Posted on 04/12/2002 6:13:23 AM PDT by Mr. Thorne
ANTI-AMERICANISM EMPLOYS A SET OF CLICHÉS as predictable and stale as the conventions of supermarket romance. Every time, for example, the United States acts forcefully abroad to protect its interests, you can bet the farm some pencil-neck in America or Europe will whip out the charge that America once more is acting like a "cowboy."
This charge is usually tossed off with the smug assurance that acting like a cowboy is about the most horrible thing one could do. The ignorant masses might think that the cowboy myth is about qualities such as the courage to risk one's life for one's convictions or to protect others, but what do those oafs know, brainwashed as they are by movies and ads? The right-thinking elites know the real score--the cowboy is the racist enforcer of manifest destiny, a sadistic, genocidal thug, probably a repressed homosexual, and the mythic peddler of cigarettes and pickup trucks and other proletarian accessories.
This misreading of the cowboy myth of course reflects the world-view of what the cowboy himself would call a "tinhorn" or a "tenderfoot," those usually Eastern city-boys who are unable for whatever reason to use violence when violence is necessary to stop evil. Sometimes the tenderfoot is merely a coward who camouflages timidity with principle. Other times he's a naïve idealist who thinks that the protocols of civilized justice and reasoned debate will work in the Darwinian world of the frontier, even though there the rudimentary social structures are themselves either ineffective or corrupt.
The constant theme of the cowboy myth is that such idealism is dangerous, for force is always the tragic choice necessary for destroying evil and protecting civilization. Nor is this choice simple: in the best movie westerns, the cowboy understands that his willingness to use force to protect civilized innocence is itself uncivilized and creates a moral burden, which he must accept and bear. As Alan Ladd says in Shane, "There's no living with a killing."
As such, the cowboy myth is one of the last great expressions of the tragic view of life increasingly absent in our therapeutic world, but necessary now more than ever. We have instead adopted a weird hybrid of Enlightenment and Romantic myths that tells us people are basically good and rational, and only behave destructively because an unjust and oppressive society robs them of self-esteem and causes them to "act out." Reform society, offer therapeutic, esteem-building solace through psychological technique and sensitivity, and then we can create the utopia in which everybody is happy, evil is banished, violence disappears, and all problems are solved through reasoned discourse.
The cowboy knows better. He knows that some people are evil, and their evil afflicts the innocent. Maybe they have an excuse for their evil, maybe they don't, or maybe they're just no damn good, but ultimately what matters is keeping that evil from destroying the good. Reason, law, appeals to morality ultimately cut no ice with the bad guy. He respects only one thing-- overwhelming, devastating and, usually, lethal force. Since the legal and social structures for applying force and judging evil are usually ineffective or corrupt, that force has to be applied by the man (or the woman, like Grace Kelly at the end of High Noon) who is willing to kill for the right.
Our modern tinhorns and tenderfeet, those intellectual deconstructors of every mythology save their own, scorn the cowboy as simplistic. His "good" and "evil" are old-fashioned concepts modern psychological science has shown to be no more real than fairy tales. His dependence on force is crude and primitive, and ultimately more noxious than the evil against which he fights. Better, like the intellectual in his universe of words and ideas, to rely on talk, negotiation, persuasion, and all those other confabs in which the verbal adept shines.
This belief in talking evil out of its evil ways strikes me as peculiar, and one certainly not supported by the evidence of 20th century history. The two great totalitarian threats to human freedom, fascism and communism--whose collective tally of dead is at least 150 million people-- were stopped by force or the threat of force. It was Hitler after all who scorned the GI's landing at Normandy as "cowboys" his panzers would quickly teach a lesson. The next time some Eurocrat sneers about American "cowboys," he should remember that if not for those "cowboys" Europe wouldn't even exist today.
Talk can work with those who respect talk, who share a common tradition of democratic values and rational discourse. It can work with those who don't respect talk if talk is backed up by a believable threat of force. But talk fails utterly with those who scorn negotiation and give-and-take as evidence of weakness. With such people talk merely provides the cover for their aggression and emboldens them into thinking their use of force will succeed. As Jimmy Stewart--the idealistic Easterner who wants to counter evil with reasoned law in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence-- finally learns, "When force threatens, talk is no good."
Again, talk can work when validated by sufficiently deterrent force. But ever since Vietnam, our talk has not been so validated, with the exception of Reagan's build up of potential force that brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Elsewhere we threatened and blustered, we negotiated and bribed, we dickered and haggled, but the message was clear: America will blink and stay its hand. It took the most devastating attack on American soil finally to rouse us from our therapeutic slumber and wake us up to a hard world filled with evil people who need not to be talked to, but killed before they kill others.
by the way whenever they start to make noise- just flash the pict of the Swastika flying over the Eiffel Tower. Only the Brits and Turks have true grit now
Besides, have you actually ever KNOWN any Frenchmen or Italians (from the other side)? Mama's boys bigtime!
This is particularly true of the Scots and the Welsh. I must say, however, that Poofy Tony the Englishman has been quite the water carrier for us.
R.J. Cogburn
U.S. Marshall
= )
From my real life experiences in Europe, I disagree with your estimate of effiminates and socialists.
But you might be an expert on effiminates and socialists.
Hey, you use the movie Godfather as background? Another 100% real world reference.
True Grit. That's a good movie. Contending for the number one scene in all westerns is the picture of The Duke charging the bad guys by himself with the reigns in his teeth and both guns blazing.
"Fill your hands, you S@n of a B%*ch !"
For the record, I have traveled throughout Europe and Latin America. I work with more foreigners than Americans in my place of business. Show me how Euro-peons are not more socialist than the USA and I am sure that you can prove that snipes exist in the Phoenix Valley.
Furthermore, as a half-Italian American, I am proud of the fact that my ancestors learned how to shove on their own in America and minimalize Mammisima.
BTW: Why do you knock my screen name?
He sure does. He, unlike Clinton, represents the true American spirit. The social(sm) collectivists of EUrope will never - CAN never - understand that, because the fashionable political left is unable to comprehend the American spirit.
The French loved Clinton. They dismiss GW as a "cowboy." What does that tell us?
Nice background kid, but I still disagree with your assessment of Europeans being 95% effiminate socialists. You must have traveled in a different crowd.
Hey, so what, I have nothing against effiminates, or socialists, as long as they mind their own business.
If that's what you found in Europe, you're welcome to your own.
Liberal = Collectivism
Therefore, the liberal despises the idea of a cowboy.
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