Director James Cameron’s billion-dollar, award-winning blockbuster, Avatar, bears a striking resemblance to Dances with Wolves in its basic plot. White guy from a military background encounters an indigenous population, falls in love, decides their values and way of life are superior to his, and casts his culture aside.

Of course, there are some refinements to Avatar, mostly the over-the-top technical effects that make this film possible and that are woven into the storyline. The white guy, a crippled former Marine named Jake Sully, uses an avatar, a biomechanical fictional being that is genetically engineered to be half human and half Na’vi, the inhabitants of the planet Pandora. With it he is able to walk again, breath air that is poisonous to human beings, and mingle with the natives to learn their ways.

Avatar is paradoxically plentiful and yet insufficient. The bounty consists of the powerful visual punch that this movie packs. There is so much to see in Pandora that the eyes boggle long before even half of the activity registers in the mind. Watching it non-stop on the big screen is downright exhausting. It’s as though the director does not trust his audience to be able to imagine anything for themselves. In that sense, Avatar unintentionally insults viewers even while offering them the most spectacular blend of animation and live action to come out of Hollywood yet.

As to its lack, the film provides frustratingly superficial glimpses of the natives’ beliefs and spiritual practices, squeezed in between all of the action sequences. Even so, that’s a deal too much for certain critics, who slam it as “anti-human” and “anti-American.” The Vatican doesn’t care for the film’s earth-based faith, and still others bash the portrayal of a white man as yet another savior of an indigenous population.

What do they expect? Cameron, who wrote the script as well as directed, is a white male, so he’s stuck with that viewpoint. No doubt those who find fault would be equally censorious had the director tried to make the film from the native viewpoint.

Critics may gnash their teeth all they want over the movie’s politics, but it is wildly popular precisely because of its advocacy, not despite it. As polls continue to show, more and more Americans have abandoned traditional religions to call themselves independent seekers or simply spiritual. There has also been a huge rise in interest in the goddess, or the feminine divine. On top of that, the public is incensed over unpunished Iraq war profiteering, massive corporate fraud that led to the 2008 economic meltdown yet was rewarded with equally gigantic bailouts, and Wall Street’s baleful influence over Congress and the White House.

Avatar reflects and builds on these trends. The Na’vi tribe’s home is on top of a huge deposit of highly valuable ore that a human corporation wants to mine. Sully’s mission is to persuade the tribe to move peacefully, or his corporate masters will have no qualms about using deadly force to clear the members off their land.

Sully soon realizes and tells his superiors that the natives have no interest in anything the human interlopers could offer them. The Na’vi do not live to amass wealth or power. They love the world that sustains them and try to live in harmony with it and with neighboring tribes.

What a tragedy that the preceding is so threatening to so many Americans. If might-makes-right, profits-uber-alles is now the creed of our culture and country, then we are indeed as lost as Sully is when his avatar inadvertently spends its first night alone outside in Pandora.

This film is also a hit worldwide. In the greedy ore-grubbers, who don’t care who they kill or what they destroy in their profits quest, others clearly recognize the proverbial ugly American. If we also see it and don’t like it, then there’s little point in blaming the mirror, which in this case is a movie called Avatar.

Maybe it’s time to address what causes such a revolting reflection in the first place.

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

If Nobel Prize winning author Sinclair Lewis were alive today, he would have to rework his statement. A timely version might read, “When fascism comes to America, it will smile and wink like Sarah Palin and carry a cross.”

The book’s name is similar to the title of Palin’s recently published autobiography. But their monikers and their main topic are the only things the two have in common. Unlike Going Rogue, Going Rouge is a compendium of essays and columns that thoroughly and often wittily skewer the former Republican vice presidential candidate and ex-governor of Alaska. The authors form a roster of well-known leftwing and progressive commentators.

Many of the pieces were written in the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign once John McCain tapped Palin as his running mate. A few were published after the GOP election debacle. Although the editors group the essays under varying themes, it gives readers whiplash to move back and forth between the before-after perspectives. A chronological ordering of the work might have been easier to digest.

One of the most powerful parts of the book is the brief compendium of Palin criticisms from conservative pundits. And there is also a good deal of angst from women who worry that Palin’s stark deficiencies in experience and understanding of complex issues set back the cause of serious female candidates for high office.

“Palin won’t bust through the ceiling that has Hillary [Clinton]’s 18 million cracks in it,” writes Slate columnist Emily Bazelon. “She’ll give men an excuse to replace it with a new one.”

While there are many pithy, cogent observations about Palin, most of the contributors do not seem to understand the deeper significance of what they are analyzing. Typical is New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who writes that Palin “puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions.”

What Palin truly represents is a sexy, winking stalking horse for a twisted version of Christianity every bit as radical and destructive as Muslim extremism. Adherents of this militant Christianity, known as the New Apostolic Reformation, scheme to remake the United States as a Christian theocracy, and have enlisted significant swaths of the U.S. military in their cause. They want power and control every bit as much as bin Laden and his followers, who dream of imposing a new Muslim Caliphate over the entire Middle East and do not shy away from violence to achieve their ends. Neither do Christian militants.

Not even Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family, an expose of how right-wing politics and politicians are financed on a global scale, connects the dots. Instead, his column compares Palin to Westbrook Pegler, an ultra conservative commentator masquerading as a populist in the early 20^th century.

The omission is perhaps the editors’ doing, not Sharlet’s. If there’s one thing left-wing punditry shy away from, it’s examining core religious beliefs. That’s very uncomfortable territory for them.

It’s a shame. The editors of and contributors to Going Rouge might want to spend time reading the knowledgeable researchers at websites like Talk2Action.  Bruce Wilson, the site’s founder, and his colleagues understand exactly what Palin really represents, possibly because they are also people of faith. They are doing their best to alert the rest of us to the true perils of Palin’s rise to political prominence before it is too late.

Gives this book 3.5 stars out of 5.

• Title: The Spear of Destiny
• Author: Trevor Ravenscroft
• Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
• Pub. Date: June 1987
• ISBN-13: 9780877285472
• Pages: 400
• Edition Number: 2
• Rating **** (out of 5 possible)

In order to explain the otherwise unfathomable rise to power of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, mainstream historians devised the phrase “the banality of evil.”

Hitler and his henchmen, so the theory goes, appeared so ordinary and mundane that no one could spot their real intentions or their murderous deeds until it was too late. 

The author of this book has a different take on topic. He maintains that Hitler was the reincarnation of an evil political minister from 1,000 years earlier and was motivated by revenge for being castrated.  (Hitler had only one descended testicle. Make of that what you will.)

The central theme of Ravenscroft’s book is Hitler’s strange fixation on an ancient Roman spear, which some believe was the weapon a Roman soldier named Longinus used to pierce the side of Jesus, ending his suffering on the cross. The spear of Longinus came to be known as the Spear of Destiny because the legend surrounding the weapon stated that whatever nation possessed the spear would control the fate of the world.

Hitler fervently believed this legend. When he came to power in 1933, the spear was in a museum in Vienna. According to Ravenscroft, one of Hilter’s primary motivations for expanding German territory prior to World War Two was to possess the spear, which came about in 1938 with Germany’s takeover of Austria.

Ravenscroft also explores Hitler’s occult beliefs and practices, an area mainstream historians either don’t know about or, if they do, they avoid discussing because they don’t want to seem weird. Hitler was very strange, and Ravenscorft’s explanations of the man’s beliefs and practices help our understanding to a certain extent.

Too bad Ravenscroft either did not know about energy or did not choose to reveal further details about it. One of Hitler’s most consequential abilities was his skill in using the energy of consciousness while he was speaking. He may have looked and sounded comical, but his evil intent was to manipulate his listeners at the subconscious (emotional) level. He succeeded, with repercussions on world events that echo to this day.

Long out of print and hard to find, thanks to print-on-demand technology this book is now readily available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble online and most likely other Internet bookstores, too.

I would give the book 5 stars, but the writing of the edition I own  is terrible and should have been heavily edited before going to print. So it gets 4 stars for fascinating content and a compelling story that takes readers way out of the banality of evil into the full horror of it.

After the defeat of the Third Reich, the United States took possession of the weapon, and has dominated the world’s destiny ever since. If the legend is true, another nation will have to control the spear for that to change.