Text 22, 133 rader
Skriven 2004-07-27 19:51:50 av John Hull (1:379/1.99)
Ärende: Call us Cowboys?  You bet!  Part 2
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Americans enjoy the emotions freely chosen activities bring. We enjoy the
autonomy and sense of authenticity, the exhilaration, the "wind in your hair"
feeling of motion and freedom.

For centuries those describing our social character have identified exuberant
energy and spiritedness as the most distinctive trait among Americans. "The
place is so alive." "It makes you feel you can do so much more." These are
common expressions among visiting observers of all ideologies.

Some individuals do not care for highly spirited people. There are quite a few
American characteristics that seem unpleasant to people with different
definitions of virtue. People who have a strong taste for order and hierarchy,
who enjoy calm and quiet and leisure, who prefer security to risk, who take
aesthetic pleasure in simplicity rather than in the bustling variety of human
commerce--such people are not likely to enjoy America much. The British painter
John Butler Yeats (the poet's father) spent 15 years trying to be an American.
"A sort of European old-maidishness gets between me and them," he mourned.
"Depend upon it, it is a mistake sometimes to have been too well brought up."

America's thumos appears most often in our pursuit of enterprise. The ancient
passions for bravery in battle have reappeared in our prosaic, commercial
culture. Tocqueville was quite taken with the American style of building
lower-quality sailing ships, then taking over ocean commerce by sailing more of
them faster, heedless of the risk of shipwreck, so that shipping could be
cheaper. "Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce,"
he noted.


The place where America's national legends have been acted out has been our
Western frontier. Even as the frontier has moved, we continue to use its
imagery to describe ourselves, as when we refer to "homesteading on the
electronic frontier." America's critics also favor Western and frontier imagery
to describe us, as in the disdainful European references to "cowboys."
In every language in which we have tested this, "frontier" means something
nearly opposite to its American sense. The French Larousse gives only one
meaning for frontière, and that is the border between two nations--which in an
oft-invaded country like France conjures up danger rather than opportunity. In
Mandarin Chinese the term is bian jie or "boundary." In Cantonese, the word for
frontier is huang di, which carries a negative connotation of "wilderness" or
"wasteland." A frontier is a barren hardship post, not a place of
opportunities, explains a Chinese colleague.

Russians have a very similar attitude toward frontiers. A Russian who
discovered that one of these authors maintains his judicial chambers in Alaska
blurted out, "Why were you sent?" The idea that there might be appeal in an
assignment on America's Alaskan frontier seemed incomprehensible to him.

During America's expansion westward, frontier transformed into the very
opposite of a boundary or limit. Its primary meaning in American English came
to be a "boundless realm of possibility." Indeed some foreign dictionaries call
this meaning of "frontier" an "Americanism."

The attractiveness of frontiers to Americans is demonstrated by our much more
frequent use of the word. When we recently counted usages of the word frontier
in business names in a number of different countries, we found that Americans
use frontier in business names four times as often as the French, 15 times as
often as the British, and 25 times more than the Argentines. And these numbers
understate the national differences, because in other countries frontier is
often used in reference to a business on the border (e.g., "State Line Liquor")
to advertise businesses that leverage cross-border tax or regulatory
differences.


Americans have many symbols of the Western frontier--mountain man, pioneer
woman, homesteader, prospector--but our main symbol of the frontier is the
cowboy. Hardly anyone needs stirrup-friendly, pointy-toed boots for his daily
chores anymore, but plenty of people buy them. The cowboy best encapsulates the
emotion, hostility, and fantasy of American independence.
Though detractors Marxify the cowboy into some sort of violent capitalist, the
"Western" fable was actually a rebuke to the "Gilded Age." Americans did not
choose as their heroes of song and image the men who financed the railroads and
endowed the libraries. The Plains hero of Owen Wister's novel, "The Virginian"
(a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt), had no property, no schooling, no social
standing, no money and no interest in getting these things. What gave him pride
was his courage, competence, self-discipline, self-reliance, physical prowess
and most of all integrity and sense of justice. The cowboy, an impoverished
hired hand who slept in bunkhouses or on the ground, was a figure of
aristocratic honor. As Wister put it, "If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall
Street would have found him behind the times." The cowboy was a knight, albeit
one with no land or money.

"High Noon" portrayed a sheriff who, unable to get any of the townsmen to stand
with him against brutal thugs taking over their remote town, faced them down
alone, and survived only because his Quaker wife picked up a gun and sacrificed
her abstract pacifism to the concrete virtue that the hero represented. "She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon" presented John Wayne as a military hero who, through
great courage and skill, prevented an Indian war. In "The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valence," Jimmy Stewart played a lawyer who had no skill with a gun, happily
wore an apron, and dried the dishes in the kitchen until he was forced by a
sense of honor and justice to confront the villain who ruled the town by brute
force. "Shane" told the story of a brave man who wanted peace but risked his
life to protect homesteaders from the men who were destroying them. In all the
classic Westerns the hero, by dint of great courage and competence, fights
alone for justice, achieves it, and leaves without riches or fame, with nothing
but honor.

Because the cowboy melded the aristocratic virtues of honor and indifference to
material things with the democratic values of self-reliance, discipline, and
independence, this myth appealed deeply to our national character. Freedom
imposes burdens--isolation, inequality and anxiety about whether our choices
are wise. The cowboy ideal stimulates in us the vigor to attempt difficult new
tasks.

When foreigners see us as cowboys, they are not mistaken. As a people, we still
exhibit a high degree of courage, independence, aggressiveness, competence, and
spirit. Diplomatic Europeans have responded to tyranny over the latest century
mostly with accommodation, like the townspeople in "High Noon." Cowboy
Americans, on the other hand, have hungered to confront and defeat tyrants, in
real life as in legend. Our Western experience--love of freedom, little
deference to wealth and status, an idealistic drive for justice, and a
willingness to be ferocious toward these ends--continues to drive much of what
is best about America.

So can they call us cowboys? You bet. Because we are. Our response ought to be
that of the Virginian when he was described as a son of a bitch: "When you call
me that, smile!"

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Mr. Kleinfeld is a judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Mrs.
Kleinfeld is director of the Northern Studies Program at the University of
Alaska at Fairbanks. This article appears in the July/August issue of The
American Enterprise. 



John 

America:  First, Last, and Always!
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