Cowboys And Indians
Posted on May 9th, 2009
by Daniel Larison |
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In those days, the most common boy’s game was Cowboys and Indians. Now I have nothing against Indians. Unfortunately they lost, despite putting up a brave fight, a fight that was a lot more ruthless than waterboarding. No Geneva Convention in those days [bold mine-DL]. Did they get a bad deal? Yes, but their bravery is remembered in the many school teams named after them. Were I of Indian heritage, I would be proud to be so honored. ~Gary Horne
As it happens, I have nothing against kids playing Cowboys and Indians, and I think objections to these mascots and team names are misguided. That said, perhaps one reason (though I grant it may not be the main reason) why there are fewer Westerns today is that there is some greater acknowledgment today that the forcible displacement and, in some cases, extermination of whole tribes as part of inexorable westward expansion involved quite a lot of tragedy and suffering, and that our countrymen were responsible for much of this. Therefore, it might not be the sort of thing we want to valorize and celebrate after patting ourselves on the back for being so good as to pay tribute to the virtues of people whom our ancestors either forced or wiped out. Imagine for a moment someone saying today, “Now I have nothing against Armenians. Unfortunately they lost, despite putting up a brave fight, a fight that was a lot more ruthless than waterboarding. No Geneva Convention in those days….” Aside from belittling the moral gravity of torture and minimizing the importance of providing protections for captured combatants, what is the purpose of such statements, except to wink and nod at the brutality of the past and implicitly to try to make light of modern injustices? If you find torture outrageous, how much more would you be troubled by a history filled with greater ruthlessness? If you prefer to ignore torture, is there any kind of brutality that you wouldn’t be willing to ignore? We don’t need runaway presentism and endless exercises in passing judgment on our ancestors according to modern standards, but the fact that non-combatants were massacred on both sides in our frontier wars isn’t something that should make us all indifferent to or supportive of modern wartime excesses.
One of the key elements of a traditional game of Cowboys and Indians was the conviction that one side obviously represented civilized norms and the other did not, and to the extent that the other side was given any credit it was in the role of the proverbial “noble savage”–the one who is now honored, so to speak, by being made into an athletic mascot. Of course, this is the conceit of apologists for war crimes in every generation: we are bringing light to those in darkness, even if we are doing so in brutal and unjust ways, or we are overcoming forces of darkness. That is, even when we are uncivilized and savage ourselves, we are never the savages–that is the role of the other side. If children absorb this lesson without qualification, I can actually see something harmful in it, and that can’t be dismissed as nothing but political correctness. (For what it’s worth, political correctness today, if majority opinion is any indication, would dictate that we approve of torture of suspected terrorists and that we embrace any other extraordinary measures used to fight terrorism–P.C. is not merely a multiculturalist or liberal phenomenon.)
Horne continues:
The boyhood game of Cowboys and Indians is not about violence or racism, it is an allegory about good and evil. To play the cowboy was to be brave and triumph over evil [bold mine-DL]. To me, this seems to be an essential lesson for a child to learn. I know of a mother in California who would not allow her son to play with any kind of toy weapon, much less a cowboy fighting Indians. I think her son will grow up to be a man incapable of standing up against evil, who will shrink at the approach of the next bully, and undoubtedly vote Democrat.
Leave aside the lame put-downs at the end. Ah, you see, it’s just an allegory–all is well. Horne doesn’t seem to see that he has just wrecked his own cause. As a harmless game among boys, who could really object to it? As an allegory of good and evil, in which the Indian is made quite clearly to fill the role of evil, it seems to me that Horne gives the game a grim significance that it never had for a lot of people. At the same time, his defense rings hollow. The game isn’t about violence? Of course, violence is at the core of the game, as Horne himself is insisting a moment later. Standing up to evil, resisting the bully–Horne means learning to be willing to fight and even to kill when necessary. The key value of the game, according to Horne himself, is to teach boys how they should be willing to inflict violence against evil men, who, of course, always happen to be identified as being on the other side.
If the game actually taught kids that “we” can do no wrong, that evil is always somewhere else and can be defeated through the use of violence, it would be time for that game to go. Fortunately, I don’t think it represents most of what Horne says it does. Of course, all of that was Horne’s introduction to a series of extremely tired remarks about relativism and diplomacy, which I can’t be bothered to answer.
Filed under: politics
Horne should read Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer to find out what its like when that kind of juvenile anger gets refashioned for Indians; I imagine that he wouldn’t especially enjoy the bits about wacking pasty white people.
I think though we have come a long way in acknowledging not merely the past injustices, but about how, literally through legal documents and treaties, those injustices still claw their way into the present. I don’t think its unfair to point out for instance that much of the slaughter was merely codified and made proper in the form of “land-deals” and other such absurd non-sense. Pointing out that the victims of that might want to re-negotiate doesn’t indicate that everyone whose a descendant of those original people are responsible, but that they DO enjoy the fruits. Merely throwing one’s hands up saying its a fait accompli is easy enough for the people winning it, from American’s to Israel to any number of other situations.
It’s one of the reasons why the idea that America will ever leave Afghanistan or Iraq is absurd; like Japan or South Korea we will become the 800 pound gorilla in the room overseeing, and eternally being responsible for, the situation we ourselves intervened in.
Im speechless. This is probably one of the most incoherent and boneheaded columns I’ve ever read, and that’s saying quite a lot.
Lets get this straight. Cowboys and Indians is a necessary and useful pedagogical tool for teaching kids about good and evil, but its not about violence, even though violence is the best and only effective way the good stand up to evil. Also, it is unfortunate to Horne that the Indians lost- even though the indians must, if we extend his good/evil dynamic correctly, represent evil. So Horne fights it unfortunate that the evil side lost, and he is baffled why Indians would ever take offense to being considered the side of evil in his interpretation of the cowboys/indians game. Amazing.
I swear, sometimes the ignorance of my fellow conservative bewilders me. The best defense of cowboys/indians isn’t that its a deeply symbolic and meaningful game, but that its merely a harmless and playful extension of historical imagination. Kids play cowboys/indians for the same reason they play cops/robbers: its an amusing fantasy involving the embrace of a novel and romantic identity.
Oh, and I forgot. If kids play cowboys and indians to learn about good and evil: then isn’t playing the Indian a BAD thing? Perhaps the game must involve like 10 cowboys and 1 Indian, so the ratio of good/evil is still worth it. Or maybe we should pull Arabs out of torture chambers and make them play the role of indian for our kids.
I must have completely missed the point of childhood games, because I’m old enough to have played cowboys and Indians a million times when I was a kid. In fact, my first five Halloweens in a row I dressed up as a cowboy. But it never occurred to me to think that Indians were evil. In fact, quite the opposite, they seemed like very “cool” characters, and the game was fun because it seemed like you could choose to be either side and not be labelled a bad guy, unlike other games like cops and robbers or Nazis and Americans. In spite of my seeming love of cowboys, I played the Indian side with relish just as often, because it was fun to be the “other” in my imagination. But the Inidan “other” was never an evil force in our minds, just a more primitive, instinctual force, living in the woods, hiding in the trees, silent and stealthy as nature herself. It was fun to be that way for a while, sneaking up on the “civilized” cowboys. I just must have grown up in a different kind of neighborhood from the Home family.
I have to agree with nrmurra that Horne’s argument makes no logical sense at all.
I think the reason it makes emotional sense (at least to Horne) is because of Macho Sue-ism. In Horne’s mind, the Cowboy is a Macho Sue:
Horne despises negotiation, compromise, and treating people with respect even when they disagree with him.
As Whitfield says, this is all wrapped up in ideas about masculinity, which IMHO is why it’s been 12 years since a white male was US Secretary of State: you can’t do the Secretary of State’s job and still be respected as a Real Macho Man, yet it’s too important to be shuffled off on a John Bolton who will take the position only to publically mock it. The only choice has to be someone without Real Macho Masculinity to be threatened.
As one who would have been a Brave had he remained in his family’s hometown, this seems about as good of an argument as any for getting rid of tribal names.
There’s also a pattern to this apologizing – the apologists’ basic position is that bad things were done in the past, including by the US of ‘God Mit Uns’ A, so that bad things are justified forever on.
Of course, they don’t follow this when it would not help them. For example, many of these people could come up with a long list of things which FDR did, and got away with, that they don’t like. But if Obama did them, the apologists would certainly not say ‘FDR did it, so any Democratic president gets a pass’.
Back a few years ago somebody mentioned some pope (in the early Rennaisance?) who publicly came out against torture, under the reasonable belief that confessiing under torture are what people make when the pain gets too bad.
I realized that he had to go against most of what he was taught to believe, because he grew up in a world where judicial torture was considered a good and moral thing. He transcended his world. The people who apologize for torture now are people who were brought up in a world where torture was considered to be an evil thing. They’ve anti-transcended their world.