Pop89: Western Thought
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
I’m doing research for a novel set in the 1800s. And one reality that hits home for me, time and again, is how much people needed each other to survive, despite it being the days from which we derived the stereotypical image of The Westerner as the lone cowboy riding off into the sunset, going it alone. The image may tell us a lot about circumstances for both men and women in those frontier days, when forced to spend long swaths of time alone on the homestead, in the field or on the range. But, from all the letters and memoirs I read, it was not the ideal for anyone.
And yet, the image clings. And with it certain phrases like: if you want something done right you gotta do it yourself. Nobody’s gonna help you. You gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps. There’s no free lunch. blah blah blah.
And while we certainly have no right to complain if we aren’t willing to put our shoulder to the plow, how did we arrive at the idea that a mature individual lives by a code of rugged individualism, trusting no one?
Because, the truth is, we’ve been getting free lunches ever since conception. And, most of us fed off our mother’s milk and our father’s weekly paycheck. We were given a roof over our heads, a school bag full of pens and paper, shoes on our feet, and a lunch bag in our hands. Nope. None of us are so exceptional we made it this far alive entirely by ourselves; we all have a few people to thank.
The notion of exceptionalism can be traced to the term Manifest Destiny, a lofty expression given to us by an American newspaper columnist. In 1839 John O’Sullivan pronounced that the US had a right to annex Texas, as it was part of God’s plan. His exact words were: “It is our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty.”
He does not add that, in carrying out the great experiment, certain people, indigenous and black among them, lost their liberty and freedom of movement. But he does mention that after Texas and California comes Canada. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine, in support of the idea. “A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.”
Oh, hathen’t it?
History is full of empires, nations and countries convinced of their God-given right to “begin the world” over. We know individuals who behave this way, too. They are terminally unique creatures who do things their way because no one understands them. They may go to their graves believing they are special, but as my rancher friend Ervin likes to remind me, “the cemetery is full of indispensable people.”
We certainly do need to pull our weight, according to our own heft. We can expect to get out of a project what we put into it. We need to understand what it means to pursue excellence. In my case, that means putting in that extra hour editing, finding the right word, doing one more draft, fine-tuning, burnishing, embroidering, sanding, refining a piece of writing to its prettiest possible self. I don’t believe everybody gets a prize just for showing up. That’s how we breed mediocrity. We need good writers to help us see and make us think. And we write for others, for good readers to open our eyes and minds. That applies to every job - we need to reward those who work diligently at the task at hand. Artisans, professionals, geniuses all have discipline in common.
But, if artisans and pros, geniuses and self-made men have been erroneously thinking, along with celebrities and CEOs, that their exceptionalism makes them indispensable and manifestly superior, then Covid exploded that misconception.
If covid taught us one thing, it’s that we need each other. AND that we need ranchers, farmers, grocers, clerks, truckers, factory workers, health care workers, field workers etc. And, though we might enjoy, we don’t need movie stars, record label magnates, con artists, and all those rugged individuals who claim to have made it on their own and yet are evidently incapable of making their own supper, coiffing their own hair, vacuuming their own carpet.
The term essential workers became common over the last couple of years, as poorly paid service employees risked their health to go to work in order to pay for their rent and food and keep us in cheese and milk, gas and booze. We were, at the beginning of this long lockdown, thrilled to stand outside and hammer pots and pans in support of essential workers. We thanked them and praised them. And then, we forgot them. TIME magazine, in a supreme act of forgetting, made the new president and Vp person of the year when essential workers were the obvious shoe-in. After all, they’ve been on their feet, nonstop, on our behalf.
We need each other, and we always have. And furthermore, we’re supposed to need each other. Getting to a place of mutual trust where one is able and willing to share one’s hopes, dreams and ideas, as well as fears and sorrows, is a mark of emotional, psychological and spiritual maturity.
Author Anand Giridharadas, in his blog “The Ink,” recently wrote about America, although it can be applied to Western thought and the thought of the old Westerns, too: “We’ve come to venerate what we do alone and sneer at what we do together. While tradition inspires the celebration of a heroic soloist, capitalist, pull-yourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps story … that’s never been the only story. We’ve also always had this story of movements.” He reminds us that “The most important things we do, we do together. At our best, we do things together in a way that allows people to do things alone. And people do things alone in a way that creates the opportunities to do things together.”