Cowboy Movies
I am “old”; approaching the Biblical definition of “old”; three score and ten. I grew up in the 1960’s. But even as old as I am, I was a little bit past the age of the “cowboy movies”. That was more in the fifties, though I definitely saw my fair share of John Wayne epics. But I was a little bit past the heyday of Audie Murphy, Tom Mix, Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott. I saw their black and white movies, usually on TV on Saturday afternoon. But they were definitely before “my time”.
Besides Wayne, my cowboys were Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, with a sprinkling of Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, and Henry Fonda (my favorite actor). They were kind of anti-heroes. Newman and Redford, in the wonderful “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”; portrayed criminals, doomed to destruction. And Clint Eastwood, either in the Spaghetti Westerns like “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, or the later “Outlaw Josey Wales” was definitely not the typical good guy.
Hats
But I still got it: they were “good guys”, even if they weren’t perfect. And then there were the real “bad guys”. In the fifties movies you could usually tell by their hats: good guys wore white, bad guys wore black. John Wayne almost always wore white, except when he played the sheriff in “True Grit”. And when Wayne played Davy Crockett in the Alamo (coonskin cap, of course), we were again reminded the difference between the “good” and “bad” guys. Mexican General Santa Anna ordered his buglers to play “El Deguello”, the throat cutting. There were to be no prisoners, and no mercy, for the Texican rebels. The Mexican Army even wore black hats.
America used to think of itself as a “white hat” country. We were the good guys, John Wayne in “The Cowboys” or “Big Jake”, my favorites. (Okay, both of those movies were in the early seventies, but close enough). There was no ambiguity. We knew who was good and who was not. Wayne even took that Western role into Vietnam in the 1967 movie “The Green Berets”, where David Jansen (of the original “The Fugitive” TV series) played the jaded reporter. John Wayne was “pure” good guy, even in a war where there wasn’t much pure or good to go around. It was Jansen who had to be won over.
Bad Guys
Sure there’s been a change in some American’s view. The “Neo-Cons” of Dick Cheney ilk believed that whatever was good for the US, was good, even if we had to act like the “bad guys”. Americans committed war crimes at Abu Gharib in Iraq, justified in their minds by the horrific attacks on 9-11. There was “good guy” America: waterboarding captives, and making them stand naked in front of women, threatening their genitals with guard dogs and electric probes. John Wayne would never has stood for that, even in the Green Berets.
And today, the Trump Administration seems to take great pride in being “the bad guys”. The United States of America has no problem bringing the full weight of the government down on a nineteen year-old woman in college going home for Thanksgiving, or a grandmother, or the tenants of a Chicago apartment building. There’s no “good guy” in that, only “bad guys” reveling in the idea that their atrocities are “in the name” of the USA.
And now, Defense Secretary Hegseth has (metaphorically) ordered “El Deguello” for every one on board a targeted “drug boat”. Unlike Santa Anna, we aren’t at war with any of the countries involved, nor are the boat crews even “rebels”. No; instead US Special Forces launched a second missile into the wreckage of a ship, to make sure that two survivors of the first attack, wouldn’t make it. They even have a cute name for it, a “double tap”. That’s the term used by assassins to make sure their target is completely dead: two shots to the head. So we are not only attacking ships on the high seas, an illegal act of piracy, but we are assassins as well.
Tarnished City on the Hill
Seal Team Six is the highly touted group of Special Forces, heroic beyond heroism. They brought us the death of Osama bin Laden, in the dramatic raid that finally achieved America’s ultimate retribution for 9-11. But recently, it was revealed that they assassinated North Korean fishermen who interrupted a surveillance operation. The fishermen saw something they shouldn’t have, and innocents lost in the name of gaining North Korean information.
But now, the Team is ordered to remotely destroy boats in the high seas, and kill the survivors. I guess it’s good Seals don’t have a uniform cap. It would be hard to determine what color they should wear. And, before anyone starts to say “they’re just following orders”; the “good guys” are better than that. It was the United States that demanded the Nuremburg Trials after World War II, rather than just summarily executing the leaders of the Nazi regime. We wanted a clear delineation; that “following orders” wasn’t an excuse for “war crimes”.
Ronald Reagan (not my favorite President), in his farewell address, spoke as America as “…a shining city on a hill”; an example for the world of freedom, and justice. As I would put it, “the good guys”. But, as we round up grandmothers and children, kill survivors of our military actions, threaten Venezuela and Columbia; we no longer deserve a “white hat”. Our “shining city” is now badly tarnished gold, just like our very real White House.
Our reputation is gone. I don’t know how we get it back.
