The Cowboy Myth
Thornton, Bruce
"The Cowboy Myth" BY BRUCE THORNTON Every time the United States acts forcefully abroad to protect its interests, you can bet the farm someone will whip out the charge that America once more is...
...He knows that some people are evil, and their evil afflicts the innocent...
...The constant theme of the true cowboy myth is that such idealism is dangerous, for force is always the tragic choice necessary for destroying evil and protecting civilization...
...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," the Europe we know today wouldn't exist...
...It took the most devastating attack on American soil to rouse us finally 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...
...Sometimes the tenderfoot is merely a coward who camouflages timidity with principle...
...reasoned debate will work in the Darwinian world of the frontier...
...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...
...Talk can work with those who respect talk, who share a common tradition of democratic values and rational discourse...
...As Alan Ladd says in Shane, "There's no living with a killing...
...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 bear...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002...
...Other times he's a naive idealist who thinks that the protocols of civilized justice and Bruce Thorn ton is professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and author of Bonfire of the Humanities and Greek Ways...
...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 P1 hhio Shot Liberty Lnlenee---finally learns, "When force threatens, talk is no good...
...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...
...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 and violence disappears...
...This belief in talking evil out of its evil ways strikes me as peculiar, and certainly not supported by 20th-century history...
...Elsewhere, we threatened and blustered, we negotiated and bribed, we dickered and haggled, but the message was clear: America will blink...
...Again, talk can work when validated by sufficiently deterrent force...
...It can work with those who don't respect talk if talk is backed up by a believable threat of force...
...This misreading of the cowboy myth, of course, reflects the worldview 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...
...The two great totalitarian threats to human freedom, fascism and communism-whose collective death count is at least 150 million peoplewere stopped by force or the threat of 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's character at the end of High Noon) who is willing to kill for the right...
...As such, the cowboy myth is one of the last great expressions of the tragic view of life-increasingly absent in our therapeutic world...
...His "good" and "evil" are old-fashioned concepts modern psychological science has shown to be no more real than fairy tales...
...Our modern tinhorns and tenderfeet, those intellectual deconstructors of every mythology save their own, scorn the cowboy as simplistic...
...His dependence on force is crude and primitive, and ultimately more noxious than the evil against which he fights...
...THE COWBOY MYTH BY BRUCE THORNTON Every time the United States acts forcefully abroad to protect its interests, you can bet the farm someone will whip out the charge that America once more is acting like a "cowboy...
...But talk fails utterly with those who scorn negotiation and give-and-take as evidence of weakness...
...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...
...He respects only one thing overwhelming, devastating and (usually) lethal force...
...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...
...But ever since Vietnam, our talk has not been so validated, with the exception of Reagan's buildup that brought the Soviet Union to its knees...
...Reason, law and appeals to morality ultimately cut no ice with the bad guy...
...The cowboy knows better...
Vol. 35 • May 2002 • No. 3
