enceladus
2004-10-11 01:38:42 UTC
eorge W. Bush is a fake cowboy. From media accounts, you'd reckon that the
president was a buckaroo to the bones. He plays up the image, big-time, with
$300 designer cowboy boots, a $1,000 cowboy hat, and his 1,600-acre Prairie
Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. He guns his rhetoric with frontier lingo,
saying that he'll "ride herd" over ornery Middle Eastern governments and
"smoke out" enemies in wild mountain passes. He branded Saddam Hussein's
Iraq "an outlaw regime" and took the vanquished dictator's pistol as a
trophy. As for Osama bin Laden, Bush declared, "I want justice. And there's
an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' "
Britain's liberal newspaper The Guardian noted that "such language feeds the
image overseas of Mr. Bush as a hopelessly inarticulate, trigger-happy
cowboy."
But liberals from both coasts and Europeans who derisively call Bush a
"cowboy" foolishly insult not Bush, but one of America's prime ennobling
myths. Instead of ridiculing the myth exploited by George W. Bush, they may
want to measure him against it.
"The idea of the American cowboy is the direct lineal descendant of the
chivalric knight," observes Bonnie Wheeler, a medievalist in cowboy country.
"The only serious difference is that your status doesn't depend on your
social class." Editor of Arthuriana, the journal of Arthurian studies,
Wheeler teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
"Our president," she says, "is neither a knight nor a cowboy. He doesn't
believe in taking care of the little guy, nor does he have the restraint or
dignity of the cowboy."
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`
end
president was a buckaroo to the bones. He plays up the image, big-time, with
$300 designer cowboy boots, a $1,000 cowboy hat, and his 1,600-acre Prairie
Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. He guns his rhetoric with frontier lingo,
saying that he'll "ride herd" over ornery Middle Eastern governments and
"smoke out" enemies in wild mountain passes. He branded Saddam Hussein's
Iraq "an outlaw regime" and took the vanquished dictator's pistol as a
trophy. As for Osama bin Laden, Bush declared, "I want justice. And there's
an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' "
Britain's liberal newspaper The Guardian noted that "such language feeds the
image overseas of Mr. Bush as a hopelessly inarticulate, trigger-happy
cowboy."
But liberals from both coasts and Europeans who derisively call Bush a
"cowboy" foolishly insult not Bush, but one of America's prime ennobling
myths. Instead of ridiculing the myth exploited by George W. Bush, they may
want to measure him against it.
"The idea of the American cowboy is the direct lineal descendant of the
chivalric knight," observes Bonnie Wheeler, a medievalist in cowboy country.
"The only serious difference is that your status doesn't depend on your
social class." Editor of Arthuriana, the journal of Arthurian studies,
Wheeler teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
"Our president," she says, "is neither a knight nor a cowboy. He doesn't
believe in taking care of the little guy, nor does he have the restraint or
dignity of the cowboy."
begin 666 g.gif
M1TE&.#EA%@`7`+/_`````,# P._O[]_?W\_/S[N[NZJJJIJ:FHJ*BG9V=F9F
M9E55545%12$A(1$1$0```"'Y! $```$`+ `````6`!<`0 2+,,@YT&(@`Y;,
ME)B6%5]I-F+FE4B*!$2:*4,@'$[:!'GZM;+,:X(+!ANK0-&84DAB.A//%?P<
M&-AL]I"0':1 S5 1=&1[HJ$T4&@7!&L*F0E E@[TX"J4+AED!&%***@1N;0,H
J/G$E51."+GP:!$19B6)_*0Q@+@&8(@YJ$H]J<WE]=PMH(@T+"),!$0`[
`
end