The Problem With Being Saviors

It occurs to me on a daily basis that we have an issue with being humble. All of us want to be saviors... even if the people that need saving don't really agree that they need help.

Take for instance Brit Hume from Fox News. Last week Brit decided to dole out some advice to poor, ailing Tiger Woods. He suggested that Tiger give up his Buddhist ways in favor of Christianity. Now this was much ado about nothing for a few days because a lot of the dolts in America thought to themselves... "Hey, that's some darn good advice!" Now perhaps I should have let sleeping assholes lay, but this is yet another example of the world of AmeriChristian egotism that underlies a whole host of much larger and deeper issues with all that is us (and by us, I mean the white/anglo-saxon/christian us... as if I had to clarify). Not knowing Brit personally, I can't make a judgment call on his level of assholedness. I can assume that Brit really believed that he was giving out good advice to someone who is having a hard time. And that exact point is the problem that I don't hear discussed nearly enough in our culture today. Those who know better simply call him an asshole and move on. Those that agree with him are growing in number simply because there isn't enough discussion to combat his views.

Let's dissect a bit...

Brit believes, it would seem from his remarks, that Tiger stands a better chance of forgiveness under Brit's belief system than he does under his own. In other words... Christianity is better than Buddhism, and Brit is better than Tiger. And to reap the rewards of God, Tiger must become a Fox News contributor, or something like that. Brit, who doesn't seem very well versed in Buddhism to start with, jumps to conclusions about forgiveness without even the hint that Brit's path might not be the only path to enlightenment. The underlying message, for those that read the subtext, is that this is America... and to be a good American, and to get into God's grace... there is but one path. Brit therefore sees himself as the savior of Tiger. And anyone that doesn't think that he is right is either a Nazi or a Communist... or more than likely, both.

The savior complex is deep and profound in this country. It permeates all of us. To take an example from the other extreme, in Avatar, James Cameron's main character sets out to connect with an alien race by literally becoming one of them. He is thus able to understand them and their culture at a much deeper level than a regular white/anglo-saxon/christian would. This would seem to be the antithesis of Brit Hume, who I can't really see trying on yellow robes anytime soon. But even here Cameron's hero is us... and Cameron's hero is the savior. The aliens can not conceivably save themselves without our help. And the only logical alternative is that WE must intervene.

The downfall of the United States of Us will come, not from the success or failure of the liberal agenda, or the right wing egotism... but from forgetting the fact that money and military power don't mean that one's beliefs are therefore more right than anyone else's. Our foreign policy is rife this approach to things. In Iraq. In Afghanistan. In China. Even in Haiti. We run to be the saviors. I would hope that we do it because it is the right thing to do in Haiti (since several of those other problems were our own making). There is no doubt that tragedies like Haiti require help... money and power set forth for a cause to save and rebuild. But I think many do it because, like Brit Hume, we think it makes us somehow superior. And we can't wait to crow about what we did to help. Because, like a tree falling in the woods, no good deed is really a good deed if there aren't people there to brag to about it.

We all want to be superior in some way. Whether it be in the clothes we wear. Or the scores that we get on our tests. Or the wealth we accumulate. Or the religion we practice. All of it, at the heart, differentiates us from others for the purpose of making us feel more worthy than those that think or dress or act differently. The concept of "live and let live" does not play well in that arena. And every day I see a world striving to be saviors, instead of world that understands that "letting live" doesn't entail changing all the others to live just like you.

Avatar: A Review

When I was little, one of my favorite books was The Wump World by Bill Peet. I've read it to my own kids dozens of times. And I could not help by think about it as I sat through 2 hours and 40 minutes of Avatar. The Wump World is about a group of blue aliens, called the Pollutians, who come to a peaceful green planet of the wumps, who are small rodent like creatures. The Pollutians have destroyed their own home and now destroy the wump world in the name of progress. In Avatar, the Pollutians are us... and the blue aliens are the wumps. The rest of the story is pretty much the same, except that the wumps didn't have bows and arrows. I've heard many people compare Avatar to Dances with Wolves... and there is something to that too. But The Wump World came out in 1970 and I have yet to hear anyone connect the two. I think the point is that Avatar was predictable from a story perspective, because most of us have seen it before.

Because of this many have already criticized the film, calling it everything from derivative to tripe. And yet the same people that lambaste Avatar are the same ones that look at Greek myth with reverence. We story tellers admire these myths because they form the foundation and roots of our own collective literary knowledge. But they were, themselves, derivative stories of their time. I am not saying that Avatar is in the same category. But the story it is telling is. It is the new mythos that we have seen repeated over and over again for decades... the need to connect to this planet. This idea grew out of James Lovelock's theory of the 1960s that all the world was an interconnected organism. This theory, commonly called the Gaia Theory, informed a generation of storytellers to come... James Cameron included.

Cameron is our PT Barnum. He is a man who is a highly proficient story teller. But he is extraordinary at creating interesting worlds... be it The Abyss, Aliens, Titanic... he has the capacity for drawing an audience into a world with a hyper sense of being there. He is also a showman... like Barnum... who is able to trumpet his own legend and groundbreaking technological expertise while being completely lacking in the humility for those whose shoulders he has stood upon to get there. The 3D effect in Avatar I have seen before... at Disney World among other places. But the 3D in a world that was thought up by Cameron, and filled in with some of the greatest sci-fi and fantasy artists in the business, is spectacular.

I am a fan of cinema. I am a fan of the spectacle of sitting in a darkened theater with a huge image and loud sound and experiencing a movie with others (as long as those fellow watchers are also movie fans... and thus are quiet). For years after I graduated from film school, my friend Dave would call so we could discuss the latest "groundbreaker". Like many of our generation, we got into movies because of George Lucas and the world that he created. But as we have aged, both Dave and I have become a little more jaded by the business... to the storytelling... to the attempts that many make to recreate what Lucas did many years ago. Like Cameron, Lucas was an okay writer with an extraordinary abilty to create a world. And at the time, it was groundbreaking and it was, for Dave and I, the beginning... because for us, it was the moment that started it all, regardless of what came before. There were moments, as I sat alone in the theater watching Avatar, when I felt some of that wonder return. When I talked to Dave later on, our views were the same. We remembered, if for a short time, why we love the movies. It is spectacle on a grand scale. It is the retelling of a story that brings us together... as myth should. It is a movie which will lose much when viewing on a television and thus it was build and should remain in the hallowed and darkened halls of the theater. And while it was not necessarily groundbreaking for me... it will, perhaps, begin a new generation of movie lovers.