000 hits a day (let me spell that out for you: that’s four hundred and fifty thousand). Depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the way Glenn phrases the link, the general interest in the topic, and other variables that remain mysterious, an Instalanche can vary from a modest spike in traffic to a veritable tsunami of visitors.

But I’ve noticed there’s one thing about an Instalanche (or any high-traffic link) that is quite predictable: the graph of the visits always seems to follow a rather strict pattern. There’s a sudden soar the first hour. Then the second hour there’s a fractional step down that represents, very roughly, maybe twenty percent of the whole. Then another similar step down in the third hour, and so on. As the traffic diminishes, the size of the step-downs grows smaller and smaller, and the previously steep imaginary line connecting the steps becomes flatter.

I’m sure there’s a simple equation that expresses the relationship. Here’s a picture of it:

sitemeter11-30-082.jpg

As you can see, this graph charts the number of visitors to my blog on November 30, 2008, the day of the Instalanche. It is a snapshot taken towards the middle of hour twenty-two. It begins in the wee small hours of the morning, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, ordinarily a very slow time on a very slow day. My traffic was just getting to around the 70 hits-per-hour point when suddenly, at approximately 10 AM, in came the Instalanche and BOOM! went the sitemeter.

There were over 2,400 hits in the first hour after that, about 2,200 in the second, 2,000 in the third, and so on, down to those smaller steps with the smaller decreases between them. This particular Instalanche was good for about 12,500 extra hits that first day—and it’s still going on, albeit at a much reduced rate.

Obama’s Dukakis moment

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama has often been compared to Jimmy Carter. But lately it occurs to me that there’s a lot of resemblance to presidential candidate Mike Dukakis, who failed a basic emotional test in his response to a hypothetical asked during the 1988 presidential debates.

For those who don’t remember it, here’s a description of the event and the question that killed Dukakis’s candidacy. Some excerpts:

[CNN journalist Bernard] Shaw, looking commanding and stern, began: “By agreement between the candidates, the first question goes to Gov. Dukakis. You have two minutes to respond: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

In the press room, there were gasps from the reporters. “Whaaaa?” “Did he really say that?” “Un-BELIEVE-able.”

…Dukakis answered instantly and smoothly. “No, I don’t, Bernard,” he said. “And I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.”

He had been on the record for years and years on that subject. Massachusetts had no death penalty and also had one of the lowest crime rates of any industrialized state in the country. Dukakis didn’t believe in capital punishment. He had seen all the studies and he didn’t believe it deterred crime…

In the press room, the murmurs over Shaw’s question now turned to mutters over Dukakis’ answer. “He’s through.” “That’s all she wrote.” “Get the hook!”

The reporters sensed it instantly. Even though the 90-minute debate was only seconds old, they felt it was already over for Dukakis. He had not been warm. He had not been likable. He had not shown emotion. He had merely shown principle…

Susan Estrich, his campaign manager, was in despair. “It was a question about Dukakis’ values and emotions,” she said later. “It was a question that was very much on the table by that point in the campaign. When he answered by talking policy, I knew we had lost the election.”

I’m not saying that Obama’s first statements about the Flight 253 bomber were up there with Dukakis’s faux pas in the suddenness of their effect. For Obama it’s been a cumulative thing, this morphing from “cool” to “cold.” But the transition has been accomplished.

Typical of the reaction to Obama’s remarks on the Knickerbomber is this column, which begins with: “This is no time for the return of Professor Obama.” Americans dislike being lectured to in a condescending manner by a president who seems removed and distant, uncaring and above-it-all.

But Americans don’t approve of an overly emotional president, either, as candidate Edmund Muskie learned to his sorrow in the snows of New Hampshire in 1972, when it was perceived that he wept too readily. And even the somewhat teary-eyed Bill Clinton was very careful about when and where he cried, and for what reason, and wife Hillary had only one carefully positioned lachrymose moment in an otherwise steely performance.

It may seem unreasonable of the public to demand of its presidents such a finely calibrated balancing act between too much expression of feeling and not enough, with the voters in the position of a bunch of all-too-fussy Goldilockses.

But these fine-tuned requirements are not arbitrary. We need a president who cares enough to understand our needs and concerns and to speak our language and send the right messages both in the domestic and foreign arena, but who is tough enough to not break down under the considerable stress of the office. Strangely enough, Obama seems to be lacking in both departments. In this, once again, he resembles Mike Dukakis, who not only failed the warmth test in answer to the rape question, but was perceived as not having the proper intestinal fortitude to be able to survive his photo-op in a tank.

Like it or not, one of the duties of a president is to be commander-in-chief. People need to believe on a gut level that a candidate or a president is capable of performing well in that role. But in Obama’s public addresses in response to the two most recent terrorist attacks, he has come across more as the country’s lawyer-in-chief than its commander.

[NOTE: And those on the left who say that Bush’s response to shoe bomber Richard Reid was similar (see today’s memeorandum page for several, such as this and this) are missing the point. By then, Bush had proven himself to the American people through his behavior during the crucible of 9/11, the subsequent anthrax scare (remember that?), and the Afghan aftermath, all coming in rapid succession. He had shown the requisite combination of caring and determination throughout, once he got over the first few moments post-9/11.

The Reid episode occurred in December of 2001, and it seemed very small at the time in comparison to 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan. The Knickerbomber incident looms much larger today, especially after the many quieter years for terrorism against the US during the latter part of the Bush administration. Obama has yet to prove himself in the same way; on the contrary, his reaction to the Knickerbomber is merely the latest in a pattern of troublesome low-key responses on his part to a host of events, including his initial reaction to the Ft. Hood shooter, as well as the riots in Iran during and after elections there.]

[ADDENDUM: When Obama’s lost Maureen Dowd, he’s in trouble. She compares him to Star Trek’s Spock, in a piece entitled, “As the nation’s pulse races, Obama can’t seem to find his.” Ouch.]