Friend M. A. Titmarsh yesterday mentioned wearing a six gun belt, chaps, boots, a shirt with fringes and a cowboy hat when a child. That image of him will linger long in the Authorial Rabbit’s mind.
Hardcopy photos of 20th century children posing in such gear lie yellowing in many a storage box on closet shelves and in attics.
The Authorial Rabbit, no spring chicken, recalled another friend whose family called him the Crying Cowboy when he was a child. He had the gear but perhaps not always the attitude.
Regarding the attitude — and the aptitude. The cowboy created by American movies and beloved by post-WWII children (except probably black, aboriginal, Latino, Asian children, whose lives told them something different) in the Americas and Europe, as the Disneyland version of the USA was loved, lived by a code. It was the High Noon (1952) quality of character: belief in duty and the law, courage in the face of not only mad, bad and dangerous people but also, perhaps especially, standing firm in the face of the craven cowardice of normal citizens, the complicit, the enablers and the weak and indifferent. In other words, potentially us, before we are put to the test.
The hero often came from outside, but not always. Sometimes he was a good person in the community and it was the community that went bad, led to the abyss by a home-grown bully or an outsider intent on taking over the town for personal profit.
That was where Gary Cooper’s Will Kane character found himself in the fictional Hadleyville, New Mexico Territory. Kane had been ready to retire, having just married Grace Kelly. Another of the strange Hollywood marriages of a much older man to a younger woman. No mention of moving to Monaco.
The bad guys are on their way. Grace wants to do a bunk, being a Quaker and all. The citizens don’t want to help, being cowards and all. Kane decides to stay, he has to stay.
Today — and the Authorial Rabbit is always aware of the risk and unfairness of overgeneralizing — the USA has become Hadleyville.
Think about the cowboy code, how the good person in Westerns should behave. Here is Gene Autry’s version:
Could the current American presidential and senate leadership divert any further from these guidelines? Is today’s Hadleyville not ruled by a leader and enabled by supporters Will Kane had to steel himself to fight alone?
Eventually there comes a reckoning. There always comes a reckoning, and not just in movies. Indeed in modern movies, the infinite violence and cynicism of the Netflix playlist, the error is that there is no reckoning, only endless despair.
COVID-19 is such a reckoning. Not a Biblical curse, just a biological reality. In its early days in the USA, its presence revealed how the cowboy ideals had decayed. The crying cowboy.
The virus is an awakening, the opportunity to be good to each other and rebuild those ideals.
J. B. Thompson 