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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Out of one, many Divisions in America By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 800 words Publication date: February 26, 2006 I finally got round to seeing Brokeback Mountain. As I expected, the direction, writing and acting are superb. With every other audience, I was inevitably drawn into the tragedy, sympathizing with each of the characters in turn. How many Oscars the film deserves is a minor issue. Of much greater importance is the light it shines on a forgotten corner of America, Wyoming in the 1960s and 70s. This is an America where almost everyone is white, where men and women grow, live and die in the same small towns. Everyone knows almost everyone else and poverty is endemic. The frontier tradition remains, part self-conscious and part buried deep in the subconscious. Strength and security lie in familiarity – in shared language and means of living and values. This is not the twenty-first century America of the East and West Coasts. Nor is it the America of the black sharecropper, although each would recognize hardship and the importance of kinship in each other’s lives. Other cultures are glimpsed rarely, not in the street or the neighbor’s yard, but through the highly distorted lens of television. And it is not the America of the recent immigrant, whose English is halting, whose mind and emotions were forged in a very different climate and culture and whose thoughts are half on beloved ones thousands of miles away. This is the America where a husband or wife is more likely to come from across town than across the nation. This is the America that sees the outside world as strange and potentially hostile. This is the America where life is endured more than celebrated. Against this background of emotional, physical and economic hardship, two young men, ranchhands fall in love. Although one is more eager than the other to ignore the rules that govern their lives, ultimately the couple has no option but to conceal their affection from all those around them. Therein lies the tragedy. The conflict between the men’s culture and their desires destroys not only their lives, but the lives of the women who love them and the children they father. For each them the price of rare moments of joy is year after year of unhappiness and frustration. It is too easy to fall into the trap of condemning the society that denied Jack and Ennis their happiness. To do so is to fail to understand the rural America of the previous generation. In that fragile world, fenced in by the distant horizon, deviations from the norm threaten the foundation of the community and, with it, people’s identity and lives. Much has changed in the last forty years. In a nation where gay marriage has become a political touchstone, the relationship between Jack and Ennis would be very different. Their internal struggle would have been played out against a background of pro- and anti-gay characters and we, as an audience would have been forced to take sides. That would have been a mistake. Whether our sympathies lie more with the men or with the society that condemns them, Ang Lee’s film reminds us that both sides have their pride and values. After all, the reality is that, no matter how different it may be from the rest of the country, no matter how backward it appears to those of us who prefer the cornucopias of Los Angeles or New York, the small town communities of Brokeback Mountain are as much America as Hollywood and Washington DC. And therein lies a problem much deeper than homosexuality. The nation is divided, the split often seen in terms of blue and red, left and right. But there are many more divisions than that. Start with the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles, Hasidim in Brooklyn and every other community that sees America through its own linguistic, cultural and religious prism. Add the wealthy Republican, the single mother on welfare, those who celebrate freedom of drugs and sexual behavior and those who condemn it. And so on and so on and so on. Each group is hostile towards those that appear to threaten it. Some Americans to feel rejected or ignored by their homeland, while others consider that only they represent America and all others must conform to their values. The differences are so profound that sometimes it seems that the country will fall apart. Perhaps I am wrong. The apparent acceptance of Brokeback Mountain across the country is a positive sign. Maybe gay ranchhands and the communities they live in are beginning to accept each other as equally American. If that is the case, perhaps the rest of the country can come together. It can start at the top. The day when Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken, offer each other honest respect will be the day when America begins to heal.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |