Calling Bullshit

Bullshit abounds, but sometimes there's just enough new about it to merit a rejoinder.  Two recent instances:

1. The Atlantic's article/review entitled What Godless Says About America by Sophie Gilbert.  (I hope this is no relation to the several Gilberts I used to know, cause I'm not going to say nice things about this.)

It's about a Netflik original western (called "Godless") that I have not seen and have no plans to ever see.  Hype usually inflates newness or difference but this is supposed to be journalism.  To be fair however, what Gilbert says about westerns has become cliche.  Problem is, it's not true.

Here's the paragraph:

"Westerns celebrate the heroic individual rather than the well-ordered—but inevitably vulnerable—community. They glorify domination, whether over Native Americans or the treacherous terrain of the frontier. And they fetishize guns, which unfailingly allow heroes to safeguard democracy—never mind the collateral damage of bodies littered in the streets after each epic confrontation."

 Given the reality of settlers subduing the land as any farming, grazing or urban civilization does, I don't recognize any memorable western movie or television series in this description--certainly not from the years when the western was a major genre (which it hasn't been for more than fifty years.)

The classic western plot did involve a threat to the community, but it was posed by outlaws (who might be otherwise respectable businessmen as well as masked bank robbers) and the hero was the hero precisely because he (and occasionally she) defended the community against the outlaws--often enough by identifying and arresting them.  From Gary Cooper and John Wayne to Marshall Dillon.

The first conflict in High Noon in fact was between the man who felt his duty was to stay and defend the community and the woman who wanted him to abandon it.

As for guns, of course western movies often centered on gun fights, as did Eastern urban crime stories, and just as war movies had something to do with guns and bombs, space operas with phasers and light swords, etc. And yes, the spectacle of those battles sometimes mocks any sense of proportion.  But in most, the test of quality was the surrounding story.

I might also mention that the first and really only dramatized examples of gun control I recall seeing were in westerns, where the law banned guns in town.  It was deemed a sign of civilization.

Dominating Native Americans--the cowboys and Indians westerns--was certainly a theme (as it was a reality), but so was protecting Native Americans from greedy whites (a bit more fictional).

All of this was most obvious in television, especially in the 1950s. The very first television western hero, Hopalong Cassidy, often found greedy white men threatening the community, or threatening Indian tribes.  The theme of the first Lone Ranger feature film was uncovering a plot by white men to drive Indians off their land and steal their gold.  Essentially it was also the plot of the second Lone Ranger feature film.

Hopalong, the Lone Ranger and other early western TV heroes fired their guns a lot but they seldom shot anyone dead.  There were more fistfights that fire fights in TV westerns, even in the era of the "adult westerns" of the late 50s and early 60s.

So: bullshit.

2. The NYTimes Nazi story controversy.  Both the story and the controversy have the same problem: reporters and commentators who apparently have never lived in middle America, or more to the point, aren't old enough to remember when overt white racism was normal there.  It helps to have black journalists, and it also helps to have a knowledge of history.  More generally it might help to have those older experienced journalists they sent packing when the staffs shrunk.  No institutional memory, no memory at all.  All bullshit.