I have nothing against cowboys. Some of my best friends are cowboys. In fact, I myself grew up in a Chevrolet pickup with a rifle in the rack and a busted-up bale of hay in the back.
I remember my first pair of Nacona boots' alligator hide, pointed toes, and spur-worthy, s**t-kickin' heels. I have even owned a Stetson cowboy hat. But I never was a cowboy. Why? Because I was always more of an Indian.
I had the dark skin, especially in summer, and the straight black hair and brown eyes. Actually, I am a Jap (a word I used to fear but now can use without flinching). But I grew up with Navahos and Paiutes. We worked alongside each other. We hauled alfalfa and harvested potatoes together. We drank water out of the same five-gallon milk can. Even so, when some Indian got shot and fell off his horse in a movie, I thought nothing of it - at least not until somebody, by mistake, called me an Indian.
My response was angry and automatic. "Hey, I ain't no Indian, you f**king cowboy."
Those fighting words came straight from my own lips. If I'm "x," then you're "y." So either you give me the respect that my samurai heritage requires, or I'm gonna beat the s**t out of you.
Forgive me for this unholy binary thinking, this ugly "either/or." It comes from the big world of ideas that surrounded my much smaller world of real Indians and real Cowboys. I tried to keep it out, but it came in. It was an infectious meme that tried to make me believe that reality could be that clear and simple. You're either a Jew or a Gentile. A Christian or a heathen. A virgin or a whore. And on and on.
I remember when Clint Eastwood and company complicated the model with the film "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." That movie taught me an important lesson. Somehow, two categories can't hold everybody. There was this extra something, this miscellaneous ugly category. Very cool. And if there was Ugly, maybe there could be Beautiful?
And if there were four baskets to hold all of reality, could there be five, and six, and seven? Here was discovered the beginning of my postmodernity. And I have never looked back.
So let me tell you the truth about cowboys - the real ones, not the clich?©, not the pretenders, not the stereotype that has come to be such a powerful symbol of American life. As Gretel Ehrlich, an easterner-gone-western, explains, cowboys are actually caring, sensitive people. They deal with animals, and animals need care. Plants need care, too. But the culture of agriculture has always allowed culture to be more precise and abstract. The difference is the difference between a row of cabbages and a herd of Angus.
Why is it, then, that the image of the cowboy, which seems to be becoming the hated image of American life for so many people both in and out of this country, is not caring at all? To the contrary, today's American Cowboy is murderous, vengeful, cruel, torturing, and ever more land-grabbing and beholden to the fastest, biggest gun.
George Bush, the born-again cowboy, might not be the most articulate and intellectually able president we have had. But, boy, is he straight-talking and straight-shooting. In these times of war, we need a man like that. Someone who does what he says, someone who holds to his values no matter what: we are good, they (all Muslims) are evil. End of story. Maybe end of earth.
Go ahead, call George Bush a good-ol' boy. But don't call him a cowboy. His nostalgic Texan pose is false and romantic in its self-delusion. Cowboys don't get into (and through) Yale because their parents have money. And how many days has he really spent doing the work of managing a ranch?
The appeal of this image is considerable, nonetheless. Bush's Cowboy is an image of the quintessentially modern white guy, locked in a binary struggle with the evil Other. The problem with Bush's blunder - this poorly conceived and fated military venture in the Middle East - is that he did not stop to do the cultural analysis. Had he learned the lessons of the so-called "culture wars" of the 1980s and '90s, he would have realized that he would be trying to lead a nation that has been there and done that. The modern image of the cowboy does not fit us, not any longer. For the same reasons, this war does not fit us either.
On the other hand, Iraq probably is still a modern nation, as many nations in the developing world are. They are passing through the modern window now, just as we did during two world wars. Someone like Saddam Hussein probably does see the world in a modern way, just as Hitler and Mussolini and Roosevelt once did. Just as Bush still seems to want to do.
To many, the postmodern analysis might seem too "ivory tower" to be relevant to the way the world works. But the echo of Vietnam arises precisely because "the system" is trying to come back from the dead. The age of world war is over for us, or is it?
Charles Inouye is a professor of Japanese, International Letters and Visual Studies.
