CSotD: From “Frazz” to fry bread
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A large element of the humor in Frazz is the misdirected expectation, as demonstrated here. Are kids more sensitive today, or just completely unaware?
I don't think the current generation of parents even played "Cowboys and Indians" as kids ("Cowboys vs. Indians" is kind of a cheat, by the way). To start with, they were born at the start of the "no guns" movement, but I can promise you, that had no traction.
As parents, we felt that (A) given that I grew up playing guns endlessly and yet wound up being who I wound up being was an argument in favor of how harmless the games were and (B) adding an element of forbidden fruit only exacerbated whatever issue there might be. So our boys were allowed to have guns, of which they had a variety, somewhere in their room. We didn't see them very often.
The guns mostly came out when kids who weren't allowed to have guns came over to play, because the first thing a new kid would say upon hitting the porch was "Got any guns?" The boys never stooped to the level of lying, but it was clear that they would often really rather play something else.
Playing guns is not about killing anyway. It's about power. There is a lot of honor-system involved in guns, whether it's "Cowboys and Indians" or "War" or "Cops and Bad Guys," and the arguments come when two people with roughly equal power dispute whether or not a shot hit home. Supposedly, if you yell "Missed me!" before the shooter yells "Gotcha!" then you are still alive. But it really comes down to where you stand on the neighborhood social scale.
Which means that, if you forbid your child to have guns, and assuming (against experience) that they do not simply make guns out of Legos or use sticks in place of guns, you still haven't spared your child from the conflict inherent in the game. He'll simply go play basketball and have the same arguments over whether or not somebody was fouled, contact between players being less important than their relative standing. A kid with enough political power can flat-out tackle a lesser player and successfully claim that it was a charge and he only grabbed him to cushion the fall.
And one day, they will grow up and get jobs and sit around big tables in meetings and find that not a goddam thing has changed.
But as for the punchline in today's CSOTD, I don't think kids have cowboys on their minds anymore. Toy Story aside, the archetype has largely disappeared from the media. I don't know that there's any particular sociological significance to this, though it is a major change in the thematic landscape.
We were so inundated with cowboys in the 1950s that I had a friend in college who was righthanded in everything he did except playing the guitar, because, as a tyke, he sat in front of the TV mirror-imaging Gene Autry and so grew up feeling that his right hand should be on the fret board. He moved out west and today makes custom fittings for violins. I don't think he shoots anybody, though. He didn't when I knew him, anyway.
When I did a historical project about the Old West a decade or so ago, I learned that most of the conflicts between actual cowboys — that is, cattle ranchers and their employees — and Indians were somewhat corporate in nature. While the Comanche basically objected to outsiders on their turf, most of the other problems had to do with how much per head should be paid for driving cattle across Indian land. It didn't come down to gunplay very often, though there weren't a lot of lawyers out on the frontier.
Come to think of it, it was probably more like a game of "Cowboys and Indians," with one side shouting "We already paid!" and the other side shouting, "Did not!"
In the end, of course, the loudest shouters certainly did win the argument, but it wasn't the cowboys of American iconography, those hard-bitten advocates of the Open Range. It was the corporate guys who, in the movies, were always plotting to fence off the waterholes. Yes, the bad guys, even from a cowboy's perspective.
Hollywood still loves its own version of Indians, mostly in the form of deeply religious stewards of the Earth. But there are alternatives emerging: I recently got "Smoke Signals" from Netflix and watched it again. If you haven't seen this native-written, native-directed, native-acted adaptation of a Sherman Alexie story, you really should. It's not only a refreshingly funny-but-honest look at native culture, but also a reflection on fathers and sons with a lot more impact than "Field of Dreams." (Yeah, you lose twice, Costner.)
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