Cowboys

Waiting for Murphy to write.  And for breakfast to cook.  And for word on the fiancé of one of the sons of our ward – a girl who lives in a small town near Concepcion, in Chili.

I am of the Dick Van Dyke Show generation.  Not city.  Not country.  I am Suburban, member of a class of landed people whose cash crops run primarily to children and lush lawns without crabgrass.  I’ve lived on both coasts of the US, in the heartland of Missouri and down under the Lone Star.  I was born to the generation that wrested social change out of southern entrenchment (too young to have actively done much), and to a family that really didn’t waste much time judging people.  My parents were too busy keeping shoulder to the wheel to look around and comment on their neighbors.

I didn’t know we were white until the day I saw the race riot.  I just thought everybody was people (keep your grammarian concepts of number to yourself).  I still don’t know it.  I DO, however, now suspect that I am getting old.

It is interesting to me to realize that I am only two generations away from the land.  I’ve known a few older people in my life who lived with outhouses.  The world we live in is so changed from the world of just one hundred years ago – a world that had not changed much in all the history of the planet before that, for who knows how many thousands of years.  We think our lives are “normal.”  But in thinking that, we belie our ignorance and inexperience.  And our very, very fragile hold on what we think of as civilization.

What I want to write about is this:

Two cowboy brothers have won  top place in the last two heats of The Amazing Race.  I don’t know if you watch this show.  I love it.  I actually made it through all the running parts of my treadmill workout this morning without even noticing I was sweating, I was so involved in the dang race.

The thing that strikes me about these guys from Oklahoma is the way they keep saying, “Don’t let the hat fool you.”  As though the cowboy hat has actually become a common symbol of stupidity and brutishness and they have to apologize for it.

But the truth is, in the last eight years, I got plenty sick of hearing the word “cowboy” said as though it meant something you picked up only between thumb and forefinger – something to be held far away from your nice clothes.  I heard it said this way in European accents.  And in Eastern Seaboard accents (which includes, oddly, certain parts of California).  It generally came out of the mouths of people who preen themselves on their very tolerant and non-discriminatory life philosophies.

The word became oddly and repulsively ironic.

So – in the eyes (ears?) of the sophisticated, the artsy, the plus-educated – the accents of people who come out of Oklahoma or Arkansas or Texas are a clear indication of a total lack of intelligence?  The Jersey accent, or the Chicago one, talking about the Sox –  now that, we like.  We like it in sit coms.  We like it in character actors.  A speech pattern, endearing and quirky and funny.   But the deep drawl of the Texas native – there can be no wit, no intelligence, no grace behind such an accent?

I’m not sure if there is a point to the way The Amazing Race casts its seasons.  Certainly, they love to pull in the quirky but stereotypical—both ends: the outrageous and the classic “normal.”  They achieve a cross section, but not necessarily representative of the population at large, heavily weighted by “good television” types. It is interesting to watch how some teams work beautifully together, solving complex problems, respecting one another, even under highly stressful situations.  And how other combinations do not prove themselves effective at all, perhaps so caught up in their quirkiness that they reinforce, rather than blast to pieces, the stereotype they were cast to represent.

These cowboy brothers?  They are running around the world in their cowboy hats, flashing their dimples, and proving themselves to be true knights of the range.  They are civil to every one (which too many of these racers are not), respectful – but canny and quick minded.  And I have never heard them use a vile or vulgar word.  Most interestingly – they are WAY capable, used to work, used to a reality that most of the world actually shares on a daily basis.  Which is not the reality of sitting in an office and dabbling in the abstract structures of theoretical, informational, political structures.

These boys may be called “unsophisticated.”  OH, BUT BEWARE – because “sophistication” comes from less than high-class roots:  c.1400, “use or employment of sophistry,” from M.L. sophisticationem (nom. sophisticatio), from sophisticare “adulterate, cheat quibble,” from L. sophisticus “of sophists,” from Gk. sophistikos “of or pertaining to a sophist,” from sophistes “a wise man, master, teacher” [A THEORIST]. [The] meaning “wordly wisdom, refinement, discrimination” is attested from 1850 [and so is fairly new.  Industrial revolutionary new].

Sophistication is a new invention.  A reality in which “taste” (which is totally relative) trumps usefulness  (which is material), and into which only certain “types” of human beings can enter.  In other words, sophistication is the invention of a rising middle class, still slightly damp and dusty from the fields that were once their life and reality – a class which found that sitting in a chair at a desk and wearing nice clothes to work were far more comfortable than getting their hands dirty.  A class that defends its existence by spinning tales for itself to explain why it deserves to have exchanged wrenches and hammers and plows for computers and keyboards and power over other people.

These people have to find reasons why they don’t have to  “think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” (Dickens.  A Christmas Carol)  And they give those reasons a whole lot of names: style, polish, awareness, refinement, verbal equity, sensitivity, the afore mentioned refinement and discrimination.  And these are all based on rules they have written themselves.  Wait.  No.  We.  We have written for ourselves.

People I had every other reason to respect spent the Bush years taking pot shots at his delivery.   Hating him for that—long before they had any other reason to disagree with him.  Calling him “Cowboy,” meaning barbarian or heathen.

Well, let me tell you something—cowboys have a long code.  Some of them are just like a lot of the Sox fans and the rest of the working and actually productive world – too fond of beer, too likely to leer at women, too quick with fists.  But many of them are also the finest people in the world – they work hard, they are good at what they do, they are courteous (yeah – in Texas, you say, “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir,” before you get out of diapers) and they give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.  Some of them are heroes.  Some of them are poets and artists.  Many of them know the land in a way that theorists and scholars may never hope to approximate.

And when this precious fragile civilization of ours – the one that values arugula and well-cut suits and political networking and sends all the dirty work of MAKING the things we depend upon, like cars and printing and steel and even baby toys, to poor countries who are ignorant enough to still want to DO those kinds of things – when it all comes unraveled, which it must – and when we suddenly are faced with the questions: how do I feed myself?  How do I manage water?  How do I fix this so it works so I can work?  How do I build a house, a dam, a fence, a working pump? — when those things happen, who would you rather live next door to – those competent brothers who are racing around the world in their big hats, connecting easily with people from all countries, friendly, respectful and patently effective?  Or some glad-handing senator?  Or some big shot Doctor of Political Science (Political science? Really????).

I don’t want to be part of a nation of theorists.  I want to live with real people.  People who do real work and call you “Ma’am” and have dimples.  And who aren’t always trying to figure out a way to get power over you – especially when it’s “for your own good.”

So that’s what I’m sayin’.  Hurray for the cowboys.  Long may they wave.  Hurray for the independent, hard working, moral human who minds his or her business and is too busy being productive to pontificate about it (ooops – pontificating. Maybe I should go do something else).  Hurray for the true heart, the person who serves rather than dictates and who seeks always to do better, to learn, to take care of business honestly.  Hurray for the million accents, and the million rich minds behind them.

I hope the cowboys win.