In A `Braveheart' World, We Need The Spirit Of `Babe'

I should just let it go. It's already the middle of 1996. But doggone it, I still don't think "Braveheart" was last year's best picture . . .

Don't get me wrong. It was an OK movie, in that macho, "I-love-ya-man-but-you-can't-have-my-Bud-Light" sort of way; a manly spectacle with battle scenes, heads dropping from the ceiling, dying heroes screaming "freedom," lots of male bonding and gay guys getting pushed out of high windows. It worked for all those real men who never lose, never run out of ideals and never fall off their horses.

But not me.

I liked "Babe," a silly, unimportant but darned nice little flick about a silly, unimportant but darned nice little animal. I can identify with a piglet too innocent to believe that his friends the dogs would attack his friends the sheep, or that the rest of his family had already been led to the slaughter. "Babe" was the perfect movie for people with nothing to get by on other than the coincidence that fate often favors the naive.

I guess you're either a Babe or a Braveheart; and if you're a Babe, you may as well know in advance that their movie is going to kick your movie's behind and send you home with a nice-try award for special effects or something like that. It just works that way .

But that's OK. Babes tend to be happy anyway. While Bravehearts have to sleep with one eye open, never knowing whom they can trust and whom they'll have to decapitate out of self-defense, Babes live

in a world filled with decent, good-natured people who don't hurt others. Life is all right, and everybody is a friend, so they don't need all those awards and recognitions.

And it's a good thing, because they almost never get them.

Perhaps the Bravehearts and the Babes are both wrong. Maybe the

first group should learn that we weren't put here for a life-and-death rugby match, that humankind isn't neatly divided into good guys and bad guys, and that, if it were, one might not be pleased with the team to which he was assigned. And maybe the other needs to wake up and smell the bacon. You can't always trust ducks and cats, and even that kind old farmer hasn't ruled out the possibility of a pork roast for Christmas.

As Jesus said, "Be innocent as doves, yet wise as serpents." Innocent as piglets, and wise as barbaric freedom-fighters, both at the same time.

Reminds me of a woman I knew. "Babe" inspired her to go and talk things out with an ex-boyfriend. Hurtful things had been said; motives had been misunderstood. An otherwise decent relationship had crumbled under the weight of suspicion and miscommunication. Now she began looking back on old times, thinking about what a great person this guy had always been, and she thought, "This is silly. We can still be friends. Let's forgive each other and move on."

But he was too worldly-wise for her. He saw through her deceptive ruse, he said, and knew that she had come only to get the advantage on him. She was the enemy; she was not to be trusted, and whatever she did was part of some secret plan that he was duty-bound to discover and destroy.

She thanked him for ascribing to her the intelligence to plot out such a scheme.

Then she went home and rented "Braveheart."

Scott Becker is a Baptist minister and free-lance writer living in Carnation.

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