Watching Avatar in La Paz

Last night I finally watched Avatar-- a pirated copy, dubbed in Spanish, obviously not 3D, which was perhaps not ideal but sort of fitting because this is the way people watch movies here. The film itself was pretty much how I thought it would be: nothing we haven't seen before in Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, The Matrix (far superior but nonetheless very influential) etc., although it was nice to see the U.S. army get its ass beat by the N'avi with help from the entire fancifully-animated ecosystem. I watched it with Luchi, who was was slightly more impressed than I was: as an artist she appreciated Cameron's world-building skills, but she was concerned with the "caudillismo" of Jake's call-to-arms (actually, I tried to convince her, it's far worse than caudillismo, because it's literally puppet caudillismo, why the fuck do they need a Northamerican soldier in a borrowed body to tell them how to resist? Yeah, THAT has ever really happened in the history of anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare) and particularly, since she is also a farmer, with the material UNreality of the N'avi and their world. What do they eat? She kept asking. Yes, there were some sexy bow-and-arrow scenes, but the film never showed the people eating, much less gathering, harvesting, doing any sort of food-related ritual that would seem important for a community this "close to the land." She was also very concerned that Jake simply turned in his old dragon for a more prestigious model (in order to get the entire N'avi community to bow down to him in a pivotal scene) without a backward glance. Her critiques, then, were actually about Cameron's inability to imagine a community with an actually sustainable connection to the natural world, which is kind of interesting. It's the same focus on the concrete details of work that I got when I interviewed Bolivians about Peace Corps propaganda photos that showed volunteers doing allegedly universal "development work": but what are they actually doing? What are those crops they're growing? Are they going to market? It doesn't make sense that they would be selling crafts in that space., etc, questions that expose the ridiculousness of any universal development idea and of plopping 20 year-olds down in the middle of a community and ecosystem they don't know anything about, expecting them to use some kind of inborn American ingenuity to "develop" it--actually, sort of the ethos of Avatar too, though they do pointedly refuse any and all development interventions, which was nice.

Despite my predictable annoyance, I was interested in watching Avatar here, because the comparisons between the N'avi and Evo Morales have been ubiquitous: Evo has stood up to the U.S. government in significant ways, defending their connection to the natural world against, for example, the DEA's "coca eradication" programs and other neoliberal imperialist projects; and MAS' color is blue, following an interesting post-Cold War global color-reversal trend that perhaps signals the new new left's (or, as Arturo Escobar posits here, the new post-leftist, post-development, and above all anti-imperialist politic which is most fully elaborated by Bolivian indigenista social movement politics ) focus on nature that Cameron also grasped, perhaps the reason the film has been embraced by insurgents all over the world, despite their lack of a an ex-G.I. savior to lead them.

Evo himself went to see Avatar, in supposedly only the third movie-watching experience of his life, and commented that "the film contains a high degree of fantasy, but is at the same time a profound depiction of resistance against capitalism and the fight to defend the natural world."

Evo is right that the film critiques the continued insistence that Bolivia "modernize" no matter what the cost to its land and people, by even liberal U.S. voices: a recent New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright on the possibilities of extracting lithium in Bolivia condescendingly calls Evo "a creature of his biography" with "a mystical attachment to coca," calls Evo's attempts at a social welfare state "out of date," and quotes an opponent (one of an overwhelming number quoted in the article) saying "Evo is Aymara, and the Aymara see the world as a fight between good and evil, like 'Star Wars.' For him, the forces of good are coca growers and the coca leaf. The evil is the D.E.A. and the U.S." It's worth noting that a) Bolivia is not the country that formulated either star wars or ANY of the manichean "you're with us or against us" justifications for pre-emptive war that define the era of U.S. hegemony; but that b) Evo was nearly beaten to death by D.E.A.-affiliated Bolivian troops for his work in the coca-growers union, so the shoe kind of fits here. See this excellent article by Suzanna Reiss to learn about how the Obama administration is, if anything, exacerbating the entirely imperialist--i.e. concerned much more with governments' attempts to hold onto and redistribute their resources than with stemming drug distribution and consumption--drug war.

Anyway, the New Yorker article: Wright refuses to budge an inch from the developmentalist paradigm, lamenting Bolivia's failure to emerge from its "pre-industrial cocoon"; worries openly that now that Evo has expelled the DEA, that "the drug trade" will "corrupt Bolivian society"; and, in perhaps the most disgusting and libelous move of the article, characterizes the entire cycle of anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal uprisings of the early and mid 2000s as about silly age-old anti-Chilean hostilities. Nothing could be further from the truth: the vast majority of Bolivians are attempting to reject neoliberal capitalism on purpose, in order to (re)conceptualize ways of life not based on modernization, endless accumulation, and environmental destruction. At least James Cameron gets that.

Romance Kills: The Global Gift Economy

It's not just conflict diamonds. Or plastic surgery deaths. Or the monumental waste of destination weddings.

In Kenya and Colombia, two of the world's largest flower-exporting countries, the mostly female flower industry workers face criminally long hours, repetitive stress injuries, mandatory pregnancy tests and other forms of blatant gender discrimination, and pesticide-related illnesses, all so the inarticulate global elite can reinforce heteronormativity and subjugate their partners and crushes (see Derrida on the gift economy) by saying it with flowers.

Click here for the campaign to stop Dole Fresh Flowers from crushing unions formed by their workers at their Flores la Fragrancia, who formed the Untrafragrancia union in response to repeated labor violations and the horrible working conditions sketched above.

Here's another petition in support of Colombian flower workers and their right to organize.

Also, has Obama begun to dissent from the neoliberal agenda? In a recent speech in Wisconsin, he questioned the benefits of "trade deals like NAFTA," at least for U.S. workers. So now will he rethink stances like his recent support of the Peru Free Trade Agreement? Will he abandon the creepy patriotic rhetoric and expand his framework to include a conception of global labor rights? Like the plaintive signholder braving the pouring rain in Central Square all day Super Tuesday, "I HOPE[,] OBAMA."

Flat Earth Watch

Check out this review of a new book by economist Ha-Joon Chang debunking Thomas Friedman's flat earth theory.  It's not as radical as it could be (not, for example, exposing the entire system of free trade as an exploitative sham), but it does explain how free trade policies are about powerful countries, who themselves became rich by protecting their own markets, forcing poor countries to open their markets in the name of development.

If you want you can also read my comment,which is the 6th one down, entitled "We were never good samaritans." It was 4:10 in the morning so my use of pronouns is a little ambiguous, but I was trying to explain how from 1947-73, which the book argues was the golden age of U.S. Good Samaritanism, the United States actually set the stage for neoliberalism by deposing democratically elected leaders all over the world and installing dictators who would capitulate to our economic interests. 

And while we're on the subject, I also want to say that those of us on the left should be very afraid of the Democratic candidates lionizing misogynist racist warmongers like JFK and LBJ, both of whom  sold out the civil rights movement in favor of military adventurism (see JFK giving a speech about the "southern half of the globe" as "the great battleground for the expansion of freedom today" on the very day in May 1961 that the first Freedom Riders were imprisoned in a show trial; LBJ drowning out, then selling out Fannie Lou Hamer and the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic Convention in favor of the segregationist delegation; LBJ defunding Head Start to pay for the war on Vietnam, explaining later, in that fun folksy way of his,  how "that bitch of a war killed the lady [he] really loved--the Great Society").  I suppose this is all of a piece with our backlash-fueled misremembering of the sixties generally, but the fact that Hillary and Barack are extolling the virtues of men whose main achievements were leading us into a horrible, vicious, immoral war is something we should be figuring out and watching closely. Protest at the DNC anyone?