Note by Hunterbear: I really wish media folks and others would stop referring to Bush as a "cowboy." While I know what they mean via American film stereotypes -- the free-wheeling cavalier [often blood-thirsty] recklessness that allows viewers vicarious fantasy releases in the safety of their living rooms -- this is really a travesty on bona fide cowboying and a signal disservice to the Real Cowpuncher.
Among my very top favorite films are Shane and Salt of the Earth. The latter, of course, teaches the great importance of successful on-the-line Solidarity: workingclass, inter-ethnic, inter-gender -- against cunningly vicious and powerful corporate adversaries. "Salt" is Eternally Real. Shane depicts a former cowboy and lone gunman who, after voluntarily assisting in the rallying of frequently frightened homesteaders against a violent ranching outfit, rides with his gun to a successful and sanguinarily effective showdown with all of the Enemy [including their own hired gun.] And Shane, too, is Eternally Real. George Bush is none of any of those or that. He's never put himself, personally and physically, into any kind of danger anywhere. Like many who have never seen Real Violence, he wallows in its rhetoric from the safety of his Soft Cocoon -- one high up in the Tree, far from the Ground. And that applies to much of the Et Al. around him as well. But back to cowboys: I grew up in Cowboy Country -- and, on my Anglo [mother's side] of our Native family, draw in part from Western ranching origins. All the cowboys I've known and know [and this includes those in horse ranching as well] are brave and honorable and courageous guys of many ethnicities -- often working daybreak to dusk in the roughest and toughest and most cutting edges of the Natural World. Much of a cowboy's life is still on horseback and those buddies can be unpredictable as all hell [I prefer mules, even if they often try to knock you off via a low hanging limb.] Utah-born Big Bill Haywood -- Western Federation of Miners and Industrial Workers of the World -- who spent an important part of his early life among the Mormons and Indians [all of whom he liked] and also very much as a cowboy, put it very well in his classic Bill Haywood's Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood [New York: International Publishers, 1929 and many subsequent editions] -- which I recommend to anyone interested in American radicalism and high-drama struggle as well as the American West. Said he, in a long and very knowledgeable discussion of that always arduous and often grim world: "The cowboy's life is not the joyous, adventuresome existence shown in the moving pictures, read about in cheap novels, or to be seen in the World's Exhibitions . . ." He pointed out that "the cowboys and the miners of the West often led dreary and lonesome lives." And cowboying is dangerous. It's still the most dangerous occupation in the United States. Coal mining is next. Contemporaries of mine in their Teens who chose that life-on-the-range frequently had many broken bones by the time they hit their mid-twenties. It would be interesting to see George Bush on a horse, chasing a calf -- let alone a bull -- through the thorn tearing mesquite. I don't think we ever will. Hell, he isn't even a W.E.B. To you all from the Big Cities, that means a Wise Eastern B. Some of Them can even be OK. Solidarity - Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ and Ohkwari' In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings. Then it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and remembering way. [Hunterbear] _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
