OFT-FORSAKEN (via Buttercup, Tom Morin, & Governor Breck):

Go Ahead, Call Us Cowboys: A visit to the Alaska-Canada border brings home the differences between the cultures. (ANDREW KLEINFELD AND JUDITH KLEINFELD, July 19, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

Though detractors Marxify the cowboy into some sort of violent capitalist, the "Western" fable was actually a rebuke to the "Gilded Age." Americans did not choose as their heroes of song and image the men who financed the railroads and endowed the libraries. The Plains hero of Owen Wister's novel, The Virginian (a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt), had no property, no schooling, no social standing, no money and no interest in getting these things. What gave him pride was his courage, competence, self-discipline, self-reliance, physical prowess and most of all integrity and sense of justice. The cowboy, an impoverished hired hand who slept in bunkhouses or on the ground, was a figure of aristocratic honor. As Wister put it, "If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times." The cowboy was a knight, albeit one with no land or money.

High Noon portrayed a sheriff who, unable to get any of the townsmen to stand with him against brutal thugs taking over their remote town, faced them down alone, and survived only because his Quaker wife picked up a gun and sacrificed her abstract pacifism to the concrete virtue that the hero represented. "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" presented John Wayne as a military hero who, through great courage and skill, prevented an Indian war. In "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," Jimmy Stewart played a lawyer who had no skill with a gun, happily wore an apron, and dried the dishes in the kitchen until he was forced by a sense of honor and justice to confront the villain who ruled the town by brute force. Shane told the story of a brave man who wanted peace but risked his life to protect homesteaders from the men who were destroying them. In all the classic Westerns the hero, by dint of great courage and competence, fights alone for justice, achieves it, and leaves without riches or fame, with nothing but honor.

Because the cowboy melded the aristocratic virtues of honor and indifference to material things with the democratic values of self-reliance, discipline, and independence, this myth appealed deeply to our national character. Freedom imposes burdens--isolation, inequality and anxiety about whether our choices are wise. The cowboy ideal stimulates in us the vigor to attempt difficult new tasks.

When foreigners see us as cowboys, they are not mistaken.

An untapped subtext here is that in Shane, Liberty Valence, and High Noon it required a particularly violent, though decent, man to maintain or restore the social order, because the regular townspeople, likewise decent, preferred accommodation to confrontation. In this sense particularly President Bush is an archetypal American figure.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2004 11:46 PM