From the Land of Cowboys to You; or, The Modern Buckaroo’s Guide to the World
Rugged individualism takes you far, especially if you’re a misanthrope. For the rest of us, it’s helpful to be nice to the neighbors, to let in the ConEd man to check the meter, and to obey street signs.
What has gotten my goat since Day One of Politics with the Sore-Loser Republican Party is how unobservant [...]
Language is a dynamic tool–it shapes us as much as we shape it. I will weep if I go into the whole “torture” vs. “harsh interrogation tactic” brouhaha (just call a spade a spade–we did torture, and we shouldn’t) so I will instead shine my small but powerful flashlight on words we no longer choose [...]
In a flurry of pink prose, headlines across the virtual Web are proclaiming the primacy of love: despite the sinking economy, people are still ponying up a few bucks to read the latest in love in lust:
Along with chocolate and Big Macs, romance novels are showing a brisk level of sales. Here’s a fact that [...]
Another appropriation of the Cowboy myth struck this past week. It was buckshot heard around the world, from the coastal waters of Somalia to a pop star’s son’s yearnings.
A showdown always brings out the best and worst, as is the case of the Somali pirate/ U.S. warship standoff that happily ended with the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, [...]
The taxman/woman brings oppressive reality. No, not all of my money is my own. My sweat is not my own. Then I tell myself to drop kick that checkbook and cowboy up–time to see what is going on in the Wild Western Web.
One phenomena that never fails to cheer me up is the strange world of western fetish [...]
Weren’t we supposed to be done with all these cowboy showdowns? Then along comes AIG, thinking business as usual, and they caught caught in populist crossfire. I’d feel sorry for them, but I’m not. I can hear a constant rustling in the bushes as one by one all of AIG’s friends and comrades abandon them [...]
The New York Times isn’t above reaching for hyperbolic language like a grocery store rag. I couldn’t help discovering–OK everything even remotely related to the West gets shot to my e-mail like a .44 caliber bullet so I can read these things greedily as if they were pulp novels, of which I have over three [...]
It’s county historical museums like the ones in Oakley, Idaho; Florence, Arizona; Pecos, Texas; and Silverton, Colorado, that should be a part of the stimulus package!
Mining Museum, Silverton, CO ©2008 es
They are fusty and musty and cluttered and jumbled, but filled to the brim with the kind of real life that Joe the Plumber has [...]
In politics there is plenty cowboy derring do-do. On days–sometimes weeks–of arid blog-writing time (good for wrangling the novel and etcetera), I take heart when good friends send me snippets of the kind of stuff you can’t write, unless you’re Howard Breslin and and Don MacGuire, putting together a taut script for the psychological western Bad [...]
In times of moral confusion
I turn to prime time
where good can conquer evil
in the space of sixty minutes (minus twenty for 3.9 percent financing on Chevy pickups and softcore Viagra porn).
Once upon a time prime-time showdowns between good and evil came in a haze of gun smoke and rawhide
men bristled with single-action revolvers and laconic [...]