Reaction throughout the country was no different in 1876 than it is today upon receipt of similar news: shock, followed by disbelief, fury, and a slavering appetite for revenge. Evan Connell’s remarks, in his account of the events following the Battle of Little Big Horn, fit our current situation: in America’s Centennial Year, right after General Custer and his cavalry regiment were wiped out by Crazy Horse and his Sioux warriors. Tony Soprano’s Uncle Junior says to his head hit man, who is thirsting for violent revenge against some of Tony’s overly exuberant minions, “Take it easy, we’re not making a Western here.” And, while pondering the western scenario that the President (and Junior) evoked, I recalled the revenge-happy antics that emerged throughout the U.S. When I heard Bush’s remark, I thought of an episode of the HBO production, The Sopranos. Of course, as Richard Slotkin has pointed out, in one of our dominant collective imaginaries, we are a “gunfighter nation.” Pointing to Western films as the genre within which the territorial extension of Euro American national culture (the westward moving frontier of violence) has been mythologized and legitimated throughout the twentieth century, Slotkin dismisses the more pacific, contractual models of the evolution of American nationhood.Ĭertainly the imagery has found its way into popular as well as official culture. He wanted to - here I use the venerable yet paradoxical phrase - “bring to justice” Osama Bin Laden. When George Dubya initially reacted to the events of September 11, he appeared to be hankering for a “Wild West” solution. But it happened, and, to borrow one of Don DeLillo’s expressions, it was like “an aberration in the heartland of the real.” And now perhaps the worst is yet to come. ![]() I wanted to see it as the worst film I has ever seen. Marine during the Vietnam War, reported in Michael Herr’s Dispatches)Ī body falling through the air from over 90 stories up a doomed worker, hopelessly waiving a white flag from a window near the top the two towers imploding with thousands still trapped inside! It was like a disaster movie without a touch of redemption. Introduction: “I don’t like this movie” (a remark by a U.S.
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