Fw: [Redbadbear] COWBOYS [REAL ONES] AND A PERSONAL COMMENT ON BUSH

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Hunter Gray 
To: [email protected] 
Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2013 3:44 PM
Subject: [Redbadbear] COWBOYS [REAL ONES] AND A PERSONAL COMMENT ON BUSH


  

COWBOYS  [REAL ONES] AND A PERSONAL COMMENT ON BUSH -- THE SO-CALLED    

Note by Hunter Bear:

I really wish media folks and others would stop referring to Bush as a
"cowboy."  While I know what they mean via American film stereotypes -- the
free-wheeling cavalier [often blood-thirsty] recklessness that allows
viewers vicarious fantasy releases in the safety of their living rooms --
this is really a travesty on bona fide cowboying and a signal disservice to
the Real Cowpuncher.

Among my very top favorite films are Shane and Salt of the Earth.  The
latter, of course, teaches the great importance of  successful on-the-line
Solidarity:  workingclass, inter-ethnic, inter-gender -- against cunningly
vicious and powerful corporate adversaries.  "Salt" is Eternally Real. Shane
depicts a former cowboy and lone gunman who, after voluntarily assisting in
the rallying of frequently frightened homesteaders against a violent
ranching outfit, rides with his gun to a successful and sanguinarily
effective showdown with all of the Enemy [including their own hired gun.]
And Shane, too, is Eternally Real.

George Bush is none of any of those or that.  He's never put himself,
personally and physically, into any kind of  danger anywhere.  Like many who
have never seen Real Violence, he wallows in its rhetoric from the safety of
his Soft Cocoon -- one high up in the Tree, far from the Ground. And that
applies to much of the Et Al. around him as well.

But back to cowboys:

I grew up in Cowboy Country -- and, on my Anglo [mother's side] of  our
Native family, draw in part from Western ranching origins.  All the cowboys
I've known and know [and this includes those in horse ranching as well] are
brave and honorable and courageous guys of many ethnicities -- often working
daybreak to dusk in the roughest and toughest and most cutting edges of the
Natural World.  Much of a cowboy's life is still on horseback and those
buddies can be unpredictable as all hell [I prefer mules, even if they often
try to knock you off via a low hanging limb.]

Utah-born Big Bill Haywood -- Western Federation of Miners and Industrial
Workers of the World -- who spent an important part of his early life among
the Mormons and Indians [all of whom he liked] and also very much as a
cowboy, put it very well in his classic Bill Haywood's Book:  The
Autobiography of William D. Haywood [New York:  International Publishers,
1929 and many subsequent editions]  -- which I recommend to anyone
interested in American radicalism and high-drama struggle as well as the
American West.  Said he, in a long and very knowledgeable discussion of that
always arduous and often grim world: "The cowboy's life is not the joyous,
adventuresome existence shown in the moving pictures, read about in cheap
novels, or to be seen in the World's Exhibitions . . ."  He pointed out that
"the cowboys and the miners of the West often led dreary and lonesome
lives."

And cowboying  is dangerous. It's still the most dangerous occupation in the
United States.  Coal mining is next. Contemporaries of mine in their Teens
who chose that  life-on-the-range frequently had many broken bones by the
time they hit their mid-twenties.

It would be interesting to see George Bush on a horse, chasing a calf -- let
alone a bull -- through the thorn tearing mesquite.

I don't think we ever will.

Hell, he isn't even a W.E.B.  To you all from the Big Cities, that means a
Wise Eastern B. Some of Them can even be OK.

Solidarity -

Hunter Bear



HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

See the new and expanded/updated edition of my "Organizer's 
Book." It's the inside story of the massive Jackson Movement,
bloody repression and murder, and more -- including a myriad
of organizing "lessons."  And with my new and 10,000 word
Introduction. http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm (". .a local activist's
 important account of the deleterious effects the involvement of 
national organizations can have on indigenous protest movements."
David Garrow in "The Age of the Unheralded", Progressive Magazine,
April 1990.

See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE:
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.)