Ninjas and Pirates Agree: Cowboys Suck!

Wall Art in Barcelona, Spain.


"...But though American Anglo-Saxons as a nation may conquer or dominate lesser breeds and nations, the new order of industry will also require a division of power and privilege between different classes of Anglo-Saxon in which some of the ruling race will sink to the level of "Poles or Huns or Russian Jews." The critical problem for the American ideology in this period of transition is to reconcile the principle of Anglo-Saxon superiority -- the ideological basis for imperialism abroad and for the subordination of some classes of Anglo-Saxons to others.
" This is one of the themes of...The Octopus (1901), the epic novel based on the "war" between farmers and railroad interests that ended in the Mussel Slough "massacre" of 1880. The embattled farmers of The Octopus are (for the most part) classic embodiments of the Anglo-Saxon drive for progress and domination. Yet they are defeated because under the new regime of commerce the race-gifts of pride, ambition, will, and aptitude for violence are not enough by themselves toensure dominance. Their expression must be consistent with the requirements of "the market," whose operations [are represented in the novel] as a law of nature, as irrisistable as the sex drive or the processes of natural fecundity. In a fully incorporated industrial order, when giant monopolies contend for worldwide markets, the future belongs to those (anglo-Saxons or not) whose racial gifts can be modified to find expression through a powerful corporate entity."

Damn you dime novels and your bigotous philosophies! To understand the present, look to the past and you will always find someone or something to blame for the stupid shit being played out today. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Hence, existentialism. Sweet, sweet existentialism.

-excerp taken from Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. READ IT!