I made a comment on Fixer's earlier post, and it got me ta thinkin' about cowboys. My Dad was a cattle ranch broker and I got to spend several summers travelling around the West with him as he set up deals. I got to spend time on ranches all over California, Oregon, and Nevada.
The ideal of the cowboy as rugged individualist loner who fights for truth, justice, and the American way with a pearl-handled nickel-plated six-shooter instead of a cape is a crock a' shit from the movies.
If you ever saw a real cowboy with his shoulder up a cow's ass as he "tails 'er up" out of a mudhole, or cleared irrigation ditches with an idiot stick aka a shovel, or fixed fences out in the middle of nowhere, or let gas bloat out of a cow (stinky!) with a special hollow knife, or getting his old crock pickup running so he can go get drunk and lust after bar hogs on Saturday night, or any of a hundred other things that go with a low paying hard job, you know that the romance of being a cowboy is a fiction.
That said, I like Western movies. Mrs. G sent me out yesterday special to get these stamps:
Click photos to embiggen, Pilgrim
Pretty cool, huh?. Got my memory to churning, and I came up with this old photo:
The autograph reads: "To Gordon, your saddle pal, Gene Autry".
That picture is probably 55 years old, a treasure from my childhood. The point being that I'm not ten years old anymore. I may not be as grown up as I should be, but I'm certainly grown up enough to realize the difference between a fictional Saturday morning movie cowboy, like George Bush, and reality.
The teabaggers need to grow up at least that much.
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