The maturity of civil discourse in the United States is in the toilet. Sean Hannity asked a recent guest of his show his opinion on the Danish cartoon controversy. 30 seconds into his guest's response, Hannity blurts out, "I don't care about your liberal point of view." And then later, "You're a disgraceful human being." Wow, what a class act. Unfortunately, this kind of absurd name-calling is not an isolated incident. Every day, the news pundits yell and scream at each other as they try to paint the nation red or blue. Complex issues such as the Iraq war and domestic spying are simplified into punch lines and one-liners. And I believe it was George W. Bush who set the current precedent for getting along with each other: "You're either with us or you're with the enemy."
So when I heard that liberal filmmaker Michael Moore had been invited to speak at a college in the not-so-liberal state of Utah at the peak of the 2004 election, I knew that the bar for civil discourse would hit an all-time low.
In a cut-and-paste nation where states are labeled blue or red, Utah comes out as the "reddest." Mormons make up the majority of the state's population and that consequently creates a lot of ultra-conservative Republicans living within a Norman Rockwell painting of nostalgic Americana. In Utah, they love God, America, and family values. Oh yeah, and they love George Bush. His approval rating in Utah is 63%, the highest in the nation.
Utah Valley State College (UVSC) is in the city of Orem, which, and I'm not joking, the city council officially named "Family City, USA." During the 2004 election season, the student body presidency at UVSC, in an attempt to electrify a relatively apathetic student body, announced that it had invited the nation's number-one Bush critic to speak among the nation's number-one Bush supporters. Michael Moore was coming to the land of Zion and I thought that was just absolutely brilliant. Expecting an all out war of words, I grabbed a video camera, drove to the college with my film crew and started to record a state of absolute absurdity.
The hallways of the school were already full of angry parents, students and community members yelling and screaming. A petition to impeach the student-body presidency was quickly started and started making rounds. A microphone was set up in a cafeteria and a Mormon Sunday School teacher got up and screamed, "This man hates who we are, he hates our values, and he would like to destroy us!"
The audience erupted with laughter during this scene at a recent screening of This Divided State at the Gothenburg Film Festival in Sweden. In a later scene of the film, that same Mormon Sunday School teacher loudly proclaims, "Free speech works because most of us have the good sense to know when to KEEP OUR MOUTHS SHUT!" The audience's laughter got even louder with one woman actually yelling at the movie screen, "Who is this guy?!" Well, his name is Kay Anderson and he, at least to this Swedish audience, represents all Americans.
People in countries around the world seem to be baffled by the actions of the United States right now. A tangible air of international anger and confusion arose when George Bush was re-elected and now other events such as the contemptible response to Hurricane Katrina and unwarranted wiretaps on US citizens have many scratching their heads and waving fists. "What the hell is wrong with America?" seems to be the question on everyone's minds. In fact, that was one of the questions I got during the Q & A session at that screening in Sweden.
I replied by saying that Americans are not only developing a deaf ear for their international community, but they are also becoming deaf towards their own. We aren't listening to one another. Patience and tolerance for opposing views has all but dried up. Human diversity demands an infinite amount of personalities and opinions, and such diversity requires tolerance, not just of a different race or sex, but of different opinions: political, religious, and scientific. I say that tolerance does not require compromising your own values, and often it doesn't require an ideological agreement. I propose that tolerance requires listening. There are so many people shouting and crusading in America, but does anyone actually take the time to listen to each other?
I stated to the Swedish audience that the mayhem surrounding Michael Moore's speech in Utah is a microcosm for the current "divided state" of civil discourse in America. Most of the arguments from anti-Moore Utahns stemmed from the fact that Michael Moore "didn't represent their communities and religious values." And that's one of the most disappointing trends in current American discourse, the fact that you're no longer right or wrong in your argument, but that you are either good or evil.
How divisive is it to lump people into two extremely polarized groups? How reductive is it to say you must be either a "red-stater" or a "blue-stater"? How insulting is it to the human race to label someone as "good or evil"? Senator Barack Obama addressed this predicament during the 2004 DNC:
"Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us... Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America... The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
Now Obama's vision of an America where those with opposing views come together and unite, despite differences, may sound utopian to some and impossible to others. In fact, back at the screening of This Divided State in Sweden, the mostly international audience was now feeling more convinced than ever that the U.S. had been overrun by crazy Neo-Con zealots. I addressed their critique by pointing out that the student-body presidency at Utah Valley State College consisted of two conservative, Bush-supporting Mormons. Yes, the very students that fought tooth and nail to bring Michael Moore to campus, despite death threats and lawsuits, were students who disagreed with him! In fact, in the end, one of the students, Joe Vogel, was forced to resign and lost his scholarship because of the controversy surrounding Moore's speech. And Joe, almost across the board, did not agree with what Moore had to say. If that doesn't shine a ray of hope upon us all, I don't know what does.