Avatar is fast becoming one of the most popular moneymakers out of Hollywood, combining high tech and full 3D effects with a popular theme in human evolution.

I saw it with my 8 year-old and, naturally, he asked me what it was all about. He loved the animation and the fast-paced drama and conflict. But he wondered aloud about its meaning, which made me think about it too.

Avatar isn't just a movie. It's about the conflict inside humanity, one that has been repeated over and over again throughout human history.

A more technically advanced civilization - not more intelligent - advances on another civilization to occupy its lands, dominate or enslave its people and rape its natural resources.

Where have I heard that story before? African slave trading. Palestine. The deep recesses of the Amazon and Guatemalan jungles. The "West" neck deep in Middle East oil. The Dutch dancing in diamond-rich South Africa. Maybe one might view it as a euphemism for the conflict in Iraq, too, where oil-driven desires started an unnecessary war?

It has, naturally, evoked a lot of commentary in wide disparity and diversity. Some minority writers insist that it is a ridiculous notion to suggest that a White Man - one that is paraplegic at that -- would enter a native environment and help save the natives from the White Man's invading race.

One writer called it "White guilt fantasy." I think the writer might be right.

I saw it in my own context as an American and as a Palestinian. A redacted saga what might have happened to Native American Indians. The ultimate reverse Thanksgiving where the "pilgrims," instead of being embraced by the "Indians," were defeated and thrown out of this already populated and cultured country.

Maybe it might even be an epic metaphor of the drama still playing out in Palestine more than six decades later with one group trying to dominate the other over a resource, land.

I am sure that depending on your race and cultural experience, the meaning was different. Maybe that is why the James Cameron film has become so popular. It's not just the amazing special effects, or even the powerful narrative of the film itself.

In America, I know Hollywood has become the public's legal narcotic, an hallucinogen that off-sets the reality of the world around us. We watch TV programs like 24 to empower our need to believe we are winning the "war on terrorism" and to reinforce the idea that the terrorists are not us, but those olive skinned Muslims.

But unlike all of the mainstream schlock in Hollywood that play to the prejudices, emotions and fears of its audiences - casting the enemy as the foreigner and mainly Middle Easterners as "the terrorists" - Avatar has masterfully given some hope, others guilt and even a few a reason to rethink our history's propaganda.

I loved the film. But then, I've always sympathized with the underdog, cheering the Mohicans in James Fenmore Cooper's novel, feeling a little less guilty over Little Big Horn and enjoying gambling and losing my cash more at an "Indian Casino" than one owned by "the man."

I can't get enough of the sensation of sometimes watching those cast as "the lesser civilized" beat the bejesus out of the "more advanced" invading "civilization.

So I will probably go back and watch Avatar one more time.

"Have no fear; Underdog is here," is a chant I love from one of my favorite childhood cartoons.

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