Avatar evokes an ecologically and spiritually mature culture under threat of destruction by corporate mercenaries. Sadly, it relies on a converted mercenary to rally the victims and save the day with brute violence.

Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010

EDITORIAL

Obama and Avatar

We had 3-D movies in the 1950s, and we have seen action flicks and war movies aplenty. So despite all the techie buzz, the new technology used to make Avatar isn't what makes this movie significant, just as the 2008 Obama campaign's innovative use of the Web to raise money and get its message heard wasn't the source of its importance.

Avatar is one of the first movies to tell the story of Western colonial/imperial arrogance from the standpoint of its victims in a way that may affect mass consciousness in the Western world. By situating the story on another planet and giving its characters a fantastical sci-fi appearance, James Cameron was able to soften the radical message implicit in the film: that corporate forces, driven solely by the desire to maximize their own profits, are engaged in wanton destruction of indigenous peoples whose connection to nature and to each other is on a higher spiritual level than those of the imperialists and the armies they have financed and trained to do their bidding.

Moreover, the film offers a critique of corporate-funded militarism by suggesting that planet Earth has been destroyed by deadly technologies developed by modern science to assist profit-obsessed corporations in dominating or destroying those who stand in their way. The film contrasts the corporation-wracked Earth to Pandora, an Earth-like moon in the Alpha Centauri star system. Pandora's harmonious ecosystem is nurtured by the goodness of human-like blue-skinned beings called the Na'vi (perhaps derived from the Hebrew word navi, which means "prophet") who live in harmony with nature and worship a mother goddess called Eywa. Viewers cannot help but identify with the Na'vi and their fundamentally pacific, environmentally sensitive, and spiritually alive consciousness, and the movie draws us into their struggle to survive attacks from an interstellar capitalist empire seeking to expand once again to capture more wealth.

Obama too had some of this kind of allure. In 1996 Obama approached Tikkun and asked to speak at our national conference in Chicago -- and he gave a rip-roaring pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-labor speech. In 2006 when I met with him privately in his office, he reassured me that he felt fully aligned with Tikkun not only on Israel but also on domestic policy and on our vision of a Global Marshall Plan (though he warned me he thought it would be a hard sell "inside the Beltway"). When he and I shared a platform in the Capitol at an event honoring what would have been the eightieth birthday of Robert F. Kennedy, he spoke eloquently of RFK's willingness to oppose the war in Vietnam and insist on a strategy of nonviolence for social change, implying that we should follow that same path today.

There was little chance that Obama would have beaten Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries had he not gone out of his way to convince followers that he would challenge the warmakers, the corporate powers, the environmental polluters, the human rights violators, and the power of moneyed interests in ways that the Clintons had not done and were unlikely to do should they be restored to the White House. When he contrasted the war in Iraq with a more justifiable war in Afghanistan, his listeners understood him to be referring to the war that had been quickly won to overthrow the Taliban after they refused to surrender Bin Laden to the United States after September 11, not to a significant escalation of American involvement there should he become president (and most supporters heard his words on this as a kind of sop to the conservatives to show he would be "strong" as president).

When Obama talked about "change you can believe in" and told crowds of labor unionists, environmentalists, peace activists, feminists, and tens of millions of Americans who had become disgusted at the war in Iraq that it was we who were "the people we have been waiting for," he implied that he had a plan to make sure that finally our voices would be heard, while the corporate lobbyists and their power would be blocked.

It was these messages that energized millions of people to reach out to their neighbors and to strangers in states in which they did not live, as well as to donate generously to his campaign.

Why Obama's "Realism" Doesn't Work for Him or Us

No wonder then that Obama's core supporters feel disillusioned and despairing after his first year in office. Some have bought the notion that Obama did the best he could but couldn't possibly be expected to stand up to corporate interests, given the willingness of Republicans in Congress to do everything they could to block his agenda. Others believe that he intentionally lied to us and was simply another manipulative politician.

I doubt both of these explanations of Obama's behavior.

More likely is that Obama, once he won the nomination, was surrounded by corporate interests, bankers, congressional champions of the military-industrial complex, and powerful security and intelligence operatives who provided him with "inside information" that colored his viewpoints. Moreover, the media and Democrats did nothing to counter these forces because they have for decades portrayed capitulation to all the aforementioned special interests as the only "realistic" option in American politics.

I remember reading the supposedly liberal columnist E.J. Dionne celebrating how pragmatic, realistic, and non-ideological Obama had become. I knew that this was a kiss of death.

Let me explain why.

American politics, like most aspects of our lives, is shaped by two conflicting belief systems that most of us have internalized. On our right hand we have the worldview of fear, which is based on the idea that people are concerned only with satisfying their own desires and pursuing their own narrow material self-interests. To the extent that we accept this view of "reality," we come to believe that we must dominate and control others in order to achieve these goals, assuming that, if we fail, others will dominate and control us. So in this picture of "the real world," one has no choice but to seek power and control over others. Similarly, in the larger national sphere, this worldview holds that homeland security comes from power and domination over others. Domination can be "soft" (achieved through economic, media, and diplomatic power) or "hard" (achieved through military power), but the goal is the same: to get others to do what we want them to do -- namely, advance our interests.

On the left hand we have the worldview of hope and love, based on our earliest experiences with a mother or "mothering" person who showed us love and caring in our earliest years when she or he had no reasonable expectation of a good return on her or his investment of time, money, energy, and love. She was "giving to give," not "giving to get." Our memories of that experience (an experience which most of us have shared at least partially, even if the situation was psychologically complicated and had neurotic elements as well), we come to recognize that there is another way to achieve security both for ourselves and for our country: to create caring and loving relationships with others and to manifest a spirit of generosity, open-heartedness, and recognition that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else in this world, not to mention the well-being of the planet itself.

Now most of us have both of these stories in our head, and at any given moment we are on a continuum between the right hand and the left hand. And so it is for everyone else. Where exactly we are on that continuum is shaped by our childhood experiences, our adult life experiences, the worldviews we accept, the messages of the religions and media to which we are exposed, and our sense of where the social energy is moving in the society around us. To the extent that we experience the social energy moving toward fear, as we did after September 11, the stories about not trusting others seem to have much more relevance, and those voices of fear lead us to accept policies, movies, TV shows, magazines, editorial commentaries, and political leaders who articulate the worldview of fear and domination. However, when the social energy seems to be moving more toward hope, the memories of hopeful and love-oriented experiences become more dominant in our consciousness, and those writers, poets, movies, media, political leaders, and social policies that reflect a spirit of generosity seem more plausible and rational to us.

And that's how it is all over the world, and all through history.

So when Obama seemed to embody this hopeful message, people allowed themselves to hope. But when Obama began to appear to capitulate to the special interests, then that hopeful part, which had been disappointed in most people many times before, started to go back into hiding. Tens of millions of people are now feeling embarrassment and even humiliation that they allowed themselves to hope in wake of the 2008 elections.

How Boldness Could Have Worked -- and Still Could

There are a variety of reasons why hope started to disappear. It began with Obama's selection of advisers in late 2008, well before he was being constrained by the Republicans. Obama had promised to "govern from the Center," and his supporters imagined that to mean that he would surround himself with advisers representing a wide variety of political perspectives. But instead, Obama only picked advisers who represented the center and right wings of the Democratic Party but no one representing the left wing of his own party, much less the social change movements that had made his nomination possible. No one can claim that Obama didn't have the freedom to make these choices from the start or that they would have never been confirmed in a Senate that had a sixty-vote Democratic majority and a strong tradition of letting the president pick his own advisers and Cabinet.

And of course, the problems go from there: the first was Obama's failure to close Guantánamo and to prosecute the criminals from Bush on down who had allowed or ordered or participated in torture, in violation of American and international law. The idea that he couldn't do it without congressional consent is nonsense. Obama could have used his power as commander-in-chief to order those detainees to a military base in the United States or to a military base abroad where they could have been given a trial in accord with U.S. constitutional standards.

Obama and the Democrats should have insisted on changing Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster and enable majority votes to prevail. And had the Republicans filibustered that, the Democrats should have allowed them to prevent the government from functioning for months, thereby letting the Republicans take the blame for a do-nothing Congress.

Obama and the Democrats also could have:

• Refused to give trillions of dollars to failing banks and investment companies until the banks agreed to tough new regulations and until Congress allocated equal or more money to fund job creation and to save people whose newly raised mortgage payments made it difficult or impossible for them to stay in their homes
• Insisted that every dollar for defense be matched with an equal amount of dollars for education, the environment, and social welfare in the United States or with money to fund a Global Marshall Plan.
• Insisted that the minimum wage be raised to a "living wage" for all workers in the United States.
• Called for "Medicare for All" rather than for a deeply flawed health care reform involving huge giveaways to pharmaceutical firms and insurance companies that seemed to do little for ordinary citizens, whose health care and pharmaceutical costs have been rising at alarming rates.
• Reframed their program from a focus on "rights" and "entitlements" to a focus on our collective need to care for each other, identifying the government as our vehicle to show that we take seriously the biblical command to love our neighbors as ourselves, and that we understand that, in the globalized world, our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone on the planet.

But even if Obama did not have the support of his fellow Democrats to do any of this, he could still have done the one thing that would have fulfilled his promise: he could have told the truth as he saw it and used his four years in office as the way to convince people of a new worldview. Reagan did that -- so even with a Democratic majority in Congress, he was able to convince the American public to trust in the capitalist market and in military solutions to global problems. He persuaded the public to distrust the government and to not care for the most disadvantaged, and his worldview eventually shaped policy not only during his own administration but also throughout the Clinton years and beyond.

Here are some actions that Obama should have taken and still could pursue:

• Call for a national bank to give direct support to create jobs and support homeowners and small businesses in accordance with the biblical principle of no-interest loans.
• Explain why "Medicare for All" makes more sense than continuing to allow the profit motive to shape our health care and pharmaceutical industries.
• Insist on a carbon tax to reduce emissions to less than 350 parts per million, explain why "growth" worldwide is inconsistent with planetary survival, and explain why we need to simplify our lives and reduce the production of goods that have little social value.
• Support a Global Marshall Plan and explain why a strategy of generosity toward the people of the world is likely to be far more effective than pursuing a "war on terrorism" (as commander-in-chief, he had the power to declare that war won and over, to explain that from now on marginal crazies such as the underpants bomber or the handful of al-Qaida members should be dealt with as common criminals and not as a serious threat to our survival, and to replace the militarists with generosity-oriented leaders in the Defense Department and throughout the Armed Services).
• Support all the ideas that strengthen Americans' confidence in the hopeful message that we are "all in it together and that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and of the planet itself."

Obama could have ensured electoral and legislative victories in the long run if he had strengthened the public's confidence in the possibility of a world based on caring for each other. His success is contingent on his ability to help us see through the pathetic calls to be "realistic" -- calls that always lead to phony solutions and make us worse off down the line. He could have encouraged us to extend the same compassion and caring to the victims of global and domestic poverty (a structural disaster caused by global capitalism) that we now extend only to victims of hurricanes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters. And he could have prepared us for the inevitable assaults he would receive from people in both major parties and the ridicule that he would receive in the media, and urge us to turn to alternative media and to alternative candidates who were willing to join him in standing up for the change that Americans had mandated him to pursue with an electoral majority larger than that achieved by any of the presidential candidates in the past twenty-five years.

If we had a president who would do that and who would speak equally honestly about his own political party and its immoral compromises with powerful interests, he could become an invincible political force capable of reshaping his own party to be more faithful to the principles that he articulated in 2008.

How Avatar Sheds Light on Obama

So now we come to the great problem of both Avatar the movie and Obama the political leader. In each case, the solution to the real problems that they dramatically show us -- problems involving the forces of violence, environmental destruction, materialist greed and selfishness, and reliance on a morally blind version of technology and science -- involves a lone hero straight out of an old cowboy Western movie.

In Avatar, Jake Sully (the white, paraplegic former Marine who through the wonders of science gets to explore Pandora in a Na'vi body) starts off as a spy for the imperialists but undergoes a transformation of ethical consciousness as he falls in love with the Na'vi princess Naytiri and becomes connected to the wisdom of nature and its goddess. In the end, he becomes the indispensible leader of a Na'vi resistance and the key to its success.

Similarly, the social movements that made Obama's election possible lionized him as a Black hero who would singlehandedly save us from the legacy of white supremacy and capitalism-gone-wild. But unlike in Avatar, where the native people join forces to defeat the violent imperialists, Obama was elected to lead the most powerful military nation the world has ever seen and has chosen to pursue its wars against the inhabitants of nations that had nothing to do with September 11. Instead of mobilizing for the foreseeable and quite inevitable struggle that would occur once Obama won, the social movements that brought him to power retreated into passivity, imagining that their hero would become their savior. This was the kiss of death.

This is where the fantasy of the one great individual hero, so deeply rooted in human culture, undermines the value of much that has been accomplished. Had movie maker James Cameron the vision to do so, he could have shown the Na'vi's process of coming to understand their collective power, which is precisely what has happened historically to make it possible for many colonized peoples to resist the ongoing domination of Western imperialists. Cameron missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to teach us all how to overcome our own self-doubts and our own fear of engaging in a struggle against overwhelming odds, a lesson that might have made it easier for Americans to identify and join with social change movements. Worse yet, Cameron glorifies violence in response to violence -- not a solution that has worked very well in history, because as we've been watching in Africa, Asia, and Europe over the past few decades, the violence originally directed against the outside imperialists can easily become a violence directed internally against domestic minorities or neighboring tribes, ethnicities, religions, or nations. Meanwhile, American social change movements have missed a unique opportunity to reach out to the American public by using this film as a vehicle to recruit people into movements to heal and transform the world.

A similar once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was missed with Obama during the financial meltdown: we squandered the opportunity (based on the transparent failure of the free market to "deliver the goods" and the obvious ways that selfishness and materialism had been at the root of that failure) to mobilize Americans for fundamental transformations of our economic and political system. Obama's passivity and compromises with the powerful, on the one hand, and his failure to use his position to legitimate and empower the very social movements that had helped him achieve the most powerful elected position in the world, on the other, combined with our own passivity and hero worship to contribute to this failure.

Imagine if Obama had pleaded with Americans in his Inauguration address (or even a year later in his 2010 State of the Union address) to become involved in a movement for social transformation, pointing them to a website identifying the two hundred most significant organizations doing work for peace, social justice, human rights, environmental sanity, and health care. And imagine if he had coupled that plea with an unequivocal statement of resolve to side with the powerless and the poor, the homeless and the hungry, and those all around the world who are seeking a world based on love and generosity. On the most practical level, those of us interested in continuing to build the movement that was emerging in 2008 were given no way to do that because the Obama operation transferred the millions of names and emails it had gathered in the campaign into a Democratic Party machine that spewed out calls to support Obama's agenda without ever letting us say what we thought might need change in that agenda. The grassroots energy of the campaign dwindled into a lifeless effort to get supporters to donate to Obama without having any way to influence the direction of his presidency.

Imagine if during his State of the Union Address in 2010 Obama had embraced a New Bottom Line and said that institutions, social practices, corporations, and government policies should be judged rational, efficient, or productive not only to the extent that they maximize money or power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe! Imagine what could have happened had he insisted that we hold ourselves accountable to those values and told us that we should hold him accountable to those values: he could have excited Americans once again, helped them overcome the despair that he himself contributed to creating, and put the focus on movements rather than on what he himself might accomplish on his own.

From Fear to Hope, from Passivity to Action

So here are the criteria we should use when assessing both Avatar and Obama: have they moved us from fear to hope, from passivity to action, from loneliness to a sense of community, from the individualism of the lone hero or even the lone voter to the energetic participant in a movement committed to healing and transforming the planet?

Well, the history isn't over yet, and what will happen is not fixed -- it is, in the final analysis, your choice and mine whether all that is good in Avatar and in Obama can become a source of strength for us going out and making history. I know that we have huge problems in doing this -- and that we need to find ways to make a social change movement feel nurturing to its participants and respectful to those whose power and wealth we challenge, even as we refuse to mute our critique of violent, war-oriented, and environmentally destructive, and morally insensitive policies and budgets.

We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives have exciting ideas, but I don't think we've yet been able to find the way to create local chapters that radiate the kind of warmth and nurturance to its members that reflect the ideals we articulate. And frankly, I don't really know how to make that happen without the local groups becoming so inwardly focused that those who want to change the world start to become alienated because they joined the NSP or the Tikkun Community not to have another support group but to get things done in the world. And I don't know how to help people in our movement understand that they need to recognize that in the category of "getting things done," one of the most important such things is changing how we think about the world, giving priority to our New Bottom Line, and challenging both in the Left and in the larger society the notion that passing some bill or getting some new policy is more important than changing the dominant worldview that makes truly significant policy changes possible.

So building these movements is something that takes a great deal of hard work and many types of approaches, some of which we have not yet developed and which we will have to try to create in future years. But there is no substitute for building a movement that has both a strong vision that can be conveyed to others and a strong sense of humility and commitment to embody more love, generosity of spirit, and forgiveness for ourselves and each other. In the final analysis, the healing this planet needs can only happen that way, when millions of us no longer look to some hero or savior, but really understand what was only a slogan for Obama: that we (with all our limitations, flaws, and mistakes) are the ones we've been waiting for!

Lerner, Michael. 2010.  Obama and Avatar. Tikkun 25(2): 7.http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010lerner1