Monthly Archives: July 2019
Cowboy – “hero of magic dreams” or everyday drama?
Among other things, foreigners simply do not recognize the associations that are present in the Western myth for the American right, and for any American. Everyone wears jeans, but no one, except for young Americans, experiences this, albeit weak, reflex to lean in them against an imaginary concord and look, squinting, at the sun. Foreign nouveau riche is not tempted to fasten a Texas hat. They watch the Schlesinger “Midnight Cowboy” and do not feel any profanity. In general, the country of Marlborough is inhabited by some Americans. Gary Cooper was serious, and JR and the other platinum characters of the Dallas series are no longer there. In this sense, the cowboy myth has ceased to be international. Continue reading
The guy from the Marlboro commercial.
The present re-invention of the tradition of the West as a mass phenomenon that captured American politics is the product of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Reagan eras. And of course, Reagan — the first president after Teddy Roosevelt, whose image of a cowboy in the saddle was consciously borrowed from a western — knew what he was doing. To what extent the Reagan cowboys reflected the shift of American wealth to the southwest, I will not undertake to judge. Continue reading
The new cowboy tradition
The new cowboy tradition made its way into the big world in two directions: Western films and heavily undervalued Western novels, which for many foreigners were the same as detectives today. Their occurrence was caused by the invention of the “new” American West. We will not discuss it here, I will only cite as an example the leader of the British mining union, a militant member of the Methodist church, after whose death in 1930 he left some money and a huge collection of Zein Gray’s novels. Continue reading
