The Death of a Cowboy
White fragility and toxic masculinity haven’t just expanded under Trump, they’ve become a resurgent political force. White men need to look inside and ask “why is this happening?”
Every white guy wants to be a cowboy. At some point, all of us looked at a movie poster or film reels and said “yeah, John Wayne, that’s who I’m going to grow up to be.” Not the roping cows, working in the fields cowboy, but a straight talking, no shit taking, protector of the home and hearth, always rewarded with a beer and a girl when the credits role. This myth puts them as the last stand between civilization and the wild.
As a white dude from Texas, I know this myth is still pervasive. It’s the myth that made my queer classmates hide their sexuality, turned football into a religion and created bully after bully trying to prove his masculinity through punches. See, this cowboy is dead and his stand-ins are, rightly, going extinct. As much as the cowboy is revered, he doesn’t have a place in the modern world. His auxiliaries, Rambo, John McClane, Robocop, are unfeeling hulks, solving problems with violence. These are the role models presented to young boys in the United States and, for some, they never grow out of finger guns and delusions of grandeur. For some, it becomes a world view where feeling is seen as a draw back, and those with different skin colors, creeds and sexual preferences become hoards to tame. The cowboy is also an isolated figure, alone in his struggle, persecuted on all sides and dreaming of martyrdom without messy stigmata blood dripping down his hands.
And it seems like those childish cowboys have come back in vogue, taking up elected offices around the United States. Greg Gianforte bodyslammed a reporter and was elected to congress for his troubles here in Montana. A Louisiana Republican, known as “the Cajun John Wayne” declared “The free world … all of Christendom … is at war with Islamic horror” asking for the United States to “Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.” Our Commander in Chief grabs women by the pussy. Texan Republican Matt Rinaldi threatened to “put a bullet in the head” of fellow representative Poncho Nevarez during a protest on state immigration law. Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal, in the wake of the Portland MAX stabbings and Portland Mayor Tim Wheeler’s promise to crack down on bigotry, claimed that it was right-wing groups that really needed protection and arms. “I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” he said. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too…And there are these people arising, like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.”
The situation in Portland is a microcosm of the current issues surrounding the cowboy mentality. Right-wing terrorism is the number one terrorism threat in the United States. According to a report to Congress prepared by the Government Accountability Office, “Of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far-right wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent).” These attacks are not seen as dangerous as threats by Islamic Extremists, to the point that all seven of the defendants in the armed take over of the Oregon Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were found not guilty by jury. Had they been any other group but white men, they would have undoubtedly been sent to jail. Trump, the Oath Keepers, the MAX terrorist, all see a diverse world forming where they aren’t automatically pushed to the top of the pile. They still have a false memory of the 1950s, where any white man could get a high school degree and be guaranteed a wife, a few kids and a career. Never mind the women, people of color and queer folks who were tossed to the side in order for that factory line of white success to appear.
Philipp Meyer’s brilliant western, “The Son,” focuses in on a family of Texan barons, from the patriarch to his great grand daughter. While the “Colonel” fought in the Indian Wars and brutally stole and killed his way to the top, his grandson plays dress up in his ancestor’s clothes. Though the family is losing money on cattle, he still drives through and ignores the wealth created from arising technologies. His Mexican handlers do most of the work, while he and his friends wear cowboy hats, pretend to know horses and spend their lives longing for something that never existed. They become gangly creatures, convinced they would have been heroes in the past, while seeing a future they fear. The present offers every privilege; the past would have swallowed them whole. When the fake cowboy dies, it is from his own foolishness. He rides into a storm to find a few lost head of cattle. They find his body bloated and crushed in a river a few days later. The time of “real men” was also the time of cholera, backwards medical knowledge and cruel, random death. It would rip the costumes right off of any wanna-be Rambo.
Gianforte, a software developer from California, took on the mantle of cowboy for political gain and showed his idiocy and cruelty. Unable to hold the respect needed to be a congressman or to convince the world of his view, he beat it into the proxy of his enemy, the truth. This is the language of cowards and is the only tongue that Trump and his ilk know. These are the insecurities of a half gallon head in a ten-gallon hat.
And we’ve seen the actions of representatives goad on other would-be action stars into cruelty. As Brian Resnick put it in his piece “The scientific case that America is becoming a more prejudiced place,” “watching leaders behave badly gives us permission to behave badly.” And with the internet churning out cesspools of hate, the alt-right, Men’s Rights Activists that once would have just stayed online, only emboldened by their anonymity, now have role models in the real world. A man body slams a journalist and is elected to congress. A man sexually assaults women and becomes President of the United States. As Suzannah Weiss reported, “Trump’s election does appear to have encouraged discrimination and hate crimes. New York Police Department reported 42% more hate crimes between November 8 and February 19 than it did a year before, and 72% of them were anti-Semitic.”
To call them evil might be giving them too much credit. They are cowards, terrified of a new world and unwilling, or unable, to adapt. Instead they seek to drag us all back through violence to a time where things were easier for them and infinitely harder for everyone else.
What’s infuriating is that we do have heroes to look toward. The men who gave their lives and stood up to bigotry in Portland were from completely different backgrounds. One was a 53-year-old Army veteran left behind a wife and children. The other was a recent graduate of Reed College, with a bright future ahead of him. Rick Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche should be the men that we emulate. Men unafraid of standing up for the unprotected. They are the heroes of the world we should be building. Let the cowboy die and allow Best and Meche to become the role models for a new generation of men.
