Loss of the Hero In American Society

PureX

Well-known member
The 'bad guys' aren't out robbing people with guns, anymore. They're doing it with bribes to congressmen and senators. And they're using the power of government to rob us systematically.

Yet we're still living in some fantasy old west novel, collecting our guns, and waiting for the bad guys to show up. But the bad guys have already shown up. They're all around us. In fact they ARE US when we work for corporations that bribe the government for the right to price gouge citizens and plunder the environment. We're the bad guys when we re-elect those same bribed up politicians over and over and over again, for decades. We're the bad guys when we blame the victims of a rigged system for having been reduced to living in poverty and hopelessness.

So who we gonna shoot at with all those guns? Ourselves?
 

northwye

New member
In the Range War Western story formula the insider villain in secret has a gang of yahoo-type outlaws do his dirty work. He tries to stay behind his cloak of respectability, but his deception is usually destroyed at some point by the cowboy hero.

Its not that the real "Insider-respected" villains will not use their influence to bring the cops and maybe the military down on the heroes who threaten their position - if that position is really threatened.

Its important for the heroes who might threaten the insider villains to maintain some control over what has come to be called "the narrative." That means keeping the moral high ground and showing some of those who would be on the side of the insider villains the truth of the narrative to lead some to join the heroes. If the heroes are to keep the moral high ground they have to act like heroes, while the insider villains play dirty.

Society is divided and fragmented. There are factions who will side with the insider villains and accept fully their political correctness propaganda used to control that faction of people. There are people who like the politicians controlled by the insider villains exactly because these politicians are psychopaths.

Its a bad idea to promote a violent revolution, and its is also a very bad idea to go along with the gun control agenda of the Left, or whoever is in power.

And the metaphors for the hero to keep the moral high ground should come from the Range War Western at its best and not from comic book "heroes" or "heroes" in video games. The Range War Western came out of a culture in which Protestant Christianity had a stronger influence than it does on our culture today, though that Protestant Christianity of the 19th century was coming under some influence by false doctrines.

Comic book "heroes" operate in big city settings and though they come out of an early or mid-20th century culture which still honored the hero of fiction, that was not the rural and small town culture of the 19th century West, which was largely Protestant. The "heroes" of video games come out of a more anti-Christian culture of nihilism, where Jesus Christ is even more uninvited than he is in the comic book culture.
 
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Totton Linnet

New member
Silver Subscriber
The 'bad guys' aren't out robbing people with guns, anymore. They're doing it with bribes to congressmen and senators. And they're using the power of government to rob us systematically.

Yet we're still living in some fantasy old west novel, collecting our guns, and waiting for the bad guys to show up. But the bad guys have already shown up. They're all around us. In fact they ARE US when we work for corporations that bribe the government for the right to price gouge citizens and plunder the environment. We're the bad guys when we re-elect those same bribed up politicians over and over and over again, for decades. We're the bad guys when we blame the victims of a rigged system for having been reduced to living in poverty and hopelessness.

So who we gonna shoot at with all those guns? Ourselves?

Often in those old movies there is the really evil guy taking over the whole town or trying to....They have succeeded in modern America.
 

northwye

New member
There was the McMinn County, Tennessee War in August of 1946, when several hundred to a couple of thousand veterans of World War II threw a corrupt regime accused of voter fraud, etc out of office. The 1992 TV film An American Story was based upon the McMinn County War but set in a Texas town in 1945.

Here is what Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about the McMinn County, Tennessee War of 1947 "Any local, state or national government, or any political machine, in
order to live, must give the people assurance that they can express
their will freely and that their votes will be counted. The most
powerful machine cannot exist without the support of the people.
Political bosses and political machinery can be good, but the minute
they cease to express the will of the people, their days are numbered.

This is a lesson which wise political leaders learn young, and you can
be pretty sure that, when a boss stays in power, he gives the majority
of the people what they think they want. If he is bad and indulges in
practices which are dishonest, or if he acts for his own interests
alone, the people are unwilling to condone these practices."

That was 1946.
 
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