Cowboy Up

[Recycled from 09:49, 23 November 2004]

The sky is gray and overcast in Corvallis, but there's plenty of light, so the town looks pretty good from up here in the lookout tower. The Benton County Courthouse stands out from its neighbors downtown, to the east of me. To the west are the cranes that are working on the stadium, on the OSU campus. I'm going to miss those cranes when they're gone.

[Note, 18 September 2005: I do miss the cranes, but it's interesting to look over to the west and see the towers of the stadium, and the ranks of windows at their tops, so shrunken by distance that they look like glass brick]

There is a bumper sticker I've seen around town lately that reads "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys", and shows photos of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in cowboy hats.

So far, I've resisted the temptation to put a note on his windshield reading "Apparently, your heroes have always been pretend cowboys -- a Hollywood actor who played in westerns and a New England aristocrat who plays cowboy on forty-day weekends at his Texas ranchette."

Americans have an astonishing appetite for the transparently phony. Hillary Clinton pretending clumsily to follow New York sports teams*. Ollie North pretending to be a simple, honest Marine. Those guys who pretended to have served with John Kerry. The doctor who claimed to have treated John Kerry's wounds. John Kerry . . . .

At this point, a lot of people would bring up actors testifying before Congress on the strength of having played an archaeologist or a primatologist or whatever in a movie, but actually, an actor who has done research for a part probably knows more about the subject than most people.

But I do wonder what people are thinking sometimes. Or maybe I should ask why they aren't.

*[Correction: She was telling the truth. My apologies.]

//The Magic 8-Ball says, "Things are often not what they are said to be."\\