JAMES LEAF
LECTURES ON THE AMERICAN COWBOY
[Delivered without notes; transcribed by Peggy Ellsberg]
April 22, 2013
The Cult of the Cowboy and the American West: “Culture has cut itself off from the cult, and has made a cult of itself.”
In North Korea there are big dance celebrations and so on, but they are actually devoted to a MAN as a god. Then there was the cult of Mao.
In western civilization, we stopped deifying men after the French Revolution—
Well, maybe there was a cult of Lenin….
But there has always been a Cult of the Bovine—Cows, and esp Bulls—going back to the golden calf in the book of Exodus, the Minotaur, the Bull Fight.
The Rodeo highlights the skills and practices needed to sustain life in the unsettled American West.
That culture has nothing to do with MOMA.
Rites of Passage: a man must assert himself not INTELLECTUALLY but in terms of the animal world.
End of the American Civil War: HUGE trauma of destruction and uprooting and fratricide.
West offers a Golden Opportunity.
Binge and Fast relationship with vice—vs—balanced participation in the life of a town.
Cowboys are piratical, dangerous gangsters.
And NB—the COWBOY is not a COWMAN: he’s too “young” to be a mature farmer; enthusiasm comes before sophistication.
The Open Range vs. Spiritually Bankrupt Civilians—note roles played by Robert Duval [“Lonesome Dove”].
Robert E Lee is compared to Wellington and Napoleon—as opposed to the poetry of WWI, in which “men die like cattle.”
New Era of flesh as commodity:
Profoundly articulated during the Viet Nam War;
Idealism has gone out of Warfare;
Young men are betrayed by old men;
Warrior Archetype gives way to Murder.
The Chicago stockyards:
Hunky=etymology of Honky, a Chicago term.
No matter how close to angels we become, the butcher in us is still there.
Chicago is the last great American City—straight out of American drama—
Next to the cow, their brother in heaven is the pig.
“Apocalypse Now”=the cavalry has been replaced by helicopters.
Michael Herr, Dispatches: officers interviewed claimed that the American “warrior” ate beef, steak, three times a day, like the All-American Cowboy.
In WW2 Japanese carried samurai swords;
General Patton carried pearl-handled revolvers, like a cowboy.
1960s films returned to the Western—Sam Peckinpaugh’s “The Wild Bunch”—we were socialized to play cowboys and Indians.
“High Noon” is the essence of American existentialism.
Playing cowboy: politicians; White Masculinity is all wrapped up in the right to carry firearms, and to use them against people of color.
Note the recent EXPLOSION of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Frontier is in our American DNA.
Now you can PURCHASE contact with the frontier by buying free-range eggs and meat.
All the Kings Men: guy messes up his life, and his first instinct is to go West.
Long Beach=the essence of California, where the Dust Bowl Okies landed.
All life comes down to the last twitch of a nerve.
***
April 30 [year unknown]
The sacrifice of the bull/blood-letting.
Roman initiation rites for men: they bathed in the blood of a bull.
Theseus—ancient Greek rodeo-man, conquers a bull.
Henry V: “Give them beef, and they will fight like lions.”
Michael Herr wrote the script for “Apocalypse Now”—
THE HORSE: Cortez and his conquistadores brought horses.
Horse was extinct in America after the Paleolithic period.
Horse helped Europeans conquer America.
Alexander and his horse Bucephalus conquered the world.
Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveller.
Cavaliers—U of Virginia basketball team—named for them.
Honor, Status, Masculinity:
-the cattle raid culture;
-After Gettysburg, the Honor Culture of the South collapsed;
-Out west Everyman can own a Horse, and thus become a Gentleman.
-After Appomattox, cowboys go west to heal.
Toby Keefe, “Go West, Young Man.” Listen to it.
After the invention of barbed wire, ranching replaced free-riding the range.
The American Diet: even poor Americans can eat beef three times a day—a burger at McDonalds costs 1$.
The Cowboy gave us these ideals: The interstate highway system and fast food.
Our cars: Taurus, Mustang, Horsepower.
Our Songs: Fight Songs about US as victors over others. Our Music after 1865==The solitary troubadour becomes the cowboy singer.
Our style: blue jeans. When the Berlin wall came down, East Germans rushed immediately to buy blue jeans. Jeans were designed for miners, who knelt on gravel all day, and soon spread to cowboys. Individual revolution through American capitalism and promoting a product.
The West has never known chattel slavery.
New Racial equality.
Huge rise in Women’s Rights—Wyoming, not Massachusetts, first granted suffrage to women.
The Laughing Warrior: we do not say “The Seventh Cavalry and Indians”—we say “Cowboys and Indians.”
At the heart of the unstated activation of the genocide of American Indians is THE CULT OF INNOCENCE.
-Military campaigns rely on a manufactured innocence in the aggressor.
-Big Horn—Wounded Knee—GROTESQUE tortures and hatred.
-Hard Facts are replaced by the image of an innocent nice white cowboy attacked by humorless, savage, red man.
After 1866 and the manufacture of barbed wire, long haul cattle drives become less profitable.
The Twentieth is the Real Century of the Cowboy because of the movies and The Wild West Show.
The Wild West Show is a Self-Parody: it rounded up Indians including the great Chief Sitting Bull to stage false battles.
Travelled to Europe.
Cheyenne and Lakota warriors moved to Paris and became bohemians.
Before WW1, there was no challenge to American masculinity: there was the cowboy and there was the military.
Death of a Salesman: “Look how they’ve boxed us in here.”
Laments eastern urbanism.
His suicide laments the lack of masculinity in the eastern urban complex.
Self-reliance: the cowboy has all of his things with him—no paper deals, no lawyers.
THE PAIN of being deprived of:
-wilderness
-animals
-labor with your sons
The Necktie is compared to the Noose.
Marlboro Man and John Wayne and Ronald Reagan—a fake cowboy becomes the highest commander.
The European Honor Code/Duelling is dissolved.
Pistols at high noon=The Duel; see High Noon.
Obama has learned to talk like a white redneck.
Congress has a National Cowboy Day.
And then, of course, there is always the Blood Dream.
***
April [date and year unknown]
The American cowboy is a warrior archetype who works to export bluejeans, hamburgers, western movies, and Marlboroughs.
The cowboy is blunt and unhypocritical.
Chicago, the place of the slaughter, is his end point.
Fantasy about cowboys is huge:
Tom Russell, “Tonight We Ride”:
-we’ll kill Pancho Villa and his horse and his 27 wives;
-also we will kill the wild Apaches;
-tonight we’ll rock, tonight we’ll roll.
A mashup of Manifest Destiny and genocidal violence.
The experience of being enclosed/boxed in/ explodes into masculine violence.
Cities/urban grids mirror psychic barbed wire.
“The Ballad of William Sycamore”: right tight boys; one died at the Alamo; the other fell with Custer; his two sons sown like apple seeds along he western trail.
Reagan and Bush: fantasy cowboys; Romantic racists; Injun killers.
Left-wing Vietnam era re-appropriation of western motifs:
-Sam Peckinpaugh
-“Apocalypse Now”—Coppola, rockabilly music, eating steak, wearing calvary hats.
Jean-Paul Sartre drank himself to death on American bourbon while watching westerns.
The cowboy becomes an existential hero in the empty desert.
Cowboys’ decisions transcend Christian core values.
“High Noon”—Gary Cooper’s imperative MAKES NO SENSE—but he MUST do it.
Pagan theme of obligation.
“3:10 to Yuma”—also existential; the passion of the farmer who must risk himself to deliver the outlaw to Yuma jail.
The frontier is where we start from scratch to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong.
***
April [date and year unknown]
Cowflesh and Iron—the Warrior Archetype
Norman Mailer, The Siege of Chicago. The Anti-War movement of 1968=backdrop for the Chicago stockyards; economically beneficial to American capitalism/and the stockyard is the ultimate point of cowboyism.
Chicago is the Gateway to the West. A Great American City, whose vast stockyards at night were like the bloody, shitty mudholes on a battlefield after the battle has subsided.
Upside down animals gurgling blood.
High psychic voltage going back to the ranch itself.
The slow incredulous stare of sheep.
Money came from the slaughter of terrified animals, and no one could forget it—the killing floors slick with blood. In Chicago they did straight slaughter.
The Big Mac is the defining American food: meat wrapped in “big” patriotism.
The slaughter of cattle is an American archetype—Totemic of virility.
Beef and blood—important to men—passages into manhood and into warfare.
In The Iliad they eat beef before entering battles; in Henry V, if they eat beef they will fight like lions.
Eric Marie Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front compare to Michael Herr, Dispatches.
Herr: Americans cannot lose because they eat beefsteak—muscle and gristle; the Vietnamese eat fishheads and rice gruel. In “Apocalypse Now” [screenplay by Michael Herr] meat is devoured.
Culture of initiation: Zeus’s totem is THE BULL.
The Bull is an almost universal symbol of male power.
At the DuBois, Wyoming rodeo, an 18-year-old going off to war rode a bull first.
Tom Russell: Apaches, dancing horses, tribalism, Pancho Villa, whorehouses, adventure, soaring mood.
The backbreaking work of ranching, driving, and wrangling, NEVER appears in the mythology.
Instead, we showcase its crazy violence, ecstatically.
Women are all good-hearted whores.
Cowboys overlap with other castes—like ninjas, samurai, Indian braves.
The Alamo=our Thermopylae.
Crocket and Bowie are our kingly generals.
Anglos are the brave victims who prevail—whites need not feel racial guilt.
Western Frontier Justice is endlessly interesting, unlike the uncreative and stale justice of Northeastern Courtrooms.
Mexico is the site of The Ordeal.
“The Magnificent Seven” justifies American Proxy Wars.
Listen to Tom Russell, “Claude Dallas.”
Today the Cowboy is a cypher for something else—I think it is the death of the American Soul.
Long Day’s Journey into Nightby Eugene O’Neill—travelling actors.
Ronald Reagan—a right-wing McCarthyite—becomes the Topmost cowboy—
August Wilson’s last play of the Pittsburgh Cycle—“Radio Golf”—compare.
Frontier: we were born too late for it, but the screen industry desperately tries to recapture it.
Stephen Vincent Benet, “The Ballad of William Sycamore”—whose two two sons died on the Westward Move. “Right tight boys” one died at the Alamo, the other fell with Custer.
“Some were wrapped in linen fine.”
Listen to Tom Russell, “Sitting Bull in Venice.”
The Little Big Horn July 4, 1876, on the Centenary of the US Republic.
“Save the Last Bullet for Yourself”—Custer’s last stand was a mass suicide. Like Masada.
Very spooky, chilling. 180 nameless graves.
Massacre at Wounded Knee marked the end of the Plains Indians’ resistance.
Paris became the mystical Orient for the Red Man.
Errol Flynn: “They died with their boots on”=highest compliment.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men: “I was driving west…. It is where you go when the land gives out….”
***
April 27, 2016
Cult of Athena=Cult of Mary.
“touched by fire”=puissance.
Cult of the Mythic Cowboy.
The Horse and the Bull are deeply embedded in our DNA and in our collective psyche.
Mastery of a large animal=manhood.
Before, before the written word, obvious action was privileged—
The Masai confer manhood on one who slays a lion.
“The Hunger Games”: a show of Blood pleases the audience.
The Giant Swan begets bastard children with mortal women.
BULL FIGHTS.
After the Civil War, it all starts.
Before the Civil War, people rarely ate meat.
The Vaqueros and their cutting ponies were our inspiration. Someone had to move the stock so they could graze.
The earliest cowboys were Spaniard men.
Serious Beliefs about EATING BEEF arise—it’s “good for the GALL.”
William the Conqueror beat up the Anglo-Saxons from HORSEBACK.
Profanity overtakes blasphemy—perfectly good Anglo-Saxon words like piss shit and cockbecame profane under French surveillance.
All Horses originate from Spanish conquistadors.
Equestrians were upper class; infantry=lower-class foot soldiers.
In America after 1865 a freed slave became “free lance”—Lancelot, the knight errant.
Knights errant are SECOND sons.
British Empire was under female leadership.
The South made up largely of agrarians—farmers and planters—heavily settled by royalists and Scots. They were cavaliers, like Rhett Butler.
The Union Army served a just cause.
The Confederacy, however, possessed ELAN, PANACHE--gallantry, chivalry, doomed romanticism and anglophilia; big emphasis on horsemanship.
ATTACK offensive warfare served Alexander the Great and Napoleon, but not the Confederacy. The Southern Army featured aesthete/cavaliers, Sir Walter Scott-style.
Repeating arms and grapeshot were Northern.
The Crossbreeds of the bogs of Europe mixed with freed slaves, and became cowboys—with a great deal of agrarian competence.
Confederate songs were the prototypes of Cowboy Songs. ”I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t give a damn”—the WEST offers allure of self-making.
1865—“cowboy” becomes an actual job description.
1890—The Open Range closes. No one can graze their cattle just anywhere now.
“Open Range”—Kevin Costner and Robert Duval and King Arthur and Lancelot.
Economic reality introduces BINGE approach to Vice.
Homosexuality—just do not talk about it. Really hardened cowboys chew tobacco while eating scrambled eggs.
Frontier women had to be equal—and had to be tough and quick. Wore bluejeans like men. Jeans were a garment that EVERYONE could wear, totally American. Did not exist before cowboys.
Music—blue music 20% black, 30% Mexican.
Cowboys have now become a MYTHOS, a STANCE, a STYLE.
The SPUR=a big symbol.
In America, turnips cost more than raw hamburger.
That is CRAZY! And uniquely American.
Also—you can drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific without being hassled. Our cars have replaced our horses, and our presidents impersonate cowboys.
Hitler admired the American approach to clearing out the frontier—unconscious apology for genocide. The American cowboy is innocent, young, and idealistic—Indians are old, grumpy, and superstitious.
In the end what does it mean to be an American Man? GRIT, that’s what! No whining! You take care of your own shit, and do not ask for help.