HUNTING FOR HONOR

Instead of cutting edge neurology and philosophy theories, I want to look at ideas from hunting and frontier life as laid out in Daniel Justin Herman’s “Hunting and the American Imagination.”  While everyone else seems locked into the confrontation between the North and South/Black and White, I prefer to work from the West, not the Civil War but the Range Wars that came from the culture-mixing thrashing about on top of the Native American civilization, maybe partly spinning off from the Civil War.

These ideas developed from a history of hunting in America, as it was imported from Europe..  The premise is simple:  when Euros first considered a whole new continent ahead of them, they split into two kinds of expectations — parties, if you like.  As the dust jacket on “Hunting and the American Imagination” (2001) puts it, Herman is contrasting “the democratic legend of Daniel Boone” with “the hunting with hounds of European aristocrats.”  “America’s sport hunters ultimately saw themselves as the self-reliant ‘American Natives’ they had displaced and claimed to be heirs of the continent and natural stewards over its land and wildlife.”

One part was determined to go to this new place and set up a replica of Europe and Britain but with THEM as the top, the kings and emperors.  Their aim was to own a big swatch of land that they could fence for their own private use and hunting grounds.  (Some say this is the source of the one part of the environmental movement, the interest of the elite in protected land as demonstrated by the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and Ted Turner.)  

The other “party” saw a new continent as a chance to create a new kind of country where everyone was equal.  To them the forests and prairies were for everyone to hunt in freely, so that no one need go hungry.  They were more open to the idea of including the indigenous people in their plans.  But they didn’t quite grasp that indigenous people are very different in different ecologies.  Instead the whites tended to raise the idea of being native into a kind of transcendent virtue.  But sooner than expected, they reached the limits of the land.  And stigma dumped the noble sauvages into the ditch.

Another split in American culture came about because of urbanization: as the nation became a small town bourgeois nation of clerks, men sought other ways to show their manliness.  Herman contrasts “pugilism” with hunting, the former being kind of low class (maybe like today’s cage fighting) and the latter implying privilege and travel for adventures.  So Trump imagines himself pounding down a personified CNN and his sons have the resources to go cut the tail off an elephant, which they assume only the privileged are able to do.  (Personally, I think they should have to eat that elephant.  Our family rule was that you eat what you shoot.  I come from a context of food hunting.) 

So what I see in Charlottesville in these white self-announced entitled Nazis and so on are pugilist adolescents, basically burger-flippers who eat their product, looking for manliness while living with Mom.  They are not warriors, but rather a mob.  It is very strange to watch them when one’s primary consciousness is with Native Americans.  All the cries of “go home” neglect the fact that the indigenous peoples have been wishing they would do exactly that for hundreds of years.  

These seekers of power carry bats and sticks for fighting because they can’t afford guns, thank goodness.  And the army won’t take them.  (The elite military and sophisticated hunting are closely related as markers of gentry, which is why Trump likes generals, though his version of hunting is chasing a little white ball down a hole.)

Herman’s two other books look at range wars along these lines but focused on the Mogollon Rim and then Mormonism in Mexico.  Rim Country Exodus: A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making (2012) was written next.  “Across east-central arizona runs a long, cliff-like escarpment, towering at some points a thousand feet, elsewhere two thousand, over the surrounding countryside. In the middle of the state, just below Flagstaff, the escarpment falls back repeatedly at perpendicular angles where creeks—Clear Creek, Beaver Creek, Fossil Creek, Sycamore Creek, Oak Creek—cut deep canyons in their search for the ocean. At its eastern extremity, that escarpment—known as “the Rim,” or “the Mogollon Rim,” after an eighteenth-century New Mexico governor—buries itself in the morass of the White Mountains, cinder cones that rise to almost 12,000 feet.”

“Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West (The Lamar Series in Western History) (2013) is Herman’s second book.  Yale University Press News, in “A Reading List for the Current Racial Climate in America” includes this book.  “The Pleasant Valley War, sometimes called the Tonto Basin Feud, or Tonto Basin War, or Tewksbury-Graham Feud, was a range war fought in Pleasant Valley, Arizona in the years 1882-1892.”

In it Herman suggests “Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were war mongers. . . Reagan and Bush were, in many ways, the creations of Zane Grey and the empire of Western novels and movies that followed him." (p. 289).”  I agree, except that I would point out that the tsunami of Western television series BEFORE Reagan was president often featured what I call “stand down” plots.  Matt Dillon and Mr. Favor and the Wagon Train boss stood for finding non-violent solutions first.  Maybe you could call those Eisenhower Westerns.

Herman suggests a basic conflict between what he calls “honor and conscience." He explains "honor tended toward assertion, strength, fierceness, combat. Conscience tended toward restraint, modesty, sympathy." (p. xxii) “  If — as a reviewer commented — honor might in this instance better be described as pride, then we could say Trump wants honor, but Obama has conscience and ended up with the honor without resorting to combat.  (Bill Clinton does not fit into this formulation.  LBJ comes down as a combatant.)  Trump in his cowardice loses everything he wants, evidently because he can’t tell what honor is, except profit.  Honor cannot be inherited — it must be earned again and again.

Herman’s fourth book is fiction:  “Summer of the Guns.”  The Amazon squib says:  “In the desolate cityscape of Depression-era Phoenix, twelve-year old Billie Jean Moran has journeyed west to flee a troubled past with her deaf sister, Sara. But they find themselves in the midst of another catastrophe--this time involving a scandal that implicates even the Arizona governor. When political crooks peg Billie's African-American father as an unsuspecting fall guy, Billie and Sara are forced to go into hiding. In the course of their ordeal, the sisters find unlikely allies in the form of a broken-down ex-insurance salesman, a juvenile delinquent, and a prison nurse. Through bravery and cunning, Billie, Sara, and their friends bring the real criminals to justice and triumph over fear, discrimination, and injustice.”

Sounds very modern except for missing the “spiritual” element, obligatory these days.  I hope there are “Indians.”  I’ll ask for a review copy.  I can’t afford any more books this fall.  Anyway, I should probably reread this densely packed earlier book of ideas called “Hunting and the American Imagination.”  I read it two decades ago, but it seems newly useful.

IS SAM SHEPARD THE JOHN WAYNE OF OUR TIMES?

Is Sam Shepard the John Wayne of our times?  Or is he the Son of Wayne, struggling with the tall man’s dark side?  It is typical of our times that we demand answers and that -- essentially silly -- the answer has to be ambiguous.

Most of us know Shepard as an actor in which he often represents “Wayne-ness,” the hard-bitten guy in charge who has no doubts.  But his “shtick” seems to be trying to escape from relentless men like that, which is represented as being caused by his tough bomber pilot father, who was a teacher (as was his mother) when it wasn’t wartime.  But my uncle was a bomber pilot in WWII, a calm, dependable, near-stoic guy.  No signs of being a tyrant or reckless with anyone’s lives.  No alcoholism.  No bankruptcy.  TWA airline pilot most of his life.  I don’t know that he ever wrote anything at all, nor has his son.

The most “un-Wayne” part of Shepard is his participation in the Sixties/Seventies renaissance of culture.  The Sons of WWII were Vietnam-napalmed.  Shepard was in Manhattan for the crossover in theatre from representation to evocation.  He had written thirty produced Broadway plays by the time he was thirty and lived with Patti Smith for a while.  Hard to imagine John Wayne with the Mapplethorpe crowd, though it would be interesting to see just how those short legs attached to that massive torso.  Not enough dialogue out of Wayne’s mouth onscreen or off to tell us much.  Hard to imagine him producing Sam’s quips, as follows:

Collaboration - that's the word producers use. That means, don't forget to kiss ass from beginning to end.

Personality is everything that's false in a human, everything that's been added on to him and contrived.

I was different on drugs - crystal Methedrine, which had more of an edge. When you walked down the street, your heels made sparks.

Don't you find it kind of self-indulgent for actors to go around writing parts for themselves?

There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.

You're still much more afraid of the audience, and yet, on the other hand, you desperately want to plunge into new territory. So every once in a while, the opportunity to make this leap gets handed to you. It's like jumping into cold water.

It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.

I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.

[on Harry Dean Stanton] He is one of those actors who knows that his face is the story.

Sam Shepard's face

I’m not addressing Sam Shepard the actor and playwright in this post.  Rather this is meant to be a response to “Great Dream of Heaven” which is an anthology of short stories -- VERY short stories, most of them two-handed conversations very much like the constant life-long exchanges between Sam and his great friend Johnnie Dark.  They are not about sex or about being heroes.  Usually they illustrate intimacy of some sort, the frustration when that doesn’t fit with the mold of “family,” and the pressing necessity to make money -- which means “success,” whatever the hell that is.  Family has as much to do with the genetic connection between generations as with gender-assigned tasks and roles, and is in tension with the desire for freedom to come and go.

I just read a murder mystery called “Montana,” which was written by Gwen Florio, a competent immersive book I don’t hesitate to recommend for those who like that genre and aren’t picky about details of Blackfeet life, but I was chiefly impressed that Florio evidently pulled so many of her intelligent and enthusiastic friends into the development of the book.  She is a journalist, which might have something to do with it.  It’s like writing that’s been in workshop or classroom development.  Many fingerprints.

But Sam Shepard is absolutely at the opposite end of the scale: he writes personally, drawing on his own life in ways sometimes trivial and sometimes from his core.  Writing like this means enormous vulnerability.  Shepard is afraid of flying, afraid of being revealed -- or at least exposed -- and with the strategy of a counter-phobe -- dares the edges of bankruptcy all the time.  Need for money forces the ideas out of him but also, just in passing, he captures moments on the road.  His craving for intimacy fights with his need to help his children, his woman, to be there for friends, which triggers panicked escape with only a dog or horse.  His desire for the status and access of celebrityhood runs headlong into his contempt for people who see only surfaces and who try to fasten onto him.  He feels terrifying responsibility in the face of inability to accept blame.

Don’t ask me how to solve these dilemmas because I don’t know and I didn’t learn any solutions from Sam’s short stories -- just saw the substrate for his stage plays.  The acting in movies is a representation, not him at all, which is how John Wayne acted.  Much of it depends upon the material culture of the American SW which the camera loves and which Shepard really knows, lives, and yet maybe more in reflection than in practice.  He loves to sit on his verandah, absorbing the idea of it.

The sequence available on YouTube called “Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself”  (1997, PBS) is very helpful.  He says a play is “sending a telegram” about being in the world, the danger and the blame and the obligation to survive anyway.   “Nobody saw him but me.”  The desire of a woman to “fix” her man, to heal him, can be congruent with the son’s desire to do the same for his father.  So Sam was both a receiver and a giver, but fathers can't be fixed.  In the end the testosterone and the cock fights are distractions.  The real issue is more like what I’ve been talking about as the “circle” inside of which one is safe, believing, comforted -- but outside of which one realizes that it’s all arbitrary, undependable, and can only be addressed by going like a tumbleweed across the great peneplain of the West.

In the end, John Wayne is just not relevant.  In a play that is a dialogue (he says, “I realized that you only need two or three people and you can stage a play.”) -- the woman is challenged to name her favorite cowboy actor.  Gary Cooper.  It is Gary Cooper who is the mix of sophistication (which is a kind of alienation) and simple reality that define the Sam Shepard circumference and crossing back and forth over that line makes the drama happen.  There’s a certain amount of hallucination, mirage, involved.  Also, a musician’s sensitivity to timing, rhythm, emphasis, elision. 

The short stories in “Great Dream of Heaven” are like pencil sketches on a Denny’s napkin while pausing on a cross-continental journey with no particular goal.  The waitress pauses.  “More coffee, cowboy?”   

“Why not?”

Do not forsake me, oh mah darlin’.  But he does.  He can't help it.