The Third Cowboy....

Cowboy worship, a creation of 19th century dime novels and the movies, forms the heart of modern conservative iconography.
Cowboys (so the rightical chic theorists intone), are strong, simple, decisive, polite, market-oriented, and conquer through sheer laconic will power.
A cowboy "doesn't cotton much" to "big gummint" and so on...
It is a winning symbol, remote and yet pervasive...all too necessary for a hyper intellectualized political movement with limited appeal to the working class.
Barry Goldwater, a department store heir from Arizona, was the first serious conservative cowboy aesthetic....jut jawed and plainspoken to the point of inanity he embodied the 1960's "Gunsmoke" zeitgeist.
Goldwater loved to contrast the free and bountiful west with the government dependent, cramped and crabbed northeast.
He all but rode a horse up the steps of the Capitol to make his point.
Unfortunately, Barry was also simple minded to the point where he couldn't avoid contradicting himself from one day to the next when out campaigning.
Nevertheless, he blazed a trail, made certain images a vital part of the conservative movement.
Along came the Second Cowboy, Ronald Reagan.
His claim to fame was he played cowboys in the movies...to back up the assertion he owned a ranch and was frequently photographed on horseback.
Reagan also legitimized the right's embarrassing anti-intellectualism and passed himself off as unread, unlettered, yet righteous.
Unlike Goldwater his spiritual godfather,Ronald Reagan went all the way and never abandoned his slow, strong, and simple cowpoke persona even as senescence took it's grip.
Reagan of course, having one set the tone for all modern American conservatives since 1980...all one way or another have to present themselves as simple-minded heroes or the apologists thereof.
Now comes what I call "The Third Cowboy", George Bush Jr.
Like every other politically active member of his family, Bush is self selective in regards to his religion and his regional origin...in other words he chose to become a Baptist Texan.
He is, however, the first serious national politician to raised exclusively inside the conservative mythology...Bush is in every way from his crudity to his dogmatism a third generation conservative along the line of Laura Ingraham or David Horowitz.
Even as his ideology ossifies, like a bad multi-generation xerox, the details on Bush's cowpoke persona have started to fade and blur.
The President hates horses, his ranch is a naught but a campaign backdrop (bought in 1999 just prior to running for the White House)...one doubts he could quick draw without shooting off his own pinky toe.
But in so many other ways Bush is the embodiment of conservative cowboy imagery...he is incurious anti-intellectual, famously impressed with his own resolve...simpleminded and primitive in his religion...his attitude and outlook breath the very essence of Wyatt Earp by way of television.
It is nonetheless a degraded and degenerated brand of conservatism the President espouses in his immaculate cowboy hat.
It is enduring conservative myth that asserts a strong simple man must take a doubting and liberal ridden republic by the hand in a crisis.
It is in some ways the very foundation myth of conservative pseudo theology going back to Barry Goldwater's complaints about slow procurement of B-52 bombers in the 1960's.
Therefore one can see 9-11 as "conservative prophecy" the national testing time that will uplift a whole ideology and it's ideologists.
The problem is, that a heroic type is necessary for the ideology/mythology to work...and these days Bush's heroism is a labored artificial thing and the ideology it symbolizes has grossly degenerated since its palmy days under Goldwater's tutelage.
It is a sad end for modern conservatism, mired in spendthrift policies and frantic with the desire to expand government intrusion into our bedrooms nationwide.
It is shadow time for the olde tyme faith, its greatest defender is a sad little punk who became a millionaire atop a pile of bilked investors and displaced homeowners.
Teddy White complained about "the liberal theology" back in 1972, now today we are beset by the "conservative mythology"...a set of tattered symbols wholly at variance with current policy.
And yet our President, the cardboard cowpoke and an even more unreal and affected saddletramp than Saint Reagan, soldiers on....encrusted with pretense, bereft of any ideas and ever more dependent on cliches to get his point across.
This the likes of Mike Barnicle calls...authentic.
The decline of conservative ideology though, is the central crisis of our times.
The internal contradictions of the movement, it's appetite for revenues, it's refusal to countenance war taxes, and it's intrusiveness are fairly breathtaking to behold.
As a movement it has "promised itself to death" and will make any bargain in order to win...even if it means winning ugly.
Even if it means damaging the constitution beyond repair...that once sacred document dear to the hearts of Goldwaterites everywhere.