MMhhmmmmhhh

I recently saw a western film in which the villain was marked by an 'eastern; manner in speech and dress. which was very strange as the setting was nineteenth century Wyoming and every single white person was from the East. This also begs the question of why all the good guys talk in the same prairie fire dry diction when a common regional dialect cannot possibly have evolved within a fraction of a single lifetime.

We should understand that the American value on straightforwardness is no vaccine against bullshit. Nor could anything else possibly be with human nature being what it is. Anytime a thing is commonly valued there will be those who try to "win" at the value through artificial means. who want to believe in this case that timidity or pomposity are more common motives for a chosen turn of phrase than they actually are.  Moe Sleazak and his precious Carhold.

On Twitter there's a guy who mainly goads the Unicameral for not being real true conservative enough. He has a cowboy hat and the standard cowboy facial hair with short mustache and tightly cropped goatee. This  LARPing ass motherfucker lives in fucking Blair.

In the earliest days of commercial cattle herding on the plains there were the same practical benefits of wearing a hat in a shade-free environment. Some of the poor vagabond alcoholics getting paid for this job by some quasi-aristocratic fuck wore bowlers, or proto-fedoras, or stovepipe tophats like Lincoln wore, or weird blob-crown looking things like in Jesus Christ Superstar.  Then by the early 20th century start to see cowboys uniformly wearing what we would know as cowboy hats, though still with a weird mismash of jeans slacks and various styles of shirt. The idea that you're supposed to be a cowboy is much younger than eating beef after all. Now some cowboy hats price at over a g for quasi-aristocratic fucks to wear at each others funerals.

It does say something about our culture that there are a thousand knockoffs of High Noon for a single "Gangs of New York" doesn't it? Daniel Day-Lewis was intentionally over the top in that one but not by much.  The movie isn't all that out of line from nineteenth century reality, or much less so than most westerns anyhow. The idea of cities being for riffraff (the definition of who They are changing somewhat over time) who aren't good enough to own land is considerably older than the automobile suburb, with roots back in Medieval England and the feudal manor.  Neglected cities have always been an American thing. Wanting to believe that the ratio of clean plain-spoken (blond, blue eyed, tanless) pioneers-to riffraff is much higher than it actually is is an American thing to; than and now.

there have been times where I've tried to say something to the effect that I do not identify as white. some may have gotten the idea that I meant to let myself off the historical hook by doing so but no, that's not quite it, at least not primarily. what I mean is that Richard Daley Sr. grew up in a Chicago where Swedish and Norwegian kids would beat each other into slush for trespassing in each other's neighborhoods. What I mean is that in 1920's Nebraska that KKK would often get more mileage out of anti-Catholic than anti-black rhetoric. That in Sutherland it apparently gained a large following by promising to stick it to the Irish Catholics within the big city of North Platte. What I mean is that there's never been any unifying whiteness beyond the idea that the riff-raff are somebody else now has there?  I mean that it makes me angry and sad in turns to see my own family forget that "Once We were strangers" etc. and embrace the contempt that gives us some bullshit claim to aristocratic normality.

I've heard that Anglophone countries that remained within the British Commenwealth have something called "culture creep" a self-loathing sense that nothing they produce can be as good as something made in the older and more established English culture. Americans certainly don't have that problem but we still have the issue of newness, the lack of establishment. There may be something after all to the strawman Eurosnob idea that we have no particular substance. that we have only the Hard Sell.  The Broad performance of exaggerated simple-man manliness. The performance of pushy familiarity, the performance of what that glam-rock fraudster Buffalo Bill defined as cowboyhood for us.  There has never been a real America.