Words from Maine South

Driving south from Maine,
the hills simmering with color
as the leaves close their arms upon
their bodies.

_____________another year, another war
added to those already ongoing.
There is a list somewhere, but most
have lost count by now.

_____Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq,
random points on the map.
Military occupation in 145 countries.
The heart cannot count that high.
We're like the leaves. Its autumn.
We're cold, and tired and ready
for winter.

'Give me a threshold. if aliens
attacked us and poisoned every
river so it was unsafe to drink from,
if they put dioxin, a lethal carcinogen,
into every mothers breast milk...'
Aspen, oak and ash race as by one
giving up the ghost. The sky
blessedly clear after a morning's
hard rain. the earth spins.

'Would you fight back?
If the aliens put acid in the oceans,
if they killed 98% of all the friends
and neighbors you know, would you fight
back. If there was a resistance, would you
join?
If you can't or won't give a threshold,
even to yourself, why not?'



Is there some hope of making
a world of sense?

The earth spins by inertia at
this point.

Car after car go south, go north,
all day and night on I-95. What the
hurry is towards no one
has explained, though we've been
told, like dreams, not to question
what we see.

'In 1998, a report was published in Time
Magazine, backed by three main ecological institutions.
They stated that the Earth has lost one-third
of all its natural resources in the last 30 years.
A catastrophe not seen since the time
of the dinosaurs, and it will take millions
of years for the Earth to recover. The main
story of the day, the month, and that year
was not that somewhat dire and prophetic warning
but rather the romantic feats
of linguist Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.'

A man walks in now. The sound
he no longer listens to, machines,
have stopped humming in his brain.
He's left them instead for rain
and tubas. "There are some facts that
are, to be blunt, more useful
and more telling, and more beyond debate
than others. If all debate begins
by halving the concerns of your
fellow human being, how long
until we get an honest look at
how bad things really are?"

Out on the ocean, sunlight shines
like rain into Squeeker Cove and all
points south on that island. enough
light to loosen the last hard bits
left in the heart.

The world spins by inertia now.

If there were a song, your
beloved would take you down
to the river, as they bathed your head
and sang it to you. Your eyes
might then make a world of sense
from the broken glass we remake with each sunrise.
If the task of seeing is too hard,
do not close your eyes for a moment.
Do not look away, for your eyes have seen
what they have seen, the heart will
feel its own blind way to meaning.

Largest oil spill in US history
destroys massive colonies of pelicans
and cormorants and sea turtles
and bass and marlin. Wetlands
systems put under severe strain
with possible collapse immanent for
crab, shrimp and catfish populations.
Reports say the amount spewed into
The Gulf of Mexico roughly equivalent
to the total spilled every 7 years
for the last half century
into the Niger delta and its
rivers and tributaries and villages from
oil extracted, headed to the global north.

Is there some hope of making
a world of sense?

'From the year 1980 to the year 2003, the
most populous prisons on the planet grew
in size and density. Caged in small rooms, those
being held are most often poor and are disproportionately
black and red and brown and yellow, and, since
the beginning of the decade of the 1980s, the number
of inmates has increased 300%, while the population
at large has increased 30%. This increase was recently
sighted as possibly erasing all gains made by the Civil
Rights Movement, now 2 generations past.'

Outside the bus station, two people get on a bus.
they are old for the journey, and they feel it, but try not
to let the feeling show. Their children laugh with them
and kiss and hug them from the platform. When they
board the bus, the woman's cheeks are trying to hold back
tears of joy, tears of sorrow, as the confusion of being
the ones now leaving sets in. The children sit in a car,
as the rain falls, and flash the headlights as the parents
wave from the bus.

This is for you, whomever
listened for an extra moment
while the heart was tender.
Who tried hard to understand
even when it seemed pointless.
This is for you, when you found
the words for that moment
and no other, when you shaked
off the songs of sorrow and talked
of cooking cornbread instead.
This for you, when you held
a stranger in your arms
and didn't ask what it meant
or for how long, or under what terms.
This for you, may your heart go strong
and listening into the glimmering.

--

editorial note: some of the formatting got flattened in blogger. underscores are present here where tabs would normally be.

A Long Conversation - Adrienne Rich

A Long Conversation

-->

–warm bloom of blood in the child's arterial tree

could you forget? do you

remember? not to

know you were cold? Altercations

from the porches color still high in your cheeks

the leap for the catch

the game getting wilder as the lights come on

catching your death it was said

your death of cold

something you couldn't see ahead, you couldn't see

(energy: Eternal Delight)



a long conversation

between persistence and impatience

between the bench of forced confessions

hip from groin swiveled

apart

young tongues torn in the webbing

the order of the cities

founded on disorder

and intimate resistance

desire exposed and shameless

as the flags go by

Sometimes looking backward

into this future, straining

neck and eyes I'll meet your shadow

with its enormous eyes

you who will want to know

what this was all about

Maybe this is the beginning of madness

Maybe it's your conscience...

as you, straining neck and eyes

gaze forward into this past:

what did it mean to you?

to receive "full human rights"

or the blue aperture of hope?

Mrs. Bartender, will you tell us dear

who came in when the nights were

cold and drear and who sat where

well helmeted and who

was showing off his greasy hair

Mrs. Bartender tell me quickly

who spoke thickly or not at all

how you decided what you'd abide

what was proud and thus allowed

how you knew what to do

with all the city threw at you

Mrs. Bartender tell me true

we've been keeping an eye on you

and this could be a long conversation

we could have a long accommodation

On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the motel room of a certain time and country, a white plastic saucer of cheese and hard salami, winter radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread, a bottle of red wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable. Someone has brought pills for the infection that is ransacking this region. Someone else came to clean birds salvaged from the oil spill. Here we eat, drink from thick tumblers, try to pierce this thicket with mere words.

Like a little cell. Let's not aggrandize ourselves, we are not a little cell, but we are like a little cell.

Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words.

A long conversation

pierced, jammed, scratched out:

bans, preventative detention, broken mouths

and on the scarred bench sequestered

a human creature with bloody wings

its private parts

reamed

still trying to speak



A hundred and fifty years. In 1848, a pamphlet was published, one of many but the longest-read. One chapter in the long book of memories and expectations. A chapter described to us as evil; if not evil, out-of-date, naïve and mildewed. Even the book they say is out of print, lacking popular demand.

So we have to find out what in fact that manifesto said. Evil we can judge. Mildew doesn't worry us. We don't want to be more naïve or out-of-date than necessary. Some old books are probably more useful than others.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society...it creates a world after its own image.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed–a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

–Can we say if or how we find this true in our lives today?

She stands before us as if we are a class, in school, but we are long out of school. Still, there's that way she has of holding the book in her hands, as if she knew it contained the answer to her question.

Someone: –Technology's changing the most ordinary forms of human contact–who can't see that, in their own life?

–But technology is nothing but a means.

–Someone, i say, makes a killing off war. You: –I've been telling you, that's the engine driving the free market. not information, militarization. Arsenals spawning wealth.

Another woman: –But surely then patriarchal nationalism is the key?

He comes in late, as usual he's been listening to sounds outside, the tide scarping the stones, the voices in nearby cottages, the way he used to listen at the beach, as a child. He doesn't speak like a teacher, more like a journalist come back from war to report to us. –It isn't nations anymore, look at the civil wars in all the cities. Is their a proletariat that can act effectively on this collusion, between the state and the armed and murderous splinter groups roaming at large? How could all these private arsenals exist without the export of increasingly sophisticated arms approved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie?

Now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: -_I can't stand that kind of language. I still care about poetry.

All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you're only

as we were trying

to keep an eye

on the weapons on the street

and under the street

Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can't get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can't fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy, if all that it does is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic etc. and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?

You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about "certainty," "probability," perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people's lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's MOST important.

His high-pitched voice with its, darker hoarser undertone.

At least he didn't walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.

So now your pale dark face thrown up

into pre-rain silver light your white shirt takes

on the hurl and flutter of gulls' wings

over your dark leggings their leathery legs

flash past your hurling arm one hand

snatching crusts from the bowl another hand holds close

You, barefoot on that narrow strand

with the iceplant edges and the long spindly pier

you just as the rain starts leaping into the bay

in your cloud of black, bronze and silvering hair

Later by the window on a fast-gathering winter evening

my eyes on the page then catch your face your breasts that light

....small tradespeople,

shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants–

all these sink gradually into the proletariat

partly because their

diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which

modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the

competition with the large capitalists

partly because their specialized

skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.

Thus, the proletariat is recruited

from all classes of the population...

pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay

the last gash of light abruptly bandaged in darkness

1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth: I wish

you would write a poem

addressed to those who, in consequence

of the complete failure of the French Revolution

have thrown up all hopes

of the amelioration of mankind

and are sinking into an almost epicurean

selfishness, disguising the same

under the soft titles of domestic attachment

and contempt for visionary philosophes

A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe:

the visionaries having survived despite

rumors of complete failure

the words have barely begun to match the desire

when the cold fog blows back in

organized and disordering

muffling words and faces

Your lashes, visionary! screening

in sudden rushes this

shocked, abraded crystal

I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous...It would have to contain loses, resiliences, histories faced; it would have to contain a face–his yours hers mine–by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that "doing well" by one, or some, was immiserating nobody: A true sentence, then, for greeting the newborn. (–someplace else. In our hopes.)

But where ordinary collective affections carry a price (Swamped, or accounted worthless) I'm one of those driven seabirds stamping oil-distempered waters maimed "by natural causes."

The music pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos conciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of traditions of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward.

"it's the layers of history

we have to choose, along

with our own practice: what must be tried again

over and over and

what must not be repeated

and at what depths which layer

will meet others"

the words barely begin

to match the desire

and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn't testify

...the eye has become a human eye

when its object has become a human, social object

BRECHT BECOMES GERMAN ICON ANEW

FORGIVEN MARXIST IDEAS

...the Arts, you know–they're Jews, they're left-wing,

in other words, stay away...

So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true

how you still do what you do

your old theories forgiven

–the public understands

it was one thing then but now is now

and everyone says your lungs are bad

and your liver very sad

and the force of your imagination

has no present destination

though subversive has a certain charm

and art can really do no harm

but still they say you get up and go

every morning to the studio

is it still a thrill?

or an act of will?

Mr. Kunstelaar.

–After so long to be asked an opinion, most of that time opinion's unwelcome,
but opinion anyway was never art. Along the way I was dropped by some, others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. To even have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in was a point in fact. In case you missed the point: I come from hard-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin–Adults and children forced into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration–never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives designated insignificant as beauty, terror. They were significant to me and what they had endured terrified me. I knew such a life could have been my own, I also knew they had saved me from it.

–I tried to show all this, and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded.

–I have no theories. I don't know what I am being forgiven. I am my art.
I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I get up and go to the studio–it's there I find the company I need to go on working.

"This is for you

this little song

without much style

because your smile

fell like a red leaf

through my tears

in those fogbound years

when without ado

you gave me a bundle of fuel to burn

when my body was utterly cold

This is for you

who would not applaud

when with a kick to the breast or groin

they dragged us into the van

when flushed faces cheered

at our disgrace

or looked away this is

for you who stayed

to see us through

delivered our bail and disappeared

This little song

without much style

may it find you

somewhere well."

In the dark windowglass

a blurred face

–is it still mine?

Who out there hoped to change me–

what out there has tried?

What sways and presses against the pane

what can't I see beyond or through–

charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language

is that still you?

1997-98

--

a few comments on the poem, which I feel are personal and unnecessary, this poem reached me at a point when more than anything I needed to be gently shaken out of some of the broader confusions of society I offer it in the same vein, in the hopes that you, who are reading this, find resonances within it and yourself.

Corpses and Corpses

--I wrote the following in New Orleans, surrounded by what I saw, and still see, as a general apathy of 'the general public' towards the destruction of people, peoples and the environment.  The numbness and motivation towards all three I feel are entwined and inseparable.  The opening quote is meant not as a means of identifying with the deity, but rather to acknowledge that if there are limits that exist within the human consciousness and ability to discern what would truly be healthy & sustainable, for an individual, for a culture or for a species, that this limit could, in this instance, very well be termed God.
Corpses and Corpses
"And if despite this you do not heed Me and you come in encounter
against Me, I will come against you in wrathful encounter and I on My
part will chastise you sevenfold for your offenses. And you shall eat
the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you shall eat.
And I will destroy your cult-places and cut off your incense stands,
and I will put your corpses on top of the corpses of your fetishes and
I will loathe you."
~Leviticus 26:26

How else do clocks keep time these days?
A shade of obsidian dropped over black silk,
with a car and a half for every soul here
the stratosphere is asking, "Why do you hate me?"
The icebergs are asking, "What wrong did we do?"
And we, the full time citizenry,
hop planes to discover the new inside us,
and back-up files to a second drive.
The math has been worked out
and grass will outlive us.

Meanwhile the dams provide the water to keep
the lights in casinos running and the rice villagers
underwater.
Our breath clogged from junk
still has a little room to breathe.
Six of the morning skies will still bless us,
after that, the seventh will loathe us.
A sky not sky emptying its contempt on us.
A desert growing larger each afternoon.
A swamp that shone like four beads of sweat
on Brahma's brow, dumping its millennial silt into the sea.

Are not half the world's things enough?

The children playing in the sand
are playing with guns and people's heads.
The elders spoon another tin
of cat food to get them to their next fix.
The derelict who speaks to himself,
had no choice
and has none now.
The smart sit unsurprised
and wrap themselves in kimonos and red wine.

We only see our reflection
as it bounces back towards us,
imagination travels sideways
wearing a green coat
only the quiet can hear.

To get the texture of it, hold soil in your hand
as you move a plant to a larger pot.
Rinse basmati with your fingers
and watch the starch cloud
swirl down the sink.

To gaze into the cells of prisons
is to be reminded of the darkness of humans,
like a tour of Auschwitz that never ends
and never ends.
A sheet over a detainee's head,
is an inescapable ten pound halo
screwed into each of our skulls.

                                               We never ask if we can lessen
the load of our fellow travelers.
                                                         Only rarely
our hands outward to catch a fellow citizen.

One day I went with Atilio to the scrap yard
to add piles to the pile for beer.
What I saw there shook something loose.
A hundred foot high pile of ready-to-be-shredded
human dreams. Machines doing the slaving,
and four people saying we weren't adding junk
to the junk correctly. This is not metaphor.
This is watching money chew through bone.
This is watching machines drink pints of blood.

The bit that was left over from that scrap run,
enough to pan into six flakes for booze,
knowing the heavens over our head ready
and the storm just off the coast.

A little smile, a little music, while the fire
eats human limbs two handed.
An embrace we hold against the rising waters.

Derrick Jensen - from The Culture of Make Believe (not for the faint of heart)

It really isn't possible to talk about hate without talking about children as objects of hatred. I know that age isn't a protected class under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, but bear with me.

Each year an estimated 20,000 Mexican children disappear, many for use as mules, to transport drugs inside their bodies, others taken for the harvest of their organs, to be transplanted into children in the United States. This is according to a study performed by the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico and presented at a conference on "International Traffic in Children."

Worldwide, entire economies have been founded specifically on the sexual trade in children. One hundred to eight hundred thousand Thai girls and boys work as prostitutes (A brochure distributed in England advertising a Thai resort reads, "If you can suck it, use it, eat it, feel it, taste it, abuse it or see it, then it's available in this resort that truly never sleeps"). Nearly all of them are enslaved or indentured. A good portion have received death sentences from HIV. There are 1.5 to 2 million child prostitutes in India (those in Bombay, for example, are often held in cages; fifty cents buys half an hour of of sex with a twelve-year-old.) Five hundred thousand child prostitutes work in Brazil (a child of thirty-five pounds is considered a prime size in many mining towns). There are 200,000 child prostitutes in or from Nepal (most of these girls are kidnapped, sold for between forty and a thousand dollars, "broken in" through a process of rapes and beatings, and then rented out up to thirty-five times a night for one to two dollars per man). Between 100,000 and 300,000 children work the sex trade in the United States (one study of U.S. survivors of prostitution found that 78 percent were victims of rape by pimps and buyers an average of forty-nine times per year; 84 percent were the victims of aggravated assault; 49 percent had been kidnapped and transported across state lines; 53 percent were victims of sexual abuse and torture; and 27 percent had been mutilated). On average, a child prostitute serves more than 2,000 men per year. At least a million new girls per year are forced into prostitution.

Kids are not, of course, injured only through sexual exploitation. A half-million children die every year from starvation or other direct results of so-called debt payment from Third World countries--from the colonies--to those countries which lend them money while holding their resources and infrastructures as collateral--colonialism in the twenty-first century--and eleven million children die annually from easily treatable diseases. This latter has been called by the World Health Organization director-general 'a silent genocide.'

This is not counting the children who are simply beaten. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 1993, 614,000 American children were physically abused, 300,000 were sexually abused, 532,000 were emotionally abused, 507,000 were physically neglected, and 585,000 were emotionally neglected. 565,000 of these children were killed or seriously injured. That's just in the United States.

So here's the question: Do all these numbers--or, more precisely, the reality behind these numbers--imply that we hate children? Perhaps the answer would be more evident if we simply invert the question: "Do we value children?"

The answer, of course, is yes. One to two dollars per fuck, unless we happen to be in the Philippines, in which case it will cost us six dollars to have sex with a six-year-old.

So let me put the question another way: Was slavery in the United States based on hatred of the Africans, or was it based on economics? Is hate even the right word?

The problem we have in answering (or even asking) these questions comes from the fact that hatred, felt long enough and deeply enough, no longer feels like hatred. It feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are. Rape is not a hate crime because our hatred of women is transparent. Child prostitution is not a hate crime for the same reason that beating a child is not a hate crime, because our hatred of children is transparent. The economic murder of children (or creating the economic conditions for their slavery as prostitutes) is not a hate crime because we've held this hatred long enough to enshrine it into our macroeconomic policies.

If we did not hate children, we would not cause or even allow them to be destroyed by any of these means. And if we do not love even our children, what, precisely, can we truly say we love?

Avatar: The Machine-Race's Hidden History and the Indigenous Resistance

Avatar

Part 1: Newsreels

By way of introduction, let me tell you a brief story. Last year, while I was staying with friends in State College, PA, my parents visited me. At a loss of what to do after a sumptuous Thai meal with coconut curry, we decided to head to the movies to see the heralded 'Slumdog Millionare'. Cinematically I found the film quite good. The plot was predictably drole, but so be it. Early on though, there was something that was shown that was critically interesting. I speak of the scene of communal Hindu violence, where the slum lived in by Muslims is overrun with stick and bat-wielding Hindus who beat and kill their fellow citizens. Though the location of the film is Mumbai, I couldn't help but think back to 2002, in Gujarat, when 1,000 citizens, mostly Muslim, were killed and possibly 100,000, again, mostly Muslim, were driven from their homes in a systematic attack on those whom the Gujarati Hindi had felt were responsible for the deaths of 58 Hindi Pilgrims in the burning of the Sabarmati Express Railway car. The Sabarmati incident was never officially investigated. All this made the portion of 'Slumdog' poignant, in the sense of the roots of the word, poindre, to pierce with the tip of a sword or needle.

All of this is to say that there are times when styles of film stray across one-another, where documentary enters seeming-fiction. Such blurrings undoubtedly quicken the response of those who view art, by mirroring reality, however dimly perceived. My purpose here is to explain why the facts and the fiction are not as far apart as at first perceived.

Part 2: The Endless War

In the case of Avatar, the war against the indigenous people is represented from, presumably, the indigenous point of view. The film is worthy of praise on several accounts. Most demonstrably, it does attempt to render some of the inanimate connections indigenous persons feel with the land and all its inhabitants visible. It presents the desire to avoid unnecessary destruction in a way that is genuine. In the end though, the film does not extend to a level of self-review necessary for the present situation, or even for that matter, historical accuracy.

I do not offer the following as a comprehensive history, rather as the briefest of glances into a very dark past.

For 500 years in the Americas, the indigenous have been hounded, captured, experimented on, misunderstood, forcibly sterilized, poisoned and largely exterminated. The history of colonialism is a history of looting, of subjugation, of isolation, of torture and of genocide. The 'enlightened' cultures of Europe were unable in their race to explore and understand the world to spend time to listen to the indigenous view, other than to prostitute it as a means for initial survival, and then self-enrichment and profit. As far as cultural entitlement for the sake of creation of art, those beneficent gifts we should be supposedly grateful to society for, for every Shakespeare, there is a Bishop Diego de Landa, the priest who decided in 1562 to censor the Mayan texts of the people he was visiting by burning nearly all of them. For every Wordsworth who spoke of returning to nature, there was a tribe of Indians who were forcibly removed from their homes, which were in nature.

As concerns religion, doctrinally speaking, every time Jesus was introduced to a community, he kicked out indigenous gods who related to the mountains and the rains and the skies of the place. In the Americas, in the Middle East, Jesus was used, in this case, as the homeless wanderer's island of refuge. The only means of praying to Jesus, for many, was then to displace others the way that they themselves have been displaced.

In the south, Conquistadors were coercing the locals to abandon the gods of their place. In the north the Anglo response was much the same, though most recently the most abhorent were the practices of Indian Reservations & of the Boarding Schools in America & Canada. While many acknowledge that Indians were forced onto reservations, destroying their traditional lifestyle, and that those reservations were continuously shrunken to fit the needs of the largely white society, what is less acknowledged is that the war for resources and land never ceased. It has continued until the moment you are reading this sentence, and will continue afterwards. The war for land now takes place often in the courts, and in protracted land disputes over cattle grazing rights, over uranium mining, over coal mining, over oil drilling, over tree-cutting and they concern often those places least visible to society at large. It takes place as well with those who are allowed to farm, and those who are not.

In the US, cattle grazing rights, as in the case of the Dunn sisters of Western Shoshone, often come into question, and when resultant legal fees become too vast, the fees become the means of eviction for persons unable to civilly defend their right to exist on the land. The situation has been replicated in Mexico, where a million and a half farmers, many of whom are indigenous persons, have been made homeless by the government incentives for large corn agribusiness. In the Amazon, the indigenous are fighting oil exploration that is intensifying by the day as the global thirst for oil increases.

All of this is a means of introducing the film Avatar in a way that is genuine. The Na'vi are not a tribe of aliens on a far-away planet, they are the indigenous on this planet. The year is not a far-away time in the future, it is the present year, and the indigenous are not winning the battle, at this point they are merely surviving.

Part 3: Education, boarding schools, Conquistadors

When the Conquistadors brought their means of interpreting the world to the shores of the Americas, they brought Jesus. It was useful for them that Jesus was contained in a book, and that the book could be taken over an ocean. In this sense, it would have been absurd, for instance, for a few of the San of South Africa to cross the Atlantic and ask the U'wa people of the Amazons to respect the desert as their relative. The indigenous view of the Earth is perhaps summed up in the question they might have asked the arriving Spaniards, 'what awful difficulty compelled you to leave your home?'

For those who live in concert with the seasons and the earth, it is difficult to understand why anyone would desire to leave their home, let alone poison their home, as western societies seem to increasingly feel is acceptable.

Moving towards the modern times and how the educational system operates in western societies, the school for the indigenous in Avatar, promoted by Grace & her collegues, would have doubtless been filled with the finest technology available, computers that held the knowledge of the other planet at the fingertips of those who used it. But the question becomes, would this knowledge bring one closer to the reality of being alive on Pandora, or further away? Perhaps once the Na'vi learned all the names for the plants that Grace and her collegues had to offer, they began to see that Grace & her collegues were only interested in plants as specimens, not as relatives. From the point of view of the indigenous of the Americas, education has been a realm of bankrupted beliefs that destroy the land for the sake of one, possibly two, or at most three generation's worth of comfort and convenience. It sacrifices the long-term viablity of the planet, and all its people in the process. No one who considers the state of the planet honestly can say that we are creating the means to have another seven generations of humans on the planet. Certainly not equitably, and far from sustainably.

Similarly to the conquistador model, the United States, Canada & Australia had, for about 100 years and until the mid 1980s, a policy that encouraged children to move away from their families and cultures, encouraged them to abandon their cultures and languages, all for the sake of assimilation into a culture that, again, views the earth as a resource, and life-systems as banks which can be drawn upon by poisoning, and awaiting the large deposit of 'clean-up' at some point in the future. Such a bankrupt set of beliefs does not survive long without the machine aids that the present society is forced to design for itself, when it found itself homeless and cold within a land which it did not understand.

Part 4: Guatemala, Acteal, Bagua

The list of slaughter of native peoples is long, and will not be recounted fully here, or anywhere. As a poet once said, 'you can die once, twice, a hundred times, but you can't die a thousand times.' The most critical thing to remember is that the hostility towards indigenous people did not end with the cessation of the Indian wars of the 1800s in the United States, nor with the violence towards native people through the Boarding School policies in the US, Canada and Australia. This short list will not include those killed by official government policies of resource extraction, with the most criminal forms of neglect including poisoning aquifers with arsenic, barium and uranium. No, what I wish to record here are actual massacres, and recent ones, that no one seems to much notice. Those who disappear much the same way that those in Gujarat disappeared to everyone save those who lost husbands and daughters and wives and sons and shops and dreams in those days of state-sponsored terror.  

In Guatemala, during the 1980s, a protracted civil war was carried out, largely with state forces attacking villagers, who were predominately Mayan Indians. The state was armed and backed by The United States, and when the math was finally worked out, the Guatemalan Truth Commission found that 200,000 people had been killed, and another 2 million driven from their homes. The vast majority of these people were the indigenous Mayan Indians, rural farmers living in the highlands and surviving modestly on what the land provided.

A little later, and further north, the Mexican Government shot dead 50 people, including 4 pregnant women, in the massacre of Acteal, in December of 1997. The government has decided that no genuine investigation is needed or will be forthcoming. The massacre is often viewed as an official government response to the Zapatista movement, a group fighting for indigenous rights to the land on which people were born, and on which they derive their livelihood and meaning for living.

Which brings us near to the present moment, and where the fiction of Avatar meets the historical reality in which we are living. Last year, a group of indigenous protesters began a blockade in response to prospective oil removal that was to commence after the Peruvian President Alan Garcia declared 93% of the Peruvian Amazon up for sale to the highest bidder. The Constitutional Decrees that the Garcia Presidency enacted were declared unconstitutional, but in the soft way that those in power have of pushing a boot onto the throat of those who are suffering, the very laws that were declared unconstitutional by the Peruvian Congress for over six months remained in the middle-realm of bureaucracy and had not been actually removed from the books. In this sense, the morality of the Peruvian Congressional Representatives, and their constituents was assuaged, but the multi-national oil companies, such as BP, started to grow impatient.  

The indigenous communities, some 3000 tribes over 200,000 villages, was organized by AIDESEP, and led by Alberto Pizzango towards a set of strikes designed to shut down the ongoing oil exploration. Far from a benign walk in the woods, oil exploration often sets off dynamite beneath the surface at intervals of as little as 100 yards, critically undermining the root systems of many trees and killing many life forms who do not feel that "dynamite" is the tongue in which they would prefer to speak. Roads are built with migrant labor, many of whom are poor landless peasants.  The roads undermine the forests integrity and the workers bring with them disease that many of the local tribes have never experienced before in their history, diseases to which they have no immunity.  As if the initial exploration were not insulting enough, the communities who are subjugated to oil exploration are often only given the barest of notice and consultation, and rarely, if ever, given the ability to reject a proposal on the grounds that they feel it would not serve their interests. If oil exploration and extraction does occur, tribes have more roads cut across their land, roads, malaria from puddles caused by excessive soil erosion and a massive poisoning of the fresh water supplies upon which they depend.

So, AIDESEP organized a series of protests to demand remedy to the situation, and on day 55 of the non-violent civil disobedience, the State Police, armed with US made automatic rifles and sub-machine guns and helicopters and sniper rifles, opened fire in a pre-dawn assault, killing as many as 90 people.  A group of Indians, protesting the misuse of their land, fight against the onslaught of the machine age. Indeed, in this case, James Cameron's Avatar could not be more timely, however not for the reason generally proposed. The film does not represent the mining rites of 'unobtainium' on a far-away fictional world, but our own planet, in our own time, and with our own contradictions. Indigenous persons are fighting the machine in the Amazon, in Indonesia where they fight lumber corporations, in Africa where they fight oil plundering, and in all the places that society at large has preferred to look away from.

Part 5: Grace & The New Piracy

As suggested earlier, it is not the realm of fiction in which Avatar operates. All premises in the film are factual and actual to our present time. They do not address scope however, and this is most endemic of Grace and her eco-collegues. In an effort to have some amount of 'good guys' on the side of the racial divide perpetrating destruction, the film paints Grace et al as fighting the good fight with the Na'vi. The truth in the world today, is that bio-prospecting of the genes of indigenous peoples is a profitable business these days, with researchers looking for ever more unique combinations of DNA in the search for cures to diseases. These diseases are, largely speaking, often the result of a society that is poisoning itself and the planet. So the 'civilized' world is again looking towards the 'uncivilized' for answers, in this case, to the very basis of life itself as interpreted by the western mind. It is as though given the ability to exist on the planet were not enough for scientists engaging in bio-piracy, they instead feel the need to reorder the universe, and then find some sense in that reordering. All of this, and the world in which the indigenous are allowed to exist grows smaller by the day, the borders of the reservation are again being redrawn.

Part 6: The End...?

In this sense, the film is not fiction, it is as near to reality as mass-market film gets these days. What is critical to understand, perhaps the most critical to understand, is that there is a fundamental un-truth about the film, or perhaps better to say short-sightedness. In the end, the machine-race is forced to leave Pandora to return to 'their broken world'. What is unstated is that every time that indigenous peoples have won a victory, here as elsewhere, every time that they have staved off 'development', it has only been a temporary reprieve. The machine-race always returns. It is always hungry. In today's society, it seems that no one can deny that the need for resources and energy is intensifying, and that resources and energy supplies are diminishing rapidly. With this in mind, the machine race will return to Pandora. They will hire another project manager, they will hire another NGO to do damage control for them, they will control media outlets more adeptly, they will misinform the public wherever possible. Keep in mind, when it is more profitable to cut down a forest than it is to keep it, the result of outcomes is utterly predictable. Perhaps then the only sense that Avatar is truly fictional is that the Na'vi are allowed to win.