Advice For The Obama Camp

[poliphilo]

"You Brits will never get Sarah Palin" reads a headline in this morning's Telegraph.  But I do. At least I think I do. After all, I grew up watching westerns. Every time I go "ooh!" and "ah!" over a John Ford movie I'm buying into the myth that sustains her.

The USA is a country very close to its origins- both historically and emotionally- and Palin- as the gun and Bible-toting mayor of a small town in one of the few corners of the country that can still plausibly be described as wilderness- is a figure out of that not-so-remote and sainted past. She brings with her the fresh breeze of the frontier. Of course the frontier wasn't really so innocent.or so heroic. The pioneers were driven by greed and acted as the agents of genocide.  But who wants fact when they can have myth?

So if I were a wonk in the Obama camp I'd be doing all I could to grab my boy a piece of the action. I'd use Palin's background against her and be painting the Republicans as the corrupt establishment of the mythical small town. I'd cast them as the range-enclosing cattle baron, the cheating saloon owner, the corrupt sherrif, the guy who sells the Indians rifles and whisky-  and my candidate as the lonesome stranger riding in to clean up the mess. I'd have him be Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp.

Comments

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

The only Palin who deserves to be Vice-President is named Michael.
Have you seen Ford's second version of Wyatt Earp, played by Jimmy Stewart in Cheyenne Autumn? It's a wonderful 10 minute cameo in an otherwise heavy and joyless film.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've seen Cheyenne Autumn. I think it's under-rated. OK, the story isn't up to much, but the cinematography is gorgeous.

Maybe I missed something, but I never quite worked out what Stewart's splendid, little cameo was doing in the movie

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

My guess is that Stewart's Earp was supposed to be a cynical counterpoint to the racist hysteria of the white townspeople--he knows the Indians don't represent a threat, so he humors and manipulates the citizens, as other Ford heroes do. Still, that section has such a wild tonal contrast to he rest of the film that it initially seems out of place. There's an excellent book called "The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre's First Half Century" that discusses CA's Earp and the segment's relation to Ford's earlier work. I'm not sure how available the book is in Britain, but I definitely recommend it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I must look out for that.

I imagine it's available over here. We Brits love our westerns, really we do. I think John Wayne is almost as big a cult hero with us as he is in the States.