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Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…ng on your perspective and imagination: a tale of American colonization, a cheap rip-off of Pocahantas or Russian science fiction, an allegory for the Chinese industrialization process. Writing in the New York Times last week, Dave Itzkoff outlined the many ways in which James Cameron’s Avatar has been praised and/or condemned, the ways viewers have interpreted the movie as an allegory for this or that, the way it might even serve as a “Rorschach…

Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

By Jay Michaelson

…an’t quite pinpoint what all of these had in common, except that they were cheap, over-simplified, and kitschy. And thanks to Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, the Frankfurt School, and a legion of writers and musicians allergic to the cliché, I came to reject kitsch and its quasi-fascistic associations. Feel this way, think this way, act this way—no! It took another several years before I really understood that some people, perhaps most people,…

Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

By Haroon Moghul

…rd is a real American, because Bill Gates is American. Those of you using iPhones, by the way, are probably Iranians and should be detained or deported. Because Steve Jobs was part Syrian, and Syria is part Iranian, which means your iPhone auto-correct is lying to you. Come to think of it, how do we know Lindsey Graham is not lying to us? How do we know Lindsey Graham’s not an Iranian? What if he’s the Manchurian—or should I say Mazandaranian!—can…

RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

By Nathan Schneider

…n the last chapters of After God, you seem to judge their black-and-white worldviews inadequate for the crises of the modern world. How do you stack up this mastery they have of the media—much more so than liberal religious movements—with their inability to solve the big problems? It is a very interesting question. When you look at the analyses of people like Timothy LaHaye or Hal Lindsey on the contemporary scene, they’re very sophisticated. A fo…

Israel’s Immigration Debate: “Where is the Jewish Spirit?”

By Mati Wagner

…rocess their discriminatory work permits. These “guest” workers, who today number between 250,000 and 400,000 (half of whom are illegal) did not only toil. They fell in love and established families and had children, probably more than 2,000 children, who were sent to state-run schools like Tel Aviv’s Bialik-Rogozin to learn with young Israelis their age to read, to write and to add and subtract—in Hebrew. They also were taught about the miraculou…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: Missing Voices

By Daniel Ramirez

…re has been much hypocrisy in the immigration debate. All have sinned. The cheap salads and meats consumed at immigration policy conferences and stored in the homes of suburban America were placed there through the labor and sweat of “illegals” (so, too, were those suburban homes); the wine and bread served at communion tables arrived through “illegal” hands. After foisting “free trade” schemes on to the vulnerable Mexican countryside, we feign sh…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…des might agree that the rhetoric of the Lou Dobbs and Glenn Becks of the world is too mean—and that it leads too quickly to an objectification of human beings, which no religion wants. That objectification begets the kind of violence we are increasingly seeing. People of faith agree that such violence is to be avoided at all costs. You don’t have to be pro-immigrant to be anti-sneer. We could come to consensus around the need to change hate-langu…

Possible Heir to Dalai Lama Cleared of Corruption Charges

By Tsering Namgyal

…ny analyst and former official with a view on Tibet and China could fire a cheap shot. The Indian government’s assertiveness vis-à-vis China is refreshing (though achieving it at the expense of refugees and Buddhist monks who fled China at 14 to get an education smacks of bad taste.) The affair has also unsettled the sentiments of those living in India’s predominantly Buddhist Himalayan region, which separates China from India. There were large pr…

Why Egypt is America’s Enemy

By Haroon Moghul

…red. Indeed where does capitalism lead us except the best of all possible worlds?). A liberal! A had-been! But you know what? El-Beblawi is still a liberal. For in its otherwise excellent coverage of the military’s violent assault, the Times cannot escape a challenge to its fundamental worldview. Like the Muslims who cannot believe al-Qaeda are Muslims who (appear to) believe that what they do is justified by Islam. This doesn’t mean that liberal…

Disney’s Lump of Coal

By Anthea Butler

…only a movie, but movies shape how people, especially children, view the world. In the case of New Orleans and the myriad of cultures it holds, to stint on all of the facets that make New Orleans and Louisiana the wonderful, complex, and sometimes exasperating place that it is is a crime. Disney’s princesses, once again, may have big beautiful eyes, but while kids are enjoying the view, Disney’s hack job of deconstructing history by making it “cu…