Farce of the Western Sunset

Since Ronald Reagan the Right has continuously re-animated itself by reference to frontier mythology.  Of course there is no more frontier, only the memory of an ethic that was false from the beginning, an ethic of theft and domination, and sanctimony.  This is a model for empire, so it’s not surprising that it’s relevant today.  But the turn westward is inevitably a Hollywood re-staging of the frontier as a means of preserving and obscuring the model of empire.  Crucial to this are politicians who move adroitly between the real of politics and the Disnefied fantasy of the right.  They must either be cynics or children, though the media and its political festival are particularly critical of the appearance of cynicism, perhaps because cynicism is the master value, and must be kept from sight at all costs. So the right is dominated by the infant terrible type: Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, et al.  The resemblance between politics and comic book narrative seems to matter not as the spectacle of America translates every discourse into entertainment.  The primal sin for a politician now is to fail to entertain.  If we are entertained, we feel represented.  Bored, we seem to disappear.

The farce of the Western sunset sheds its light on the sunset of American memory.  Without memory, history is quickly lost.  Without history, time begins to precess within itself and becomes an unrecognizable eddy.  Cinema repopulates and reanimates the past.  Vietnam re-invented by Norris and Stallone. 9/11 reinvented in real time, closing memory entirely out of the loop.

The shame of this spectacle seem to be successfully displaced upon the Left.  The Left has become the impotent repository of guilt and conscience.  It is the Left that hesitates, that doubts itself, that suffers the pains of bad conscience. It is the Left that cannot find entertainment in its mythology.  It is the Left that is eternally anxious.  It’s the Left that’s held hostage.  Regarded as weak, it enacts the pathos of weakness.