Men in Tents

I'm putting up the news headlines on the Blue's News sidebar this week, a task that always occasions the finding of strange and interesting news items, some of which I post, some of which I keep for my own twisted amusement. This is one of the latter, from Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper: No ‘Brokeback Mountain’ for overseas troops. The Official Story on this is the release was ill-timed for getting on the list for military theatres, that it wasn't possible to obtain enough copies of the film, and so on. I'm pretty sure every one of these "reasons" for not showing this heart-rending and mind-bending film to the troops could easily be debunked.

What I think is that Mark Morford has his finger on the pulse of the real reason the military is afraid to show Brokeback Mountain to its captive audience. His article "Sam Alito on Brokeback Mountain" is about the

...ever-present push-pull of the culture. This is how we stumble toward the light, gasping and bleeding and with painful rope burns on our wrists. After all, there is no progress forward -- intellectual, spiritual, sexual or otherwise -- without a concomitant blood-curdling scream from the power brokers and the religiously terrified to hold it all back. Change brings fear. Sexuality brings confusion. For every person who has his rigid homophobic ideology shattered by "Brokeback"'s emotional hammer, there is a confused neocon who redoubles his efforts to replant it.

Yep, I think the Pentagon fears having the minds and hearts of its military personnel moved and changed by this amazing film, as some surely would be.