disordered thought processes

Cartoons on Nickelodeon have always sparked my imagination since I was a little kid. From Dangermouse, to Belle and Sebastian, to the Seven Cities of Gold, I found myself transported to remote times and places.

So it’s not surprising that Nickelodeon hosts the show ”Avatar: The Last Airbender” Set in a fantasy realm divided up into the four classical elements (air, water, fire, earth), it follows the fated Avatar—who can manipulate all four elements—in his quest to re-establish balance in the world. It has echoes of the Deathgate Cycle by Tracy Weiss and Margaret Hickman (of Dragonlance fame) which also literally sunders the world into four elemental planes. And it has a taste of Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea, which is itself borrows heavily from Taoist philosophy, and is also very interested in the maintenance of balance.

The creators of the show openly state that they were heavily influenced by such works of popular culture such as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter.

The premise is that every generation, there is an Avatar born, who is the only person able to control more than one element, and whose task is to maintain balance in the world. There is a cyclic rotation as to which culture the Avatar is born into. The current Avatar is named Aang, a 12 year old boy born of the Air Nomads, who tries to run-away from his destiny, and ends up in suspended animation for 100 years. The Avatar before him was Roku, from the Fire Nation. (And it’s probably just coincidence, but Roku’s home and final resting place is forever known as Roku’s Island, which evokes the Isle of Roke in Earthsea. And Roku and Firelord Sozin’s battle against the volcano reminded me of Ursula K Le Guin’s short story “The Bones of the Earth” which depicts a similar battle pitting an impending earthquake against the mage Ogion and his master Heleth.)

After Roku is killed, the Firelord Sozin finds himself free to pursue his imperialistic ends. The Fire Nation commits genocide against the Air Nomads, in an unsuccessful bid to destroy the next Avatar. But with Aang locked up in ice, the Fire Nation is able to freely assail the Water Tribes and the Earth Kingdom.

Interestingly, Sozin’s rationale for warring against his neighbors is the notion of spreading the Fire Nation’s prosperity and wealth to the less fortunate cultures. Avatar: The Last Airbender strikes me as a bold allegory concerning American Imperialism, and Sozin’s rationale recalls W’s sophist arguments for invading Iraq: to spread Freedom™ and Democracy™. The fear evoked by the Fire Nation parallels how the U.S. has grown to be hated and feared in many corners of the world. The advanced industrialization and resultant pollution of the environment by the Fire Nation also speaks of American excess.

But the Fire Nation, like any imperial power in the history of humanity, is not made up of cookie-cutter nameless, featureless evildoers. Like any culture, it is replete not only with the diabolic and the divine, but also all the shades in between. The last Avatar, Roku, after all, was from the Fire Nation. The characters of Iroh and Zoku also depict the conflict inherent in persons who strive to do what is good and honorable, but who are enmeshed in an imperial endeavor. The children of the Fire Nation are not demonic imps intent on destroying the world, but just regular children who are constantly spoon-fed brain-killing propaganda about the greatness of the Fire Nation.

What is most interesting is that the goal of the protagonists is not to destroy the Fire Nation, but rather, to re-establish balance.

Implicit in this notion is that industrialization is not in of itself necessarily evil (in stark contrast to J.R.R. Tolkien’s apparent position.) The goal of the Way is not the occlusion of progress, but its moderation. The smooth ebb and flow of fortune is preferable to the boom-and-bust discontinuities inherent in capitalism. A smooth gradation in incomes and wealth is more ideal than the stark disparities between rich and poor in our society. And a balance of power, even if it means we are locked within the insanity of mutually assured destruction, is better than one nation wielding all the power.

Pretty deep shit for a cartoon targeting 6-11 year olds!

I never watched the original version of “3:10 to Yuma” but I suspect it probably didn’t have the nuances of the remake starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. The plot is relatively straight-forward. Ben Wade, the infamous leader of a band of outlaws that have robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad twenty-two times, finally gets caught. Meanwhile, Dan Evans, a veteran of the Civil War who lost his leg, and a rancher who is being forced off his land by the Southern Pacific Railroad, decides to take the job to bring Ben Wade to justice, by escorting him to the prison train that stops in the town of Contention. Of course, Wade’s band of outlaws does all they can to save their boss.

The mythology of the Old West, in terms of honor and what makes a man a man is mostly intact, and the landscape of the barren desert of the Southwest is evocatively utilized, but what is even more haunting is the undercurrent subtext: the Western is a long obsolete genre, and the director Richard Mangold succeeds in capturing the sense of the ending of an age. The mythologic yeoman farmer/freeman rancher is obliterated by the onrushing modernity of the railroad, and outlaws become subject not necessarily to justice, but to economic necessity and the iron will of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, and the Native Americans are swept completely under the rug, literally erased from history. The oncoming age is not about mythic concepts such as loyalty and honor. It is about profit, and every man (and woman) has a price.

In the background of every scene is evidence of the railroad. Despite the fact that it is the railroad that is the cause of his oppression, Evans nonetheless grudgingly allies himself with their cause, and even rides beside the man who had burned down his barn at the behest of a landowner whom Evans owes a considerable debt to, and who wants to clear the way for the railroad. The imagery of the teams of men and women, many of them immigrant Chinese, building that steel road in the middle of nowhere haunts me, and whatever the outcome, we both know that in a sense, both Evans and Wade are doomed, whether they live or die.

What “3:10 to Yuma” especially reminded me of is China Miéville’s novel Iron Council, which actually superficially resembles a rather standard Western plot, focusing on the attempt to capture an outlaw who helped organize a workers’ rebellion against the railroad company, and the eventual confrontation that this leads to. While Mangold narrates the end of the Frontier, paved over by Capitalism, Miéville concentrates on the nature of Marxist revolutions and how they tend to fail, because of individual ego, because it seems like human nature to want power instead of justice, and because the ancien regime simply has more firepower and more resources than the revolutionaries do. But the end is the same: profit supplants any sort of justice, and instead of robbing people with guns, the new outlaws aren’t outlaws because they operate with the sanction of the government and steal your money by manipulating the system in their favor. (For modern day examples, see the present day Republican Party. Also see the perfidy of Walmart and its never-ending quest to break the average man and woman into indentured servitude.)

The thing with Westerns is that you know how it’s going to end. While there are still large tracts of desert out there, it’s astounding to see how we have started to terraform our planet. The last time I flew from the West Coast to the East Coast, we flew over the Imperial Valley, and it’s almost bizarre how green it is, fed by hundreds of miles of aqueducts lined with concrete.

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The suburbs of L.A. have started encroaching on the Mojave Desert

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My sister reminds me of the quite optimistic thought that one of these days—particularly given the reality of climate change—wars will be fought over water supplies the same way we know fight over oil supplies, and the Colorado River will certainly be up for contention. Will the cities in California, Nevada, Arizona, Baja California, and Sonora band together in adversity? Or will the Colorado River become a war zone?