Word: cowboyism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. MONTIE MONTANA, 87, rough-riding cowboy who left the Montana range to appear in silver-screen westerns alongside John Wayne and Roy Rogers; in Santa Clarita Valley, Calif. A skilled lassoer of barnyard beasts, Montana was more famous for hitching humans: he roped President Eisenhower during Ike's 1953 Inaugural parade...
Cities of the Plain (Knopf; 293 pages; $24) is the concluding novel of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. Like All the Pretty Horses, winner of the 1992 National Book Award for Fiction, and The Crossing, published two years later, Cities tells the story of cowboy John Grady Cole and his trailmates as they drift south of the border to find respite from modern encroachments. The time is 1952, about when pickups started looking prettier than horses. The starting place is New Mexico, nursery to the atomic...
...murky conclusion to McCarthy's epic contrasts unfavorably with the clarity of his cowboys' laconic dialogue ("Pass the salsa yonder") and terse fatalism ("When things are gone they're gone"). On the other hand there is something unfashionably noble in McCarthy's uncompromising passion to land the big one. It takes a risky independence to still use old-fashioned symbolism with obvious religious overtones. To some, Cole's romance with Magdalena, an epileptic Mexican prostitute, will suggest the New Testament and a disorder once thought to be a gift from God. To others, the relationship of a young cowboy...
...same time, and in a way he succeeded. At Oxford he protested against the Vietnam War (cool) and wrote a letter thanking a ROTC commander for helping him to avoid the draft and "maintain my political viability" (square). He's a President who wears blue jeans and cowboy boots (and looks good in them), revels in intricate discussions of domestic policy and may have an extracurricular love life...
...such a shift may be less of a new paradigm than the old politics of personality. I suspect that if Newt Gingrich were in Bill Clinton's cowboy boots, the American public would be saying, Pack up your bags. Even today, Gary Hart, who was once Warren Beatty's presidential candidate, would probably not get the benefit of the doubt that Bill Clinton is receiving. There was something holier-than-thou about Hart that folks just didn't cotton to. Bill Clinton comes across as a struggling sinner and never implies that he's better than the people who voted...