the cowboy and the modern man

The endless miles are not really endless; it’s just the lens makes them look that way. The sky vaults, the cactii prickle, the snakes rattle. There he walks.

His boots of leather and fortitude are worn down on the heel, a little to one side. His canvas jeans have never been washed. He has known love, a love so intense that it could never be spoken. Yet he is alone, as he has ever been. His pace is slow, his steps quiet. Or he sits upon a horse, a magnificent beast all black, or palomino, or all white; something special. His eyes are narrow, his face unshaven.

They call him a cowboy, but make no mistake: this is no boy. He is a man.

It is not his slouch hat that marks him out, or his impassive face, or his relaxed, easy gait. No, his truest self hangs low on his hip. Like a guitar, it’s more practical worn higher, but it looks cool down low. Sexy. Dangerous. You just know, he is going to pull it, faster than anyone else, and fire it, sharper than anyone else. He has used it in the past. You can see it in his eyes: he bears the weight of another man’s life. And you know that when the time comes he will not hesitate to use it again.

He walks with death at his side.

Women cannot resist him, not that he gives them a choice. All eyes are on him when he enters the saloon. He drinks harder than the rest, wins at cards, then throws the prettiest girl over his shoulder and takes her upstairs. She is laughing. He is not.

No-one would mistake him for a good man. His anger is of legend, and his vengeance may not be stayed. Yet he has a reserve, for he wants nothing. That is what sets him apart from the rustlers, the ranchers, the bankers, and the pimps; and most of all, from the men who believe laws can be written down in books.

If he has a morality, it is an old one. He follows the code that existed before commandments were written in stone. It has always been. You can just about make out his image, or one like enough, in the stones of old Assyria. He was old then.

He carries within him a sort of wisdom. He is closest to his horse, and it was, perhaps, on a horse that his wisdom was born. His wisdom is not that of the soft, deskbound men with their cravats and their caveats, the prisoners of words and slaves of intellect. Nor is it the knowledge of the sky and the air, the grasses and the beasts, though he knows these things well enough. The towns, the laws, the histories, the birds, the rivers, these things are all incidentals. They come and go. He walks.

He serves not his family or clan, his culture or traditions, his country or its laws. He might learn the name of a valley or a humble outpost, but he holds all names at a distance, like a foreign thing.

He is no-one. He serves only himself. His is the only morality that matters, in the end. The inexorable logic of survival. You live or you die.

He lives, if you call it living, discarding one form or another, always appearing again, always walking, always westward. Slow, unstoppable, the setting sun in his face. He walks from the cold and grey into the harsh, dry wilderness, from the played out decadence of the old world to build a new, carved from the desert by sheer force of will. And violence. Lots of violence.

You can’t argue with survival. Many did not make it. The innocent townsfolk were good-hearted people from back East who just wanted to start a new life. A young married couple from a poor village. A widow from some war. A fresh-eyed graduate from a smart school. A naive pastor who wanted only to minister to the needy.

They were always under one threat or another, for the road was long and bloody. Bad men in black hats or black skin tried to take what little they had. Yellow-bellied cowards or yellow-skinned Chinese were always scheming and plotting. And in clouds of red mist descended hooting and terrifying natives of red skin. Of purity and innocence there was but little, a lone fair maiden in a sundress with blush on her cheeks.

The stranger did not like to kill. He did not like anything much. But he did it anyway. They called him “justice” or “law” or “vengeance”, but he cared nothing for those things. For some to live, others must die. That was how it had always been.

So when the dust cleared and the sound settled, as bodies lay bleeding in the dirt, the townsfolk emerged, alive. They had made it one more day. As they gathered their things and prepared to head West, they wanted to thank him. But they only saw his back, his feet already kicking up dust. He did not want thanks. He did not want anything at all.

His only allegiance was necessity.

The Western is California’s origin legend. It is a story required by circumstance, one of the rare occasions when humanity invented a whole new way of telling stories; reality frozen in liquid light. By the time Hollywood was getting its legs, the Western was glowing in that perfect twilight sun; not quite real but not yet entirely false.

The mongers of dreams quickly grew rich. They shone their visions on the silver screen, and the whole world showed up to watch. Their dreams became our dreams. And when all the leaves were brown and the skies were gray, we dreamed of California. The sun was brighter there, the faces more beautiful, and the future shone in the light of the silver screen.

A dream, though, is never just a dream. People have always told stories, and if you look closely, those stories, no matter how fabulous, always contain a teeny bit of truth. We can’t really tell stories of nothing. California learned that if you dream brightly enough, you can turn dreams into reality, if you burn enough oil to make enough electricity to shine lights on screens big enough and bright enough. “Industrial Light & Magic” they called it.

Industrialized dreams floated north from Hollywood so that Silicon Valley might forge them into machines. They succeeded, perhaps a little too well. They made dreams boring. Now all our dreams are brown and our future is gray. Perhaps there is a temple we can drop in on our way.

The Western showed us that civilization followed the railroad. Once it was built, the wilderness was tamed. It was not long before we were flying overhead, watching a Western on the screen, and the desert was for sightseeing and sentiment. And, awkwardly, when we reached our safe and shiny home in the suburbs, our neighbours were the same folks who the Western told us were villains.

Hollywood needed a new story. But it had grown lazy and decadent, unable to say anything new.

The walk to the west was over. The endless miles of desert had come to an end: we had made it to the sea. We stripped off and dove into its waves, full of joy, fresh and innocent as babes at a baptism, reborn and ready for a new world. Like a Star Child, an embryo floating in space. So Hollywood told the same story—in space! Laconic men with no past or future carried lethal weapons at their hips; but they shot lasers, not bullets. The Space Western, they called it.

Men built machines to gaze into space and saw there, not blackness, but a new frontier. The final frontier. More wild than wilderness, more deserted than desert. Necessity stirred in their hearts.

Around them, the once-promised land had turned soft and corrupt, its dreams endlessly recycled, its possibilities filtered and sanded down, adapted to the realities of market pressures and the practicalities of mortgages on houses with adjustable taps and granite kitchen benches. The idea of “home” grew intolerable; for what is a home if not a place where you have to listen to women?

The cycle was renewed. The land once promised was trapped in the decadence of the old world. For the all-consuming pettifoggery of Christian moralizing and stifling civilities were substituted the all-consuming political correctness of pronouns and diversity. Morality changes. Maybe it even gets better. But to Real Men—that is to say, arrested adolescents—it is always a cage. So they snarl and claw, and the guardians of the cage point and say, “See? That is why we need a cage.”

Then the Real Men get out. The cowboy wakes, stirs himself from his slumber, and walks among them once more.

He knows them full well. Small, anxious men with illusions of magnificence. Tacky, transparent, worried about sex, they are consumed with rage at the unrighteousness of a world where so many mediocrities—the responsible ones with their suits and their forms, their ossified thoughts and predictable desires—simply do not comprehend their singular genius.

They fall under his sway with distressing ease. The cowboy makes them his bitches. They think they’re as cool as he. They think they’re his partners.

He is cool not because of his hat or his gun, his emotional reserve or his murderous resolve. He’s cool because he goes on. Because in whatever world he lives, he enters fully formed, deals absolution, then departs exactly the same as he ever was.

They think they are going to live forever. He does not share that opinion. Nor do the bodies he leaves behind.

He’s a legend; they’re fanfic.