Bareback Mountain
Friday, March 17, 2006 at 12:41PM Speak up, Billy boy, speak up. Nah… it’s easier to just shut up. Drink your wine. It’s a nice day. Why bend yourself out of shape again over something you can’t do anything about?
These thoughts were going through my head yesterday on Cumberland Avenue in Toronto. Beautiful spring sun was flooding in the windows of the bistro as my wife and I enjoyed a glass of Pinot Noir from Sonoma Valley, California. Me, I’m trying to figure out how some of these rhapsodic wine experts would describe the flavour. You know: “splash of black raspberry, earth tones, mild licorice …” or something like that, when I saw high behind her, up on the high wall opposite, an enormous banner advertising the movie I call “Bareback Mountain,” with the words “LOVE IS A FORCE OF NATURE” in large block letters. I tried to ignore it. Honest. But there it was. Twenty-by-thirty-feet big and blaring this slogan that struck me instantly as another wrong-headed declaration typical of this whole broken-down civilization of ours. “LOVE IS A FORCE OF NATURE.”
Second glass of wine now (and much better, though from the same bottle). And I am getting upset by that darned slogan staring down at me with those two wet-lipped cowboys. I mean, how deep does this go? How many gazillions of dollars and how many layers of influential film people from Hollyweird, and sympathetic soft-heads like Larry King does it take to persuade an entire people that something that is patently false, is true.
Now if the slogan had said “DESIRE IS A FORCE OF NATURE” I would have said – “you bet!” And there’s a living example sitting right here with this great wine. Every normal person feels desire, some weakly, some overwhelmingly. For lots of things. Great food. Profound conversations. Fine lectures. Fascinating books and ideas. Coq au Vin. Sexual love. Skiing in white powder. A great beach. Oh, it is endless, really. Human beings are nothing if not ambulatory desire, squared, cubed, quadrupled. And sure, one of the things we all desire, is love.
The desire for love is probably universal in all but pathological people, and this desire is indeed a force - not of nature (trees do not love each other) but of human nature. But the particular love we engage in; that we embrace and welcome into our hearts, long for, thrive upon, wait for, then seal with our voluntary commitment, is always a choice, and not itself a force of nature. It has to be a choice, just because there are innumerable kinds of very strong desire we all feel much of the time that are clearly bad in themselves, and bad for us. And we usually reject them out of hand, and often quickly, because they can be scary. But if we are not strong enough in character to reject them, then we usually rush to justify them as “love” the first chance we get.
Seems to me that one of the great tasks of civilization has been to teach us to discriminate between good desires and bad ones, and between good loves and bad loves. Selfishness, for example, is bad love. And cruelty - some people just enjoy being cruel to animals or people. Or they enjoy cheating and stealing. A lot of people love money and would do any of these things to get more of it. Indeed, almost one out of every third person I meet tells me they have been defrauded by someone at some time in their lives. These are all forms of bad love. There's a very long list of bad loves, and all great religions and all profound philosophers try to warn us against them and encourage good love instead. Gluttony is an excessive love of food; alcoholism is an excessive love of drink; self-blinding pride is a big one. The psychological manuals list thousands of forms of bad love: irrational love, misdirected love, hurtful love, sado-masochistic love, etc. Even very weird loves like necrophilia and coprophilia. Almost all these weirdisms have hard-to-pronounce names that end with “philia,” from the Greek word meaning “love.” So there is no argument. Desire is indeed a force of nature, and because of that we want to love and be loved. But the kind of love we seek or welcome or reject is not itself a force of nature. It is a personal choice from among many that in the end define us and our civilization. If I ask myself what standard we can use to decide between good love and bad love, the plainest answer is … natural law. Here is a good definition of natural law that anyone can memorize. It’s “A command of right reason that follows nature for the common good.”
When I look again at that banner and think of two sweaty whiskered cowboys deep-kissing each other and looking for their most profound sensual pleasure in the other’s anus, it seems pretty clear this is not following either right reason, or nature. Neither can there be any common good for civilization in mock sexual behaviour that by definition must be forever barren of offspring – especially one that according to our own government’s statistics has led to the deaths over 80% of all AIDS patients in the Western world. If this is “a force of nature” we can do without it. It is unnatural, does nothing for the common good, and it can easily kill you.
Reader Comments (5)
The Reform MP from Southern Alberta (sorry I have forgotten his name - can someone help me with that factoid?) who dared to speak the name of these outcomes 5 years ago was practically lynched with pink rope.
as long as homosexuality remains controversial and edgy it will be in the spot light.
Some social conservatives were upset when the Brady Bunch was released as you may recall, saying that it normalized non-nuclear family structures. Because it did normalize non-nuclear family structures. Because that was edgy at the time. Because what's edgy and new tends to make money.
will and grace, Brockback mountain, the L-word, Queer as folk, etc are all created for the same reason... to make money.
Simply put, a social-darwinist, for-profit, free enterprise system will continue to provide a framework for debauchery. As long as there is demand for what's edgy , there will be a supply.
Well, which is it William? In your 10 March post you use Health Canada's stats to argue that the threat of AIDS is overblown. Sixty people died of it in 2004. Now, suddenly, homosexual behavior can "easily get you killed." If we estimate there are a million homosexuals in Canada, by my math, 6 one-thousandths of a percent of them are dying from AIDS annually. (And that's if we assume all 60 were gay.) If homosexual behavior can easily get you killed, that fate can also easily be avoided. And 99.994% of gay people are doing so.