Class Lines on the Font Lines: the 1998 Reporting, part 1

So, the reason I was so interested in chatting with Coyote about West Laramie that Friday when we walked along the green belt was because of what I had read in some back issues of the Laramie Boomerang from 1998.  I was surprised to find an AP article on the class divide in Laramie dated just a week after Matthew Shepard died.  The article was put out by a couple of AP staff writers and a Cheyenne reporter, and the Boomerang ran it to show how the drama was being reported in the national media coverage.
The piece was over-the-top, honestly, and laughably inaccurate as it overplayed the common tropes of class struggle.  According to the AP, upper-class Wyoming families are all close and loving (never mind that Shepard's father spent most of his childhood working on a different continent) and all lower-class families are virtual time bombs for criminal behavior (never mind that Henderson, not Shepard, was the Eagle scout).  West Laramie, apparently, is the complete opposite of east Laramie, according to the AP, and west Laramie is therefore a crime-ridden, poverty-strapped sewage pit.  And when West Laramie residents read this article back in 1998, some of them actually (and quite understandably) flipped out.

But, what really fascinated me was the way in which the AP reporters picked up on a narrative that, to be honest, has always resonated with me, but I was never really sure if that narrative was just part of my personal relationship to Laramie (because my family splits that same class divide) or if it was a larger narrative being played out in the community.  As it turns out, I wasn't making it up.  That narrative of class and privilege was one that was floating around even while the narrative of LGBT intolerance was being passed around, too.  I'd like to share a little of this article with you, and the Laramie reactions, to show you how that east-west Laramie split, still felt by my brother Coyote today, was making waves in Laramie back in 1998... 

The Religious Codes of Tectonic Theater: Using Your "Inside" Voice

When people speak about certain issues, they always do it from within a limited point of view: are they looking from without or within?  Each perspective is useful in its own way, but they're not the same thing.  Whether or not you consider yourself (or your conversation partner) inside or outside of your community can really affect the way you explain your view of things. 

Religious dialogue, for instance, is one of the places where the play has the hardest time breaking into, so to speak.  This is something observed by a "bench coach" for the original TLP, Stephen Wangh.  As I pointed out in a previous post, Wangh wonders a little bit whether or not Tectonic Theater found themselves unable or unwilling to address that society's "holy protagonists," and more often than not I find that I agree with him. 

But that's not entirely up to Tectonic Theater to decide; after all, those "holy protagonists" have a say in the matter, too.  For a variety of reasons, from doctrinal to social to political, each of these people can make a choice about where to align themselves in regard to Tectonic Theater.  If we look at how different people speak about the religious community-- Unitarians, Mormons, Baptists, and Catholics-- can we see where they see themselves fitting in?  

As for me?  At one time, I was an insider in The Baptist Church.  And now, where am I?  Do I speak now as an insider or an outsider of that community?  Well, just look above for your answer...

Fences

I grew up clambering over barbed wire, buck fences and snow fences as a kid, and in my childhood imagination I played favorites between them. I never liked barbed wire, first because I always ran the danger of a tri-corner rip in my jeans (and therefore my mother's wrath) every time I squeezed through them. It was an aesthetic dislike, too: barbed wire is too impersonal. It's a cheap fence, metal, thrown up and pounded in without the slightest thought other than to carve the wilderness into parcels. A forcible mark of ownership. And, it's hard to climb.

 

Buck fences are more conciliatory, I had always thought. They're made from the wilderness itself, more organic, lying on top of rather than punched within the ground. To me, they suggested a more symbiotic relationship between man and land, a way of showing a stretch of land as  both "home" and "habitat" at the same time.  Snow fences, however, were always my favorite because they don't actually "fence in" anything-- just long, parallel stretches of tall rails that comb the Wyoming wind to steal its snow. You climbed a snow fence just to climb, not to get anywhere.

The fences of my childhood never registered as being something worth any particular comment-- just another part of the landscape-- but living in the South has taught me to look at them differently.  For instance, it had never occurred to me that one's relationship fences might be cultural, that that relationship might need to be taught.  One of my favorite conversations so far at my new college has been trying to explain in detail how a "snow fence" works to a friend of mine from the southwest. I eventually had to resort to pictures. He was enthralled.