Subtext: Two men who will always save you, or: it’s all about fidelity

[Again, this is a building block post and out of order, as I didn’t finish writing about Vicar of Dibley yet. It’s about why I am inclined not only to like, but also to feel ambivalent about certain kinds of characters, as a prerequisite to figuring out why Mr. Armitage’s acting affects me so much. It’s been percolating for awhile but is prompted by the fact that a generous friend helped me to see Strike Back episodes 1 and 2 and I am having a rather emotional reaction. My writing’s been disrupted not only by this reaction, but also by finals at my university and ongoing family issues, but I hope this post marks a return to regular posting. It won’t all be this serious.]

Where and when I was growing up, there were two men who would always save you. To be more precise, two kinds of men. The farmer and the serviceman. It follows as a direct corollary that two sorts of men were unreliable: the townie and the bureaucrat. I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s in a small town in the Up North of the U.S. that was near what we termed a big city (c. 30,000 people at the time). My family –both sides: my parents can’t tell you when they met because they have always known each other; they were married when they were both 19– was, since the mid-nineteenth century, from a much more rural farming community about 40 mi. west.

A story: The winter I was nineteen, I was temping for an attorney in town over my Christmas break and four months in Texas had weakened my weather awareness. Up North you never leave the house in winter without winter gear along (even if you don’t have it on), just as your car should always have a big bag of salt, jumper cables, and a blanket in it. It didn’t help that, in a fit of pique over my decision to go so far away to college, my mother had given away most of my really warm gear with the justification that it should go to someone who was going to use it. In a combination of not having the gear and not thinking much about it, I drove to work and stopped afterward to buy a few things at K-Mart. It had been snowing when I left work but by the time I came out of the store the snow had become a blizzard. I was only about ten miles away so I decided to drive home figuring I would be there before things got really bad. Well, I hadn’t been watching the sky, or I might not have made that decision. And this was before the days of cell phones. I was fine till I got to the edge of town but the country roads were bad and slick and at some point, after braking, I did a 360 degree turn that I couldn’t steer out of and landed the car hood first in a big, deep ditch. What was I going to do now? The blizzard was intensifying, I had no chance of getting the car out of the ditch, and I was dressed for work at the attorney’s: trench coat, polyester blouse, wool skirt, hose, black ballet flats. I was afraid to get out of the car, and I couldn’t see anything. As I was beginning to wonder what was going to happen, a figure appeared at the door of the car. It was my dad. When I hadn’t gotten home on time he’d gotten worried and started on the road to town to look for me. He pulled me up out of the car, put me in the cab of his tractor, attached the car to the back of the tractor, then drove himself, me, and the disabled car all home, all in the midst of a raging blizzard. On the way home he saw another car in the ditch, stopped, got out, discovered the neighbor lady and her toddler in it, took the child out and gave it to me, then drove us all home, detached my car, and went back for the neighbor lady and her car.

You might be tempted to think this was just my dad, or that it had something to do with me, but this was the expected standard of male behavior in my community. (Whether it was always fulfilled, and what that meant about the expected standard of female behavior, would be topics for a separate post, and maybe they will be, some day.) This was not bravado, or macho heroics. My parents did not farm, but most people did, and my father still sees himself as a farmer. My brother lives on the farm where my father grew up now, and he’s just the same. There’s a self-confident, non-aggressive vibe about all the men up there: if they were forced to put it into words, they might say: We do what we have to do, and we will do what we say we will do because we can count on ourselves to do the job. We won’t talk big, we won’t promise anything we can’t deliver, but we are watching out for each other, and–equally important–we won’t make a big deal out of it.

I think the vibe was also heightened by the social connections of the men in the community with the military. Conscription in the state was absolute by county, not proportional by population. Probably half the state’s population lives in its two largest cities, so disproportionately more rural dwellers went to WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Veterans’ Day was a solemn day in my community. Almost all the dads and uncles of my classmates had served. My dad and both uncles served, as did all of my great-uncles on both sides. (My grandfathers were both exempt, I’m not sure why.) All of my male cousins have served, and many, many of my classmates at school. My brother has not, mostly through historical accident. I say this not to stress my family’s patriotism or give them or me points, but to suggest that this experience of shared service created a sort of community ethic that may have been peculiarly enhanced in the wake of Vietnam and U.S. perceptions of its outcome in rural areas. That is, men have been particularly reluctant to let each other down because they felt let down by the country. If they couldn’t have the support of their nation, at least they could show each other, and each other’s families, how an ethic of service and commitment really looked. These stances are not unabashedly positive, even as there is a lot of good in them, and I won’t hash that out here now, but key for me is that this is what I was raised to believe a real man was: a farmer, or a service man. As a friend of mine said of her partner: these men are true blue.

The service man wore combat boots; the farmer wore work boots. If a dancing man makes me hot, a man in combat boots or work boots makes me trust that he will do what he says he will do and not let me down.

~ by Servetus on May 14, 2010.