Getting that on the record is as good a reason as any to unretire this blog for a moment.
Via Womanist Musings, check out this quote from James Cameron in a recent piece in the Guardian on his activism in support of a Brazilian indigenous struggle:
“I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation,” he said. “This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar — I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society — which is what is happening now — they would have fought a lot harder.”
Screw you, dude. Here are the folks who should have “fought a lot harder”:
It’s almost as if the Lakota did fight back, and then in return got massacred, women and children not excluded. Hmmm.
Enjoy also Cameron’s response to critics who say he shouldn’t interere in Brazilian affairs:
“I think one of the biggest questions is: ‘What is your standing? What are you gringos doing here? What gives you the right to tell us how to run things within our country? It’s our problem, it’s not your problem.’ I get all that,” he said. “But North America is Brazil’s future. We can come to Brazil from the future and say: ‘Don’t do this.’
Now, I’m an internationalist, and I don’t believe that our rights and responsibilities to speak up and have opinions on important matters end at some imaginary line in the sand. I do however strongly object to the view of history and civilization that says “North America” (see what he did there?) is the “future” for the Third World. Hint: Brazil’s future is their own.
The development of Brazilian society might share some similarities with the development of white Atlantic civilization — and to the extent that it does, I reckon that they can draw their own conclusions about the failures and successes there without the help of some random film director. But while there may be similarities, we can be sure that it will have its own unique characteristics as well. To say that we come from Brazil’s future is pure narcissism and represents a teleological view of the world that should have been buried with the nineteenth century.
So, in summary and in conclusion, James Cameron is an asshole.
April 23rd, 2010 | Category: politics | Comments (1)
