a very tired controversy, including SPOILERS

Ever since the the Oscar nominations have come out, the media has been turning itself blue hollering, "Culture wars! Culture wars!" Turns out Brokeback Mountain offends some of the Concerned Women of America because -- well, actually, I'm stumped as to why. Damned if Elizabeth Vargas, who has informed me of the issue TWICE now, mysteriously during "World News Tonight," has deigned to explain.

The thing is (SPOILERS!) I'm scratching my head over what even the most repressed and repressive would find objectionable in this film. The two men have a love affair, sure, but they both hate themselves for it and torture each other with their inabilities to commit to a taboo lifestyle. Instead they bow to social pressure and marry women, who they, of course, then inevitably make miserable.

They don't identify as "queer," they don't agitate for rights or acceptance -- in fact they're completely apolitical. I'd think they'd be the right's posterboys for good gays. Well, okay, maybe that's stretching it, but if the right were willing to tolerate homosexuality in America, don't you think this is how they'd want it to look? Cloaked in quiet suffering & self-denial?

On the other hand, I did come across this article from OUDaily.com that I hope Ang Lee and Annie Proulx have also found, because it seems to indicate that they did their job perfectly.

Oh also: I can't post a frikking thing about Palestinians without thereafter feeling guilty about it. So let me add, to assuage my lefty conscience: I think it's criminally stupid that French and German papers are now reprinting the offensive cartoons, to the continued horror of the Muslim world. Thanks, guys. Well done. Way to show how advanced and mature you are as a civilization, shaking salt onto an open wound. Even Voltaire, seeing this, would ram his forehead through the nearest wall.

We in the west have grown accustomed to the ramifications of free speech. We weren't born with a thick skin; we've developed one over hundreds of years, and not without a rather a lot of bloodshed along the way. It's naive to expect that the Arab Muslim world, largely without a free press or a tradition of satire, would be able to react the same way we do. And anyway, even in the west protests pop up all the time over free speech issues. France doesn't allow large religious accessories in public schools, that's how much they value total free expression.

So tend to your own backyards, Western world, and stop making things worse.