Word: cowboy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Arafat was right, in a way, about the cowboy logic. But his understanding of the word cowboy and an American's understanding of it are entirely different. Arafat meant the word as an indictment. Americans might take it as a compliment. They would think, "Damn straight we used cowboy logic, if that's ( what you want to call it." They might be delighted that they had been able to do a "cowboy" thing. It proved that the old American cliche can reappear now and then. It was not as if the U.S. had turned Rambo loose upon the Palestine Liberation...
...archetypal cowboy, of course, is the famous leading man in the nation's collective unconscious. What Americans carry in their minds is not the historical reality of the cowboy but the myth as it came to them in books and movies, the cowboy according to Zane Grey and John Wayne. Americans, tutored in the lore from childhood, almost unconsciously see cowboy stories as morality plays. Good guys do battle with bad guys. Right generally triumphs. The bad guys end in the hands of the law. In the American understanding of the myth, cowboys may sometimes operate outside...
...rest of the world does not share the Americans' native sympathy for cowboys. Beyond the territorial waters, "cowboy" is often a term of derision, of contempt. In Europe, the word frequently conjures up everything that people fear and mistrust in Americans. It suggests unpredictable, violent behavior, a heedless and cavalier lawlessness and a kind of vigorous stupidity: a hard killer glint in the American eye, the loose cannon rolling around in the American mind. Viet Nam was a rip-roaring American cowboy adventure that turned into a nightmare. The cowboy idea does not always ^ travel well abroad. It works best...
Teddy Roosevelt at least went to Harvard and wrote books. Ronald Reagan, conservative and ex-movie actor, became Ronnie le Cowboy in France even before he came to Washington, and that was not a term of endearment. Europeans feel sometimes a snarling and virtually Oedipal discontent with the U.S. And they came to see, presiding over the nuclear button, the fate of the world, this cowboy, this actor of cowboys. The half-awakened image that they had in mind came from the last 30 seconds of Dr. Strangelove: Slim Pickens clutching his cowboy hat, astride the falling H-bomb, whooping...
...Europeans love cowboy books and cowboy movies. Whatever their official distaste for the cowboy mind-set, they often harbor a sneaking admiration of the individualism and freedom that the idea of the cowboy implies, of the romantic recklessness that they also consciously censure...