Doug wonders if scamming and hot air have been part of the fabric of the USA forever. David suggests that some of Tombstone's tourist trappers may have been poisoned lead miners. I don't know what the people who put on the OK Corral shootouts every day did before they took this up. I feel empathetic toward them in any event. It can't be that much fun to dress up like Wyatt Earp every day or take little kids and their parents on a stage coach ride all day long while you tell the saps tall tales about gunfights and murders. Given the visible poverty of the place, wages can't be very high. In Jackson and Cody, Wyoming I saw lots of these shootouts. The "outlaws" were so obviously down on their luck (some were hankering for a drink too), you couldn't help but feel sad about the whole spectacle.
As to scamming, yes, it's as American as apple pie. There is so little social solidarity and the ideology of individualism and self-interest is so strong that there is little to counter a dog eat dog mentality. My wife's brother in law used to regale me with stories of his job as a car salesman in south Texas. "Boy, did I fuck that poor Mexican," he'd say. One of my former students once conned me in a real estate. My wife once worked for an agency that helped women in domestic court proceedings (child support hearings and the like).A lawyer who was also involved told her that when my wife became a lawyer, she had to consider every person she met a possible source of income (probably this attorney ws one reason my wife quit law school). A foremr brother in law won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and now he is shilling for a vitamin company. The infomerical is on TV day and night. The more I see of this country, the more everything seems like one big lie. Entire industries like car sales and service, real estate, and banking, are based upon scheming and cheating. Braverman says in Labor and Monopoly Capital that capitalism offers so many opportunities for theft and deception that armies of workers and tons of capital have to be employed to insure arms length dealings.
In defence of Tombstone's hcukers, let me say that millions of Americans are willing marks. They eat this shit up. Look at Disneyworld and everything like it.
Michael Yates