Over at Tacitus there’s a pretty interesting debate going on about the ‘cowboy’ thing: Tac’s pretty much in that ‘this is an insult?’ camp of Righties that delights in complicating the lives of people who just wanted to use a nice, simple pejorative. For my part, that pretty much sums up this particular debate right there: I look at this sort of thing and see people wanting to be pains in the ass to other people, and the various objections thereof. In other words, it’s mostly just an exercise in rhetoric.
Well, it’s that and an excuse to link to good Westerns. I’ve always liked Clint Eastwood movies, myself: The Outlaw Josey Wales, Hang ‘Em High (which I’ve watched eight times but never got to see the ending) and Kelly’s Heroes, which is really a Western, only with tanks and Germans*.
Moe
*These are just examples, of course: there are plenty of other good Eastwood films…
Kelly’s Heroes being a western with tanks and Germans makes me think of my favorite, High Plains Drifter… which is really a horror movie with cowboys and a dwarf.
Yeah, that’s a pretty fair assessment. 🙂
Salon once had an article (I’ve long since lost the link) arguing that Bush isn’t a cowboy, since the archetypal movie cowboy is a reluctant warrior, whereas Bush is a sort of trigger-happy shoot-first-ask-questions-later yahoo. The article then went on to postulate that the movie character analogue that best suited Bush’s foreign policy was not “cowboy,” but “revenge movie protagonist,” wherein 9/11 becomes the Act I catalyst for Blowing Up A Ton Of Shit (Salon used the Terminator for its example; the better analogue would be the second and third Rambo films).
The mistake of using the term “cowboy” for Bush is that it invokes both the cowboy character in fiction (Eastwood, Wayne, etc.) and the cowboy caricature (Yosemite Sam). The latter is clearly intended here – hence the multitude of political cartoons showing a pint-sized Dubya firing off a pair of six-shooters into the air with wild abandon. Like most caricatures, it isn’t all that satisfying – one of the biggest problems with Bush is everything he’s NOT shooting at – but it suffers the additional handicap of associating its target with genuinely likeable movie personae.
May I suggest to my friends and colleagues on the left looking for a nice pejorative to replace, for example, “cowboy diplomacy” with “Rambo diplomacy.” The few who would defend that stance, as is, would be instantly revealed, to their humiliation, as either campy Sly Stallone fans or terminally nostalgic for 80s culture, immediately disqualifying them from partaking in rational discourse. I hereby present to you “the Rambo president” – a rhetorical hand grenade so explosive it will soon be as overused as comparisons to Hitler. No no, don’t bother to thank me.
Tacitus says it looks like the comment originates in Europe – the immediate image of ‘cowboy’ in the UK at least is the trigger-happy, knock-down-everything-in-your-way one.
As a big fan of the film genre, I know that’s not the case even in the false reality of the movies; but that’s certainly the foremost image in most European minds.
In the UK, ‘cowboy’ also refers to someone doing shoddy work and ripping you off – e.g. cowboy builders. Presumably not what’s meant here though!
Good, Bad, Ugly. Best over.
I’m sure the fact that the finest purveyor of westerns in history was European has some kind of profound bearing on this debate, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is.