Avatar in Massachusettes

Yes, the name of the state is misspelled.

And here is a quote from science fiction editor Annalee Newitz (io9dotcom) via an article in the NYT:

"In movies like “Avatar,” Ms. Newitz wrote, “humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress,” until a white man “switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior.”

Whatever else viewers might say about Avatar--that it is anti-imperialist, pro-animist, anti-monotheism and all the rest--the fact is as Newitz implies: it's a white-guilt/redemption classic. Personally I found this theme rather obvious and that the obviousness of it detracted from the overall awe one could not help feeling for its complex visual beauty.

And now a perhaps tenuous but not, I think, altogether inappropriate segue to the Great Democractic Debacle in the Bay State where the now-forever-ignominious Ms. Coakley could not withstand the former nude male model's White Manly Pickup Truck onslaught in an election that could spindle National Health by allowing a Teabagger to take the place of the Great Healthcare Lion who recently and most ironically passed on just before he might vote on the Great Cause of his long tenure in that August Body.

In short, is it really possible that there is now a Palinesque male Junior Senator in the senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy? Wake up, ye thoughtful losers, for it has come to this. And many now say major health care reform, long and idiotically allowed to be held hostage by the GOP while an ineffectual near-supermajority of Democrats could not seem to do what any Republican Majority would have done (smash through whatever they wanted with 51 senate votes), may be in serious peril. Speaker Pelosi, facing us with an ever-less-believable rictus, says not to worry. However, if I am a fan of major health care reform, I am worried. And of course worried about the newly minted good fortune of the Grand Old Teabaggers--in "Massachusettes", where once a band of outraged taxpayers threw tea in the water dressed as "Indians" to protest levies of the Crown.

Let us now examine the manner in which the magnificently inept Coakley campaign misspelled the name of its own state in an ad during the campaign. And then let us think about the white-male-savior fantasy at the heart of What's-His-Name's unexpected victory.

The Hellenistic world, and especially the U.S.A. which is populated by all the peoples of the planet but governed by laws descendant from the Greek, has often been a theater of battle between pantheism and monotheism (to wit: Salem; slaughter of animist Native Americans; forced-Christianization of chained and shackled Africans). Monotheism has in this country been not only ascendant but unforgiving until quite recently (the 1960s), when all manner of thought not including a White Male Leader fairly exploded upon the general consciousness and wrecked the cut-grass and steak-for-dinner oppressiveness of the White Male Power Paradise.

It has gone poorly for the Traditional White Male ever since. Gone missing is his assumed throne at the pinnacle of creation as the landscape is re-shaped by powerful women, gay men and educated, powerful men of color . And now with an Articulate (please make careful note of the quote marks) "Negro" in the White House, the fortunes of the White Male may have come to seem almost permanently eclipsed.

But this White Male Monotheist is a fighting man if nothing else. His Templars took Jerusalem from the Saracens once, and today in America his Teabaggers are determined to take Washington from the Freaks and Geeks if it means the very destruction of the nation itself.

And here, in the cross-hairs, is poor Martha Coakley, unassuming Generic Female Candidate in what Democrats foolishly thought was a race they owned. This was the bluest of blue states after all--and this election was for the rightful Kennedy Seat! The trusty blue Commonwealth, it seemed to Dems, would elect a ham sandwich to that seat if the Dems told them to, would they not?

Not.

What has happened was this:

Martha early established her credentials as a nitwit and worse (by Teabagger lights), a female nitwit, by incorrectly feminizing the name of the state: Massachusettes (with that effete little extra "e" as if spelling "crepe suzettes"). Then she proceeded to assume, oddly like Hillary did not long ago, that the race was hers, and that there was no real need to compete.

Now here came the White Male Savior. And the guilt-ridden voters of Massachusetts, having allowed their state to help stain the purity of White Male Domination by helping elect a "different type" of man to the Presidency, saw their chance to "switch sides" and "save" themselves from a fate unendurable--that being a world ruled by laws signed by that fateful "Other": that guy with the near-unendurable name, Barack Hussein Obama.

And in his pickup truck he rode, Mr. Male Nude Model, and he was their Avatar, and they lived through him as he crunched and punched his way through the cobwebs of misspelling and ineptitude characterized by the inept and vague and miserable Coakley, and he won a Great Victory for the White Male and probably Monotheism by somehow convincing the N'avi of Massachusetts that he was one of them.

And that is how the Avatar came to Massachusettes.

I was a Deluded Liberal

The tiny elections held last night loom large in the reconstruction of the Republican party even as the tiniest election of them all, in upstate New York, threaten to keep it confused and hobbled by divisive internal attacks from Valkyries like Sarah Palin. She and Dick Armey and the Teabagger Militia rolled in behind an ultra-conservative against a moderate Republican and thereby handed the long-red district to the blues.

But for Democrats, last night was, I believe, a watershed of a different type. For me, anyway, it proved that Obama has waited too long to put his positive stamp on the country; has deferred too much to others; has simply not been the bold leader many had hoped he'd be. And now I think he has let the GOP, which had been flat on its back in the first row of seats like a wrestler hove out of the ring, climb back between the ropes bloodied but eager (and strong enough) for a fight.

Let us review for a moment the health care issue. Perhaps it wasn't obvious until right now that the thing ought to have been wrapped up and delivered before the election. The message moderates will take from the pair of big GOP gubernatorial victories is that Obama may not be magical after all; and that they need not support him on health reform. I could be wrong, but I think Obama has let the moment pass. Thanks to his pusillanimous fellow Dems in the Senate (especially the no-account Harry Reid) and thanks even more to the ever-perfidious Lieberman (who seems perversely to enjoy ruining any laudable cause he can influence), I think health care is going to be lost like a ship foundering in heavy seas, and that reform will be found only in Davey Jones' locker.

Let us now review New Jersey if we must. What gave the Democrats the idea they could win with a guy from Goldman Sachs who talks like an undertaker and doesn't know how to tie on a seat belt at high speed? Corzine stank of all that stinks in this land--the cynical manipulation of events with mountains of ill-gotten cash--and the voters went for the Other Guy, who happens to be a member of the Party of Limbaugh. Nice going, Dems.

Finally let us review Afghanistan. The right thing is to get us the hell out of that historical destroyer of empires. How many times does a person have to see "The Man Who Would Be King" before he realizes Afghanistan is a lose-lose proposition? And yet we waste blood and treasure there as if bin Laden were somehow just down the next street awaiting capture. I know Obama never said he wanted out of Central Asia. But so what? Afghanistan only adds to the sense that the extremely historic election in 2008 has resulted in nothing of great note on the ground. And lets just not talk about Iraq for now.

Sure, the stimulus has worked somewhat. Sure, there's lip service and some progress on some fronts (gay rights, energy independence); but any garden variety Democrat could have done as much.

Maybe Obama needed a wake up call. It's just that I'm not sure I know who he is right now, and what he'll do once he wakes up.