TrueMajority recently sent a message entitled:  “Don’t Let Bush Fool America About Iran.”

There may be a real disconnect on “fooling America.”

The way small towns and rural communities celebrate participation in the war, you’d think you were at a football rally.  Bush doesn’t have to fool these people.  They’re ra-rahing right along with him.  They HAND him their precious relatives to turn into soldiers and throw away on a war of resource conquest.  You’re not going to see any detemined mom breaking her kid’s foot  to keep him from getting his legs blown off in a humvee roll-over.

I’m out here in the middle of beautiful nowhere where it’s safe, but I’m not gloating over it.  Then again, I’m not whipping up the Support-The-Troops war fervor, either.

People from small towns come back and brag about how much the Iraqis like them.  Here’s a poser:  occupation troops vs. your own angry neighbors who see you as collaborators. 

First of all, no one’s going to mouth off to a member of an occupation army who’s got a gun in his or her hand.  It’s like dealing with the uniforms in this country:  status can change from Innocent Iraqi to Enemy Combatant as fast as Broken Headlight can change to Tasered Takedown, especially if you don’t look like the uniform.

Rural people actually suffer from the delusion that they can communicate better than people in cities.  They don’t realize that, having spoken to nobody but the same people in the mini-towns for their whole lives, they might not understand that not everybody has the same viewpoint.  They’ll assume everybody’s on the same page — and can be very hostile to anybody who grew up in a different way, or even just have different experiences.  These are the people who can’t understand why the kid with the scholarship got out of town and never came back; one of the most exhausting activities anyone can be part of is Dumbing Down.  It’s one thing to smile and agree politely at the local library or restaurant, but it’s hell to have to live with it 24-7, years on end.

Rural people don’t want to know.  They won’t even face or stand up to businesses that are ruining their health.  Everybody may have cancer, but nobody’s going to question a watershed full of toxins, because it might run a few fading jobs out of town.  I know how these people think — I grew up in a mill town, where the sulfur fumes peeled the paint off the house walls and the layers out of people’s lungs. 

Rural folks are not going to be hit with the real repercussions — only large coastal cities will face any real damage if any such thing as an attack happens again.  It’s the large coastal populations who know that War Doesn’t Work. 

The disconnect is the unthreatened community vs. the threatened community.  Nobody is going to bomb anybody’s soybeans in Iowa or struggling fishing fleets; they’re going to take out New York or Washington.  But it’s the unthreatened communities who think they’re the target and are endangering the communities who may actually BE a target.

The only thing the unthreatened communities are going to lose are their grandkids — when the kids they sent to Iraq don’t come home to breed.

But then, there’s something else a lot of small-town people refuse to accept:

Evolution works.

Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place - the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. — Mark Twain

The Olympic Peninsula, especially the rural parts of the area, are not unusual in the presence of racial and religious prejudice and homophobia.  The best people will blurt out antiquated prejudices, from comments on Hemingway’s biography to just who is shooting at a whale.

But help may be on the way!

Twilight, a series of vampire genre novels for young adults, is set in the western peninsula town of Forks.  A movie may be filmed there, using local characters.

Now Forks is no worse in the presence of homophobia than any other rural American town.  All across this country, homosexual kids always need to watch their backs; being called “gay” has been proven in American towns and the military to being the preparation for a death sentence.  There is no evidence it is that bad in any way at Forks — in so many ways, it’s Live and Let Live out here.  But it’s in the atmosphere.

If a movie is made in the area, Hollywood will be in town.  That’s an industry that can’t afford to excercise prejudice toward anyone with any artistic ability, because it takes a lot of people to film, act, choreograph, costume, edit, compose, advertise, and just move stuff around.  

Arts and media are a refuge and a livelyhood for many in the gay community, mostly because the GBLT community honors and appreciates education, the humanities and the arts.  Arts and music are never despised, ignored, or lost because the funding for the local high school went to the football program (the community up here that let this happen knows which one it is; we don’t need to go into personalilties).

If the smart, hard-working members of the gay community who work in film show up, working with local people, dining in local restaurants, relaxing in local bars, it’s going to do a lot of good.  These people can be role models for smart, artistic or musical kids who have never had the support they deserve in the area. 

It’s hard to practice homophobia when the local kids find out what good people gay people are.

Check out:  http://www.glaad.org

A local paper has been full of articles bragging about how an author was taken to task for writing about a local family, back in the ’50’s.

It’s well-known that the lawsuit for defamation was not started until the book — and the subsequent movie — began to make money.  The publishers and a local paper settled out of court to get rid of a nuisance suite.

This has led to a local mythology that the writer was defeated for making fun of a local family.  This myth might frighten local writers from using materials based on their own scene.

First of all, the Supreme Court has since backed the First Amendment by deciding that editorial cartoons, fictions, etc., come under “parody.”  This is part of the right of free speech. 

Unlike the time of the original case, and in direct reaction to this kind of lawsuit (and the actions of the House Unamerican Activities Committee), writer’s legal support groups now exist, including the Screen Actor’s Guild, the National Writer’s Union (AFL/CIO) and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.   

The New York Times found out what it was like to take on one of these organizations when it attempted to force an animation-industry style All Rights Contract upon freelance journalists, demanding the copyright of all articles from all authors.  It lost to the National Writer’s Union in a case that went to the Supreme Court.

Fiction is not defamation.  For example, recently someone went to one of my clients and attempted to make trouble for me with an organization I work with by partly quoting something I had said at an open arts meeting.  First of all, I have the citizen right to make such a proclamation.  As for the activity, involving literature that is written for full citizens and not children, I again have the right to be involved in that activity.  No one has the right to get between me and a client in an attempt to infringe upon any part of my business or livlihood.  The person who did it put themselves — and the client, who responded — into the position of being liable in a court. 

I do not intend to follow up or begin such legal proceedings, even though I know very well how the local court system works.  I think the people involved have realized that, in the case of property, if they did something like this to anyone else, and if they owned sufficient property, the deep-pockets syndrome might kick in.  They have to understand that is always a danger.

Fiction, however, does not come under the defamation definition.  The original author combined people, reworked situations, and generally did what a fiction author is supposed to do — rewrite from experience to express humor or tragedy or an overview of the human condition. 

So the next time anyone starts bragging about winning court cases against authors for fiction, remind them that happened in the days of McCarthyism, and that it no longer applies.

That was then, this is now.  And there’s more than one way for an author to get rich.