Musings While Watching "Tombstone:" Are Americans Living in a Movie?

                                                         

                                                  

     I changed channels, ah, Tombstone. Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) walked into a near-empty saloon and challenged the toughest, meanest card shark to a fight. Turns out the card shark, fat, sloppy, but nattily dressed, like a king on his throne, controlled the saloon, scaring away all the good, honest gamblers and drunks.

     New to town, along with his family, and famous Earp brothers, Wyatt (Kurt) wanted to show the tyrant that the town’s people had the right to gamble and drink wherever they wanted—freedom! Independence! Liberty!

     Wyatt, in a sharp-looking, Macy’s-style, black trench coat, wide-brimmed fedora, and a huge mustache, more cosmopolitan dandy than dusty, western lawman, stepped up to the “bad hombre” and glared into his eyes. The gambler stood and met his glare. They exchanged words. The Royal didn’t back down. Glare, glare, glare. Finally, Wyatt-Kurt said, “You’re scared. I see it in your eyes,” and slapped the tough across the face. Shocked, the man’s hardened face melted like hot wax, and he slithered out the door, abandoning his throne to the outlaw turned lawman-hero, Wyatt Earp.

     His blue eyes blazing, Kurt Russell, in the true American spirit, had freed the people in the saloon of the dictator—independence for the citizens of Tombstone to get as soused as they wanted. Hollywood justice!

     Man, I thought, Kurt Russell is a bad dude. No, wait, that’s not Kurt Russell. That’s Wyatt Earp—or is it Kurt Russell playing a better Wyatt Earp than the real Earp? Then, I wondered if the incident with the card shark had ever happened or a screenwriter invented it, creating the kind of Wyatt Earp American movie-goers expected.

     We know there was a Wyatt Earp, a real man, but how much of him is true or fiction, a screenwriter’s imagination or an historian’s facts, but, then, even historians can be biased? How about Jesse James, Joaquin Murrieta, Ma Barker, Tiburcio Vasquez, Bonnie and Clyde, the Founding Fathers, Katy Hurtado, Abraham Lincoln, Betsy Ross, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, or even William Bonny (AKA Billy the Kid), who most serious “cowboy” scholars claim was a homicidal maniac, not the romantic kid-gunslinger the dime novels portrayed. Where does the myth end and reality begin?

     Most successful actors have PR machines who create personas for them, turning 1930s dance hall girls into Hollywood starlets then princesses, with fairytale lives, better than Cinderella. Come on! Johnny Depp is from Owensboro, Kentucky, population 160,000. How much can he really have in common with the cool, hipster, eccentric characters he plays?  Though, to be fair, he did move to Miramar, Florida, when he was eight. Still, the real and the fiction must get confusing.

     Kids of my generation grew up thinking Davy Crockett, Elfego Baca, Kit Carson, and Jim Bowie were handsome, well-spoken, good-hearted, outdoorsmen, who opened up the west, American heroes, at least the way Disney portrayed them on television. I can still see Fess Parker’s (Davy Crockett) wide smile.

     Crockett and Bowie died at the Alamo, defenders, fighting to the last man, even in the newest 2004 Disney version with Billy Bob Thornton, dead Mexicans at their feet. Truth or fiction?

     How about the 7^th Cavalry, making its heroic last stand at the Little Big Horn, fighting to the last man, George Armstrong Custer, the courageous general, golden locks flowing in the breeze, firing his revolver to the end?

     Hold on! If they fought to the last man, that means there were no survivors. Now here is where a basic course in English Composition enters the picture, under “logic.” If there were no survivors how do we know what happened?

     Well, at the Alamo, they say, two survived, a man and a woman, one escaped and witnessed nothing, the second claimed to have been hiding and didn’t see a thing. They couldn’t confirm a “last stand.” For sure, no one in the 7^th Cavalry survived the Little Big Horn. Though, Captain Reno watched some of the action from his perch in the mountains.

     The only participants of the battles who lived to talk about them were the opposing armies, ahhggg--the enemy, Mexicans at the Alamo and a myriad of Indian people at the Little Big Horn, including Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, led by some of the most famous American heroes, Crazy Horse, Little Big Man, and Sitting Bull. But, in the 1800s, who could trust their account?

     Newspaper reporters out of the East, far from the battles, who wanted to sell as many papers as possible, after learning about the fighting, simply invented what happened. In fact, newspaper reporters were notorious for inventing stories, anyway. On slow news days in New York, they met in local bars, shared stories with hoodlums and drunks, started making stuff up, then they’d go back to the office and write it down, barely making the deadline for the next day’s dailies. A good day was if somebody really got shot.

     New York writer Jimmy Breslin maintains that writers, like Damon Runyon, were the real genius behind iconic times, places, and people, like the Roaring Twenties, Broadway, the Babe, the Copacabana, and professional athletics, which were more crooked than “a dog peeing in the snow,” as one Irish friend told me. Reporters made the sports appear legitimate to get “losers and suckers” to put their hard-earned money down on the table, so some swindler could wipe them clean. The Roaring Twenties didn’t “roar” any more than any other time in history, but Hollywood made sure movie-goes heard them roar.

     Runyon and his ilk turned lazy, inarticulate, uneducated, bloodthirsty thieves into, what they titled for their readers, “Gangsters” and “Mobsters”. Violence, criminals and crime sold papers. Most reporters writing for big city newspapers agreed that even more corrupt than the mobsters were politicians, bankers, real estate speculators, and lawyers, who got the thugs to do their dirty work, while keeping their hands “clean” for the unsuspecting public.

     Hollywood took it from there, glamorizing gangsters through Bogart, Cagney, Brando, and Pacino,  with Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwick, Lorraine Bracco, and Michelle Pfeiffer at their sides, much more beautiful than the real thing.

     I once asked my father (born 1924) how working-class Mexican kids became pachucos and cholos. He answered, no hesitation, “Hollywood. In the 1930s, we all went to the movies every Saturday afternoon, mostly gangster movies. Everybody wanted to be like them.” I asked about racism, the WWII zoot suit riots, and police abuse. “Nah,” he said. “Before any of that, the kids were already wearing second-hand suits, greasing back their hair, and talking tough, just like the gangsters in the movies.”

     Without the magic of reporters’ pens, none of those everyday-Joes, places, and events would have come down to us as they have—American myth.

     The truth about the Alamo? According to scholar Phillip Tucker, the Alamo in most Americans psyches came packaged in an 1836 book by Richard Penn Smith, “Colonel Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas,” what Tucker calls, “a bogus account,” “complete fiction,” even the quotes, portraying Mexicans in the most heinous way. Americans still hold on to this account.

     As for Custer, we now know, once the coverup of a "last stand" was debunked,” scholars agree Custer was a megalomaniac and a narcissist who led his men into the valley of death, ignoring all warnings. No last stand, like in the movie. Custer's men scattered under the intense barrage. They didn't form a circle like in the movies. Archeologists found skeletal remains far from the site of the actual attack, soldiers fleeing. Had he lived, he would have been court marshalled. Truth be told, it was all hubris, like George W’s “Mission Accomplished,” the Iraq war now going into its seventeenth year.” More myth.

     Polk, Sam Houston, Custer, and probably Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld too, believed in Manifest Destiny, the belief that the “Almighty” willed America’s right to take as much land as it wanted, regardless of ownership. This belief had at its root: no Indian, Mexican, or person with dark skin could defeat a white man in battle. So, the Alamo and Little Big Horn had to be portrayed for readers as how an “immoral, unscrupulous enemy had to have tricked courageous Americans into unfair battles.” (My quotation marks.)

     Every good movie needs a scapegoat. The level-headed Captain Reno, who refused to send his men into the valley to die, and still had to fight overwhelming forces to save his men, was Custer's scapegoat. I remember reading a few years back, Captain Reno’s descendants forced the Army to absolve him of his crime and admit they’d lied—or, at the least—erred in unjustly court-marshaling Reno.

     Inside the Alamo, the mostly green, volunteer-militia was caught sleeping or in sick-bay, ill from lack of food and water. They couldn’t fight. Their gun powder was old, wet, and, much of it useless. Recently, archeological evidence showed the majority of the Alamo’s defenders died fleeing the old mission’s walls, many skeletal remains found up to 500 yards away. Bowie was sick in bed when he was killed, probably sleeping. Crockett? Too many decayed bodies to ever 100% identify his remains.

     Cowards? No way! The Alamo was a death trap. The men retreated in the hopes of fighting another day, except, well, they ran straight into Mexican lancers, who were, historians agree, superbly trained in that antiquated style of combat.

                                                                                 

     In fact, Mexicans had been living on the range and herding cattle when the Yankees were still growing cotton and tobacco east of the Mississippi. American cowboy lore is more Mexican than New England, thanks to the Spanish conquistadores. That’s why so many Spanish words have seeped into the American cowboy lingo, hombre, vaquero, bronco, coyote, chaparral, barranca, canyon, reata, etc.

     The men inside the Alamo were pawns, a motley sort, many shouldering their personal hunting weapons. These men were used by politicians and pro-slavery plantation owners who promised reinforcements that never arrived, as well as "land" if they lived. There was no central command or organized force. Some defenders didn’t’ even trust each other, pro-slavery on one side and anti-slavery on the other. Why didn’t the Disney movies mention slavery?

     The battle took place in the blinding dark, and thick smoke clogged the air. The majority of Mexican casualties, much lower than reported by the New York reporters, occurred from fratricide, get it? Friendly fire. They shot each other in the dark.

     The battle lasted all of 30-to-45 minutes, not much of a defense, and the Mexicans attacked only after Santa Ana had sent the Alamo’s leader numerous warnings. That’s when the hubris set in--Manifest Destiny, “No greaser could defeat a white man in battle.” They died believing that.    

     Mexico, like its patria, Spain, celebrates everything--big, with monuments, songs, and parties, holidays, life, death, baptisms, confirmations, every saint’s day, war heroes, quincineras, and war. South of the border, nobody celebrates the Alamo. To Mexicans, it was a minor skirmish. The old abandoned mission was a lonely outpost in San Antonio, a wilderness, and its defenders a rag tag group of slave-traders, encroaching on Mexican territory. The battle barely made it into the Mexican history books.

     If important historical events are fictionalized, what are we to believe? When I see people claiming: “USA! USA! Freedom! Independence! The Constitution!” I wonder where that came from. Even the early settlers in the colonies, though seeking freedom to practice religion, still saw themselves as subjects to the king of England, including the so-called Founding Fathers. Few considered themselves “free” of laws, whether of God or of man.

     Now, why would people flee a monarchy only to continue supporting it? Turns out the alternative was to live under the rules of the new, rich plantation owners, who cared little for the small farmers, artisans, and tradesmen, and preferred slave and indentured labor to paid workers. As low as some companies pay today not much has changed there either.

     By 1780s, even after George Washington and his rebels sent the red-coats packing, the rich plantation owners ruled the roost, so to speak. They didn’t want anybody messing with their profits, least of all, a bunch of poor lazy farmers and tradesmen who charged too much money for their goods and labor.

     Historian Harlow Unger, in his book, the Last Founding Father: James Monroe, describes a German visitor’s account upon witnessing a congressional meeting in progress. “In the anteroom, they amuse themselves zealously with talk of horse-races, run-away negroes, yesterday’s play…according to each man’s caprice.”

     When Founding Father James Monroe began attending congress meetings, “…he adapted quickly to ‘club rules,’ joining other council members—especially his good friend John Marshall—in card games, dice, and billiards, and at horse races and cockfights. Monroe was an avid player of whist, poker, chess, checkers, and dominoes. Although he did not document his gambling, he proved a consistent winner and Marshall’s account books show at least one loss of 19 pounds (about $1,200 today) to Monroe at whist.”

     Only the rich land owners could serve in Congress. They represented the thirteen colonies, north and south. They didn’t want any laws passed that might limit their rights to make money. So, it was in their best interests to play games rather than pass laws. (I am paraphrasing Unger)

     Maybe the reason Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” is such a smash hit is that it may be one of the few “popular” portrayals of the Founding Fathers showing them meeting at bars and bordellos, and the use of rap, hip-hop, music and dance, captures a more realistic side than any other portrayal. These early landlords were--well, the first “hipsters,” partying while everybody else worked.

     Unger’s book shows when politicians, including some Founding Fathers, took time away from their play-time in congress, the laws they passed benefitted them, their business interests, not the “people”, as Hollywood and our education system would like us to believe. Think how much Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Universal must donate to politicians’ coffers, today. How much has really changed?

      Our country is a republic, modeled on the principles of Greece and Rome. In some Southwestern states, certain water laws (more rules), were not founded in New England, but go back to Spanish rule. In other states, the citizens are proud of their indigenous roots and practices and have incorporated some into their own local government. Talk about true “Independence.” Rules and laws everywhere you turn.

     If any group in the U.S. was completely free, it was the plains Indians, even more so than the iconic cowboy, who owed his allegiance to the rich ranchers. Since when did any American have the right to make up his or her own rules?

     Even the revolutionary war, which relieved us from the laws of a monarchy, didn’t free us from the rule of law, whether federal, state, or local. So, is American “liberty” itself a myth? Is U.S. history a myth, fantasy, fiction? Is there really no such thing as our constitutional rights?

     How about the American Tea Party, claiming our freedoms were being violated just like the Boston Tea Party back in the day.

     Well, let’s take a look. According to Benjamin Culp, professor of history at the Brooklyn colleges, who is an expert on the subject, in 1773, twenty-two percent of the tea dumped into Boston Harbor was “green” tea, the favorite of elites, like, our Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Dumping their favorite green tea didn’t make either “Founding Father” happy, especially Washington who tried avoid violence or trouble with the English king.

     Were the “tea dumpers” patriotic Bostonians, angry at the English king’s increased taxation, as so many American, today, believe? No! There was no tax increase. Tea was already taxed. No big deal. In fact, the king’s tea wasn’t even the king’s tea. It belonged to the privately owned British India Tea Company and sold cheaper in the colonies than any purchased from colonies own wealthy tea merchants.

     Turns out, the East Indian Tea Company had a surplus of tea, and the king wanted to sell it in the colonies at bargain prices, which pissed off the tea scalpers, mostly wealthy merchants in the colonies, like Amazon wanting to keep out foreign Amazons to keep prices high.

     Scholars argue the “tea-dumpers” were criminals and thugs hired by the colony tea merchants to pretend to be citizen-patriots, like outsiders, today, who come in a usurp peaceful protests and start violence giving the protest movement a bad name.

     The tea merchants called themselves Sons of Liberty to fool the public. They wanted to keep the price of tea high and make a bigger profit off the unsuspecting colonists. You know? Follow the money. It wasn’t about liberty or independence but about the almighty dollar. Duped again.

     The thugs didn’t even attack the king’s ships. They destroyed tea on American ships bound for the colonies. But, if you see a movie about it, you will see patriots (actors) crying, “Unfair taxation! Liberty! Freedom! USA! USA!”

     From where I sit, I see freewheeling journalists, Hollywood screenwriters, and slippery politicians as more responsible for the myth of the independent American spirit than any real historical events or people. John Wayne, Edward G. Robinson, Audie Murphy, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Rita Hayward, Henry Fonda, and the rest--actors, all, have more to do with our views of the free American spirit than anything real or historical.

     Ever ask how Russia became America’s nemesis? At the end of WWII, the U.S. wanted to loan Britain five-billion dollars to “restore London as a financial center.” President Truman believed this would “revitalize world markets.” In exchange, the Brits promised to remove trade limits affecting the U.S. Though, not all countries trusted the British, who had brutalized many in their colonies and lorded over other European countries.

     Democrats were on board but not the Republicans, who believed the U.S. had already helped Britain enough, not only with money but also with troops during the war. To convince the Republicans, Truman knew he needed a “boogey man.” He told the Republicans if the U.S. withheld the loan from Britain, the English might “swing into the Russian orbit.” Fat chance. Russia was a poor as any other wrecked country after the war.

     As economist Jeffrey Frieden writes in his book Global Capitalism, “…he [Truman] persuaded them [Republicans] that economic engagement would serve their anti-Soviet goals.” At the time, Russia had suffered massive losses to the Nazis. They had just helped the allies defeat the Germans. The Russians, even though communists, weren’t our enemy. Communism wasn't even such a nasty word until we needed it to be.

     Republicans, taking the bait of a Soviet scare, agreed to the loan. Dean Acheson, Under Secretary of State, who helped create the tale, later lamented, “This [the Soviet scare] was almost certainly overblown.” Acheson’s biographer wrote, “Acheson regarded it as unfortunate that the loan had to be justified with veiled illusions to the Soviet threat, but he accepted it as a price that had to be paid….”

     I guess some times politicians can be as creative at stretching the truth as reporters and screenwriters. Maybe that’s why so many are hired as presidents’ speech writers and spokes people. But consider: would our fixation on Russia as a threat have been more nuanced if not for the Acheson’s machinations? Might Kennedy and Khrushchev have worked out the Cuban issue without the threat of atomic weapons? Might we never had fought North Korea? Might 60,000 Americans killed in Vietnam still be alive? After all, Vietnam, like Iraq, were both started because of lies.

     If you believe Honest Abe never told a lie or George Washington admitted to chopping down the cherry tree, you just might believe Kurt Russell saved Tombstone from a murderous card shark. I can even hear Kurt-Wyatt tell the independent-minded tyrant as he walked out the door, “And put on a mask, idiot! We have rules in this town.”