An American Myth Rides Into the Sunset by Susan Faludi ...The president has done his part. For some time now, Mr. Bush has been obliging, dutifully working his way through the Western cliché checklist: "smoke 'em out of their holes"; "hunt 'em down"; "go it alone"; "wanted: dead or alive." ...It's worth recalling that the cowboy of the myth wasn't trigger happy and he wasn't a dominator. He carried a gun to protect himself and his cattle — cattle that didn't even belong to him. His mission was their safe passage, and by extension, the safe passage of the civilizing society to follow. And his honor was grounded on his civilized refusal to fire first. "Didn't I tell you he'd not shoot?" says a spectator to a gun fight that didn't happen in "The Virginian," Owen Wister's 1902 novel. "He's a brave man," he adds. "It's not a brave man that's dangerous. It's the cowards that scare me." ...Of course, American identity has always contained competing models; even the original frontiersman, the cowboy's immediate ancestor, had two faces. He was either Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett — that is, either the man who rode into the wilderness to build and nurture a society called Booneville, or the man who ventured out only to collect and count the pelts. ...As the nation industrialized, however, Crockett's heaps of dead pelts became the equivalent of America's capitalistic might, and his own profile began to rise from pathetic joke to vaunted hunter and Alamo hero. The honored activity was no longer husbandry but dominance. These two contesting ethics were neatly framed at the close of World War II in the debate over our future. Were we on the threshold of "the century of the common man," a phrase coined by Henry Wallace and represented by Ernie Pyle's homely soldiers? Or were we on the cusp of "the American Century," defined by Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc., as the nation's manifest right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit"? Luce's vision won the day. In this regard, President Bush's self-presentation culminates a progression long in the works. We've been on the way to becoming a different America for a while.(bold added) ...Perhaps that is why so many Americans now feel even more painfully the loss of a myth that, in truth, has been on its sickbed for a generation. As the invasion of Iraq began, a lament could be heard across the political spectrum. A letter in The Times seemed typical: "The president was speaking and I realized that an old and dear friend of mine was gone." What Americans grieve for is not reality. We've carried out regime change before, whether on Chief Sitting Bull or Manuel Noriega. We've also waged elective wars, whether in the Dominican Republic or the Philippines. But to call it a myth is not to diminish its importance. Mythologies are essential to defining who we are and, more importantly, who we want to be. We caught a powerful glimpse of our myth's possibilities, just before its end.
Bumped; interested in the opinion both on the article and the notion of the strength of the overall American myth, particularly when it comes up against the harsh realities of armed conflict and how America enters into armed conflict...