Tom Atlee’s blog on Avatar offers a site where we can read his and other intelligent reactions, pro and con, that were provoked by the movie.  Atlee  offers a good defense against the criticism that Avatar was another example of the White Savior fantasy where some white guy rescues his little brown brethren from mean white guys. He also provides links to the better examples of such criticisms as well as links to other responses to them.  I was glad to see this, for while this myth is a reality in our culture, it’s just not applicable to this movie. That some people saw it in those terms suggests to me they have imbibed more than a little bit of white cultural supremacism themselves.

One of those commenting on Atlee’s blog linked to an extremely interesting Facebook review of Avatar by Robert Augustus Masters.  I recommend it as well for those of us concerned with somehow healing the perceptual autism that characterize the modern world.

I think we need a truly radical alternative to the dominant autistic and transcendental monotheist view of reality if our society is ever to live in relative harmony with other societies and the earth.  In my view Avatar is a much needed softening up of rigid prejudices at the popular level.  A few years back the not particularly good film Independence Day featured aliens traveling to mine and destroy earth after having destroyed their own.  They lived in space cities.  Now humans  are the aliens going to other planets to rob and rape and kill in the name of progress.  As we did in the ‘New World’ and Australia in particular, but hardly just there.  It is the end logic of modern society, if we get space travel – with our ancestors’ earlier depredation as a dress rehearsal.

I imagine even some conservatives found themselves rooting for  10 foot tall blue aliens against the corporate goons spreading “progress.”

My thanks to Rick Ingrasci for tipping me off to the Pachmama video and Atlee’s blog.