The Supreme Court Decides that Wal-Mart is a Person

Fuck me three ways til Tuesday.

Today has been a hell of a day. First the racist, classist, and ugly young woman working at the Genius Bar at Apple, without looking at my brand new iPhone 3Gs, suggested that "some people," fall and smash their phones on purpose when new ones come out, so that they can get an upgrade. Therefore, she was going to have to charge me $200 to replace the glass front of my phone...which...by the way...was the only thing broken on the damn thing...the LCD and touch screens worked just fine. And I did my research, the glass costs $24. So I guess that's $175 for labor. Fuck you Genius Bar.

And then, I come home, and lo and behold I log into Facebook only to find that the Supreme Court has all the balls that seem to be missing from the Democratic members of Congress. Against 100 years of precedence, the Roberts Court (may your dick shrivel and fall off) went right on ahead and said it was unconstitutional and the court saw no compelling argument for limiting in any way the right of corporations (oh and unions...throwing the left an old, run down, and chewed on bone) to speak freely and spend freely to promote their speech during political campaigns.

Excuse me?

The U.S. Supreme Court has lost its damn mind. This is what I love...it was the Supreme Court that magically decided way back in the 1880s and 1890s that corporations, which didn't really exist in 1776, were actually entitled to all the rights and privileges of a living, breathing human being. Successive court rulings places some limits on the ability of corporations to engage in direct political speech and advocacy. But the Bush Supreme Court that we now have went on ahead and bucked 100 years of court precedence and said...what the fuck...Wal-Mart can run America...party on Exxon Valdez and Dow Jones why don't you and DuPont just go on ahead and pick a couple of your stock holders names out of a hat and they can be U.S. Senators.

Basically, the judges wrote a total of five different opinions on the ruling totally 175 pages. I can boil all that down for you into one short letter.

Dear U.S. Democracy,

Fuck you. Go buy a McDonald's Happy Meal.

Love,
SCOTUS

And you see, thanks to our wonderful system of checks and balances, which, since Bush took office, really hasn't worked worth a damn...this opinion rips apart state laws in roughly half of the states and writes corporations a blank check signed Chief Justice Roberts.

I think I am going to vomit.

The midterm elections next year are going to ridiculous. Special interests, labor unions, and corporations spent $1 billion in the 2008 presidential elections and that was WITH spending limits. Every CEO on Wall Street just got a fat dripping chubby when this news came down.

I can smell the end of the farce that has been called "democracy" in the United States. But, let me be clear, this country has never been a democracy and now, finally, the mask is coming off and the corporate dictatorship that has run this nation for the last century is going to show its true face. Time for the American Revolution Part Deux.

(Though I would rather pretend this didn't really just happen, here is a link to an article with more and less angry details.)

And, if you are as pissed off as I am, there is something you can do. Sign this petition asking Congress to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban corporate personhood.

Avatar: Great White Hopeless But See It Anyway

So, on the surface (and beneath the surface) Avatar is what David Brooks describes as a "White Messiah" movie a la "Dances with Wolves" and a dozen other popular cinema, literary, and animated fables. The movie is of course about a white man that goes native, and in this movie he literally goes native in the end swapping his human body for an alien body, and leads the indigenous people to salvation. He falls in love with an alien version of Malinche/Pocahontas/Sacajewea/Insert Any Other Woman's Name Here Blamed for Giving Access to Her People By the Colonizers. And, of course the indigenous people are at one with the natural environment, have perfect bodies, exist without war amongst themselves, and live in a big tree. They are the noble savage perfected.

I should have hated this movie for all of those reasons, but I absolutely loved it.

I won't allow that James Cameron was sophisticated in his race analysis. He wasn't. But what he did was provide a very clear depiction of what corporatism and white colonization has done and continues to do to indigenous peoples and populations around the world. He doesn't represent the corporate/military industrial complex on Pandora as having some sort of benevolent intentions...he strips away the niceties that are often present in these movies that portray the "bad white guys" as simply misguided or doing evil in the name of good or higher intentions. He tells it like it is and shows how decisions are really made in the real world when indigenous communities are sitting atop a valuable resources that is desired by the industrialized world. And, the part that won me over, was that James Cameron, for the first time that I can remember in a major world wide cinema piece, directly and clearly makes the connection between capitalism, corporatism, and the military industrial complex. He shows clearly and definitively that they are conjoined, something many of us already knew, and that they can not and will not exist separate from one another. He pushes all of his characters to their illogical extremes. But in doing so gives a more realistic view of the "bad guys" than one is likely to get in a corporate backed theater in the Western World.

He also does a weak critique, but a critique none-the-less, of the clash between Western scientists and indigenous science and technology. Let's be clear, indigenous communities have had and continue to have technology that is culturally appropriate and may not look like Western technology but is still technology. Unfortunately, Western science fails to understand or understands incorrectly indigenous knowledge, medicine, science and technology. And, in this movie, they fail again. Except Sigorne Weaver, who magically comes to a complete understanding of the indigenous science and faith system just before she departs to live with Eywa. Pullllleaassse.

One interesting side note is that Cameron did something interesting. He used a derivation of the Aramaic word for God, which is Elaw. I know this because I use that name for God in the novel that I am writing. Score one for Cameron actually opening a book and doing some research.

In the end, I found value in watching Avatar, but not for the reasons, I am sure, that James Cameron wanted. The plot was thin, but it did communicate some messages, starkly, that the world needs to hear.

On another tip, entirely, I fully believe the special effects in this movie will redefine special effects in the way that the Matrix did almost a decade ago.

In the end, I support folks going to see Avatar. Walk into it knowing that it will again be a storytelling of the Great White Hope. If you accept that up front, you will be able to get past it and enjoy the movie for what it does offer in terms of originality. If nothing else, see it in 3-D...cuz...really...the special effects are fucking cool.