Zane Grey and the OK Corral and a Glock in my Pants.

I have been lucky. I am just the right age to have read more Zane Grey novels than he wrote, and for years I watched Matt Dillon tame Dodge City. So I am not the least astonished or alarmed by the fierce urge of all these good ranchers and coyote hunters around me to buy a gun and bring law and order to the West.

Those of you who live in the Far East--that is to say, on the other side of the Mississippi River--probably do not understand what it is like out here where men are men, and women are, too. We have never had the privilege of all those New England religious Awakenings, nor the cleansing rituals of Salem Witch Trials. We have not been raised on Southern Comfort and grits. We have had to subdue mountains and raise up the flat places. We, Out West, have had to convince the people who lived here for thousands of years that their land was our land, from the Great River to the Pacific Ocean, and from Sitka to Mexico, that God gave us Dominion over the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. We had to arm ourselves and bring railroads to California, and longhorn cattle to Dodge City.

Whilst the Last of the Mohicans and James Fenimore Cooper were sneaking around in the woods, we were strapping six guns to our hips and putting spurs on our boots. If there is a real America, it is where men get permits to wear concealed weapons and shoot kids in the street: kids like Billy the Kid, and Captain Kidd, and that kid in Florida--Trayvor Martin--who went out to buy candy or something at the corner. You cannot have kids in sweatshirts walking around on the streets of Dodge, scaring the hell out of decent, God-fearing ranchers and muskrat trappers! If there is no respect for law and women and cattle herds, then we shall have to take the law into our own hands!

So that is what we are doing, these days: taking the law into our own hands. Get a Glock! Dare the paper carrier to step too close to the front porch: "Make my Daily News!"

We aren't scared! We aren't conspiracy theorists! We aren't stupid brutes. We just want to shoot the people who scare us, who are plotting to take over the town, who act uppity!

Our whole history, out here on the Frontier, shows that if good men do not arm themselves and go to church, then nobody will! Or everybody will. Or something. It is best to be armed whilst we think our way through this, elst some damned fool Quaker who never busted a bronc will try to sweet talk us into leaving our guns at the saloon door.

I read all those Zane Grey books! I know what is goin' on here!

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog