Looks like Teddy Roosevelt would agree with Gene Auttry and Roy Rogers...

"The image being invoked by the president and his posse has deep roots in the American soil. But if Mr. Bush's cowpoke credentials seem to be all simple syntax and bodacious belt buckle, his policies actually flout the cowboy charter. Teddy Roosevelt, in "The Cattle Country of the Far West," called cowboys "quiet, rather self-contained men." The president's actions have violated the basic terms of the American Western romance and, thereby, the terms by which we call ourselves Americans. He's declared war on a foundational national myth."


An American Myth Rides Into the Sunset

March 30, 2003
By SUSAN FALUDI

PORTLAND, Ore. - On the eve of the Iraqi invasion, the
president's advisers were working hard to embed George W.
Bush inside the script of the American Western. Rejecting
the widespread European frustration with Mr. Bush's Lone
Ranger act, Vice President Dick Cheney used his "Meet the
Press" appearance to make clear that the president is "a
cowboy" who "cuts to the chase." Mr. Bush's blunt talk, the
vice president told Tim Russert, is "exactly what the
circumstances require."

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."

The image being invoked by the president and his posse has
deep roots in the American soil. But if Mr. Bush's cowpoke
credentials seem to be all simple syntax and bodacious belt
buckle, his policies actually flout the cowboy charter.
Teddy Roosevelt, in "The Cattle Country of the Far West,"
called cowboys "quiet, rather self-contained men." The
president's actions have violated the basic terms of the
American Western romance and, thereby, the terms by which
we call ourselves Americans. He's declared war on a
foundational national myth.

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."

"The Virginian" is the urtext of the cowboy myth. Its
protagonist, like Wister and Wister's old Harvard classmate
Teddy Roosevelt, was a transplanted Easterner whose manhood
was fashioned in the West. "No man traveling through or
living in the country need fear molestation from the
cowboys," wrote Roosevelt. They "treat a stranger with the
most whole-souled hospitality" and "what can almost be
called a grave courtesy."

Wister dedicated "The Virginian" to Teddy Roosevelt. Our
20th-century presidents have lived under the sway of its
central ethic, and never more so than in the grave buildup
to conflict. Understanding the necessity to at least appear
to uphold the credo, no matter what the reality, William
McKinley took advantage of the sinking of the Maine in
Havana harbor, Franklin Roosevelt waited (some say
intentionally) until our fleet was destroyed at Pearl
Harbor, and Lyndon Johnson contrived the Tonkin Gulf
"incident" before entering their respective wars.

One cannot imagine F.D.R., before declaring war on Japan,
or even Ronald Reagan before Grenada, pumping a fist and
saying of himself, "Feel good" - as President Bush did
before he announced the beginning of the Iraq war. Indeed,
the doctrine of pre-emptive warfare flies in the face of
the humble, reluctant cowboy myth Mr. Bush holds so dear.

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. In his time, Daniel Boone was the hero at
the heart of our myth, the Indian fighter turned
homesteader, the war-hating American archetype. As Richard
Slotkin observed in "Regeneration Through Violence," his
history of the American frontier, for this kind of man
"solitary hunting trips are, not ends in themselves, but
means to a social end . . . the ultimate creation of a
better society." By contrast, Davy Crockett was, as V. L.
Parrington, the literary critic, dubbed him, "a frontier
wastrel," a rapacious aggressor and "a huge Western joke."

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.

A little more than a year ago, the old and vanishing
American mythology of common-man virtue enjoyed an
unexpected comeback - in the aftermath of 9/11. That
antiquated ethic returned to infuse our romance with the
sacrificial firefighters and police officers, and the
average citizens martyred in our national tragedy. Its
presence was palpable in the self-image of an ordinary
embattled people rising to the occasion in countless ways,
as if we were once more "out in some strange night caring
for each other," as Ernie Pyle wrote of the G.I.'s he
chronicled.

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. Sept. 11 gave us its
final spark, like the bright flash that the sun shoots up
before it sets for good.

Susan Faludi is author of ``Stiffed: The Betrayal of the
American Man.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/opinion/30FALU.html?ex=1050079186&ei=1&en=939fc2ee286e4fa9