The headline should really have been ”Neoconservatives Attack…” because the dicussion is exclusively about that group. What has enraged them is Avatar's negative portrayal of US-style military action - as John Podhoretz puts it, the movie
”does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.”
(Avatarocious The Weekly Standard December 29,2009 )
Perhaps more to the point, it invites sympathy for lightly-armed populations defending their homes when assailed by a military Juggernaut — next Americans might start seeing Palestinians through elongating Blue lenses!
So the disaccreditation campaign cranks up in — with Ross Douthit detailed to mobilize the Evangelical Rubes by complaining about Avatar’s ”Pantheism” in a space found for him on The New York Times Op-Ed page - Heaven and Nature December 20 2009.
Pantheism…the great threat to America’s survival.
Of course there is no mention at all of the fact that the central animus of the theme is anti-white racism — which actually is the great threat to America.
Still, I never remember approving of anything written by John Podhoretz, and rarely by Jonah Goldberg. Both do an excellent job ridiculing Avatar’s bankrupt rubbish dump of a plot. Podhoretz:
The real question is this: If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting? Would it hold our attention? The answer is, unquestionably no. There's no chance anybody would even have put it into production…Does the technical mastery on display in Avatar outweigh the unbelievably banal and idiotic plot, the excruciating dialogue, the utter lack of any quality resembling a sense of humor? And will all these qualities silence the discomfort coming from that significant segment of the American population that, we know from the box-office receipts for Iraq war movies this decade, doesn't like it when an American soldier is the bad guy?
Jonah Goldberg (also on the ”rile up the Fundies” squad):
You probably don't need a long synopsis of James Cameron's half-billion-dollar epic, "Avatar," in part because even if you haven't seen it, you've seen it.
( ”Avatar’ and the faith instinct Los Angeles Times December 29 2008)
Nice job, guys. Pity it wasn’t in a better cause.
