Cowboys and Myths

Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold
They'd rather give you a song then diamonds or gold
Lonestar belt buckles and old faded Levi's and each night begins a new day
If you don't understand him and he don't die young
He'll probably just ride away

Mamas' don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys
Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks
Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such
Mamas' don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys
'Cause they'll never stay home and they're always alone
Even with someone they love

Cowboys like smokey old pool rooms and clear mountain mornin's
Little warm puppies and children and girls of the night
Them that don't know him won't like him
And them that do sometimes won't know how to take him
He ain't wrong he's just different
But his pride won't let him do things to make you think he's right

Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings

My last blog post certainly generated a few thoughts from several readers.  I for one enjoyed the feedback.

This post continues a bit with the gender theme, but it is really about how we look (or revise how we look) at our past.

I was intrigued by an opinion piece in the WSJ yesterday.  I am NOT (thankfully for many of you) going to "cut and paste" much of this piece.  However, I will from a different article in "Science" later.

First a quick synopsis of the WSJ Opinion Piece and a few thoughts.

The piece (attributed to "The Editorial Board")  was titled "It pays to be a Wyoming Cowboy".  In a nutshell The Editors were taking a broadsides shot against the PC thinking on gender etc. found at many Universities and other American Institutions of Higher Learning.  Here is my synopsis:

  The University of Wyoming's mascot is a "Cowboy" and recently  the University decided to aggressively Market the slogan because:

"The campaign lauded self-reliance, grit and courage and suggested that anyone with this caliber of character can be a cowboy."

Now not  surprisingly not all members of the University Community were in favor:

"being the American campus in 2018, more than two dozen faculty complained. Communications professor Tracey Owens Patton said that “what goes behind the term cowboy” is “erasure, racism, sexism, heterosexi"sm, and genocide.” The university’s Committee on Women & People of Color wrote in a letter that the marketing campaign “risks casting UW as a place where only people who identify with white, male, and able-bodied connotations of ‘cowboy’ belong.”

The Article goes on the state that in spite of criticism the University has seen a significant uptick in both sales of Cowboy paraphernalia, and widespread recognition and increased enrollment interest countrywide. They even won some marketing awards.

The Journal Editorial Conclusion was of course "buck" the PC stuff.  Why?  Because so many  Americans are tiring of it.

Now my first quick Observation was to recall a story I heard from my  older sister a few years ago:

You see in the 70's she lived in Colorado and she was once  "hit on" by a University of Wyoming "Cowboy" who may have fit the Communications professor's PC description, at least the sexist part....

Ok to get more on the "point". 

 After reading the article I started thinking about  one of my favorite cowboy  movies of all time-"The Magnificent Seven".  I know that some of you have seen it (The Yul Brynner version I am generally not a fan of "Remakes") but in case you haven't let me summarize a bit.

 The story is based on a Japanese film (and feudal narrative)  "The Seven Samurai", it is a tale of Seven "notoriously shady" western cowboys recruited to help some poor Mexican Farmers fend of a horde of  very nasty bandits.  In the end some of the heroes are killed, but a few ride off, no longer needed (or welcomed) by the town.  The movie ends with this quote:  "The Farmers Always win".

 I happen to think that the fact this story resonates in two very different cultures says a lot about universal narratives and myths regarding "gender", heroism and the general human condition.  There are good guys, bad guys, and heroic guys throughout human existence.  In every culture.

In a nutshell this  is a  story about  the archetypal "Tragic" and unloved hero of our Myths.  Heroes now being despised by many "academics"  for their "Maleness", and in our culture, their "Whiteness" as well.  For those of you who see Myths as simply "old stories' and simple "fairy tales" I  apologize for my upcoming editorial content. 

 I believe that most of our myths (hey remember David and Bathsheba) are the result of Tens of  thousands of years or more of Humanity Reflecting on our existence and what it means to be human.   It is an attempt to explain and quantify Male and Female differences, brother and sister rivalries, and yes gender roles that evolved over half a million years.  Today it seems we are hellbent on bashing these narratives as sexist, racist or heterosexist (whatever that is).  It sadly reminds me of "The Cultural Revolution" in China, or the Taliban blowing up statues.   

Now to digress a bit,  but all within my thought process on this general "Theme", using a prominent example about Statues and one particular  old "hero".

Recently much has been in the news regarding movements to  purge Christopher Columbus from our public squares and monuments as a means of acknowledging his role in a  history of oppressive "white maleness"  which was  the "cause" of Native American  genocide and cultural extinction.

Now I might coincide that  Columbus and his cohorts were not simply  the "noble, intrepid explorers"  we remember for bravely exploring  and opening  the New World. 

 But neither would I concede that  they were just rapacious  enslavers and destroyers of all the  happy and gentle indigenous tribes of Native Americans.  It certainly depends on your perspective, but  here is a slightly different slant you do not hear about much of from those reinterpreting this narrative..  

From an article I read a few weeks ago in the web site "Human Progress", it was a scientific piece pulled from The magazine "Science".

Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

By Lizzie WadeJun. 21, 2018 , 2:00 PM

The priest quickly sliced into the captive's torso and removed his still-beating heart. That sacrifice, one among thousands performed in the sacred city of Tenochtitlan, would feed the gods and ensure the continued existence of the world.

Death, however, was just the start of the victim's role in the sacrificial ritual, key to the spiritual world of the Mexica people in the 14th to the 16th centuries.

Priests carried the body to another ritual space, where they laid it face-up. Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today's surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body. Using their sharp blades, the priests deftly cut away the skin and muscles of the face, reducing it to a skull. Then, they carved large holes in both sides of the skull and slipped it onto a thick wooden post that held other skulls prepared in precisely the same way. The skulls were bound for Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, an enormous rack of skulls built in front of the Templo Mayor—a pyramid with two temples on top. One was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.

Eventually, after months or years in the sun and rain, a skull would begin to fall to pieces, losing teeth and perhaps even its jaw. The priests would remove it to be fashioned into a mask and placed in an offering, or use mortar to add it to two towers of skulls that flanked the tzompantli. For the Aztecs—the larger cultural group to which the Mexica belonged—those skulls were the seeds that would ensure the continued existence of humanity. They were a sign of life and regeneration, like the first flowers of spring.

But the Spanish conquistadors who marched into Tenochtitlan in 1519 saw them differently. For them, the skulls—and the entire practice of human sacrifice—evinced the Mexica's barbarism and justified laying waste to the city in 1521. The Spanish tore down the Templo Mayor and the tzompantli in front of it, paved over the ruins, and built what would become Mexico City. And the great rack and towers of skulls passed into the realm of historical mystery.

Later in the article:

Many researchers say that, for the Mexica, political power as well as religious belief is likely key to understanding the scale of the practice. Theirs was a relatively young empire; during their 200-year reign, they conquered territory all over central and southern Mexico, sometimes facing tremendous resistance from local communities (some of which would later ally with the Spanish against the empire). Spanish chronicles describe Tenochtitlan's sacrificial victims as captives brought back from wars, such as those fought with their archenemy, the nearby republic of Tlaxcala. Subject peoples in the Mexica Empire were also sometimes required to send individuals as tribute. "The killing of captives, even in a ritual context, is a strong political statement," Verano says. "It's a way to demonstrate power and political influence—and, some people have said, it's a way to control your own population."

 Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed. "

The bold highlights are mine.

If interested, here is a link to entire article:Aztec Human Sacrifice from "Science

So my concluding Observations

1.  Perhaps a  couple of the ancestor's of those poor Mexican Farmers in the Magnificent Seven actually welcomed the conquistadors as saviors, noble warriors who rescued them or their children from those  "gentle"  indigenous Aztec Tribal Leaders exercising a humane form of "population control"!

2.  While I have no doubt the Columbus narrative was not as peachy keen as we might have heard growing up, reinterpreting everything in our past as oppression by White European Males is like blowing up historic artifacts, or negating all that is noble and true about "Cowboys" and other male role models.  Building up opportunities for women and minorities goes nowhere by simply addressing everything wrong with society as the result of "white male privilege".  Here I think  the WSJ editor's were spot on stating that  many Americans (good men and women and not just sexist pigs) are tired of hearing it.

3.  Human Civilizations almost universally enslaved people and most at one time or another practiced religious sacrifice.  While Europeans may have elevated slavery to a huge economic level it certainly was common in the New World Pre-Columbus. Most of the slaves brought to the Americas were sold to slave traders by people who were either Pagan Africans, or Muslim Arab's. It was actually Christian's (often led by men who died in the effort) who started and finished the world wide move to end slavery. 

 Finally while it may be easy (and academically lazy)  to look back on Christianity's brutal  

excesses in the Crusades etc. One should  also acknowledge that it was Christianity as an entire religion that  abhorred  human sacrifice to God  and was most instrumental in its world wide demise.

4.  History will always be handed down with different interpretations likely based on the perspective each generation receives from those who influence them most  (parents, teacher's etc).  Our society has made  higher education available for virtually all and

it is certainly not a terrible thing to learn of different perspectives on history from academics".  Having said that  I worry that the current academic infatuation with simplistic explanations of  everything being the result of  gender/race "oppression" is  creating a generation of simple minded non-thinkers.  This is dangerous to any society in the long run.

Worse yet is this fails to acknowledge that "Cowboy's and "Brave Explorer's" are an integral part of the reason we have such a rich and free society, one that provides academic opportunities to so many in the first place. 

It surely distorts much of our real and enduring history.

Until next time

Adieu