I agree with the observations below. Also, consider that cowboys are an economic or class category of peasant/worker, actually specifically a category of pastoralists, semi-migrant animal husbanders, rangers, but wage-laborers. So, this is also a sort of nostalgia for the specifically American buccolic life. Perhaps their ability to roam and range,unlike peasant farmers who are sedentary fieldworkers, makes them good as bearers of a symbol of freedom ( similar observation about blues singers is made by Angela Davis) Urbanites' use of an idiotic view of some past rural life as the basis for Romantic mythology is common in European civilization.
The migration of peasant workers to cities to become full proletarians, alienated from the earth as their natural laboratory and small personal ownership of means of production, like a horse, has created a typical narrative experience for many millions over the last 100 plus years by which there is ready sentimentalizing about the legendary back , down on the farm, home home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Oh give me a home, Where the buffalos ( not the Indians) roam, And the skies are not cloudy All day.
Charles
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>I think, btw, that there is something about the American collective psyche
that feels an undying attraction to this kind of "wild west" stuff - which
foreign observers, like myself, view with a mixture of bemusement and
disbelief. I mean, most folks who populate this country have their ancestry
>roots in the factories of New York, Baltimore and Chicago and coal mines of
Pennsylvania. Only a small handful of them were cowboys. So if they are
yearning for their roots, they should identify with workers and union
organizers, not cowboys. This whole pioneer/wild west thing is 100% made in
Hollywood. I find it hard to understand why it has such a strong
>attraction.
>
Perhaps Henry Miller explained it best in "The Misfits" -- in which
Clark Gable and ass dragging entourage eke out an existence taming wild
horses because it beats wage slavery...and shows that they are stil on some
functional level, men.
But basically, the wild west is the foundational myth of american consciousness: the individual triumphing over the wild in nature and the dark-wild in himself....a kind of Robinson Crusoe on steroids. But it's always single males. When women and children are introduced, it always gets a lot murkier...like "Shane."
Joanna