Friends in Low Places
Tuesday, 22nd December 1998Denver, CO [NotS]
Okay, I’ve been threatening this one for some time now. Cowboys. In 1998. Here’s why this don’t make no sense…
Let’s set the wayback machine to the 1880s or so. Think about the timeframe we’re in. The internal combustion engine won’t be invented for a couple of years [though, speaking of stoopidity, there haven't been any significant changes to the gasoline motor since 1885] and the computer has recently evolved from the abacus to the adding machine. Television is over fifty years away; the most advanced tool of communication is the telegraph, which sends Morse code across what will eventually become telephone lines. Technologically speaking, life sucks.
So what, without television, satellites, internets, or PlayStations, is there to do in the late nineteenth century? Not much. Go into the sprawl of Denver, with its few thousand people, or Sante Fe, or maybe even San Francisco. Grab a drink in the pub, often referred to as a saloon, score some perfectly legal opium or cocaine, find a hooker for the night…all sorts of socially acceptable fun in the American Dark Ages.
But not for the cowboys. The cowboys don’t get to enter the saloons. They don’t get to drink much of anything. They can’t afford opium or coke. Hookers outclass them.
That’s because the cowboy is exactly what he sounds like: a cowboy. A cowsitter. A nineteenth century janitor who cleans stables for pennies a day. But for Lincoln’s emancipation proclaimation, the cowboy would be called a slave. Then again, the cowboy would probably be unemployed, since there would still be slaves to do that sort of thing for the upper class.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Slavery was a bad idea, though the modernised fiction of the events have been utterly screwed up. To go off on a tangent here, understand that the evil white man never captured any Africans and forced them into slavery; the evil white man was too busy slaughtering injuns right about then. The slaves were a commodity which originated in Africa, where the African nobles [who, unlike those of the twentieth century, were actually negro] sold off the lowest caste to the highest bidder, which, it turned out, was the evil white man. So yeah, it was wrong and regrettable; but it wasn’t any race’s fault in particular. Both sides were equally guilty.
Knowing that–that A) I’ve never owned or even rented a slave, and that B) I know the real backstory of the whole mess–maybe you can see why I find it so amusing that the blacks of America are now standing up and letting us know how they got to be cowboys in the wild west, just like them white boys was. Hey, far out; just, tell me: is getting payed what, in today’s money, might be as much as twenty bucks a week to do slave labour necessarily any better than doing it for free. Me, I’d think that doing it for free could at least be written off as a hobby, or something else you wouldn’t take so seriously as to call it a career.
Okay, so at this point we should all understand that being a cowboy was never anything to brag about. At least, not back when they actually existed. So why now, toward the end of the twentieth century, over a hundred years later, it it so damned stylish to dress up as your favourite nobody and go to a country bar and two-step and hoot and generally emulate all manner of exotic bird and–and–and when in hell did the real cowboys ever do any of that? Never.
People like to joke and complain about how depressing country music is. The old joke is that if you were to play a country song backward, your wife and dog and truck would return. Personally, I’d think the country music of the late twentieth century would seem pretty uplifting to the cowboys of the late nineteenth. Hey Jess: you hear ’bout them there cowboys what used to have wives and dogs and pickups? Hoowhee they musta struck gold or sumpin…
So let’s get the record straight on just what a cowboy was. A cowboy did wear a hat, though not a Stetson, since those were a little too pricey for them. Also, to my knowledge, no cowboy ever stapled a dead snake to his hat. Ironic that, though the cowboys of 1998 have a bit of a disposable income, the cowboys of 1898 had a bit of taste. Also, cowboys never had their own horses. If they rode horses at all, it was probably a temp position as they rerouted the cows into a new spot. Horses went for about seventy-five to a hundred bucks for a good one–in today’s money, Buicks and Mercurys average about twenty-five grand. Kinda out of reach on a $20/week budget, wouldn’t you say?
Okay. Knowing that, what’s the fascination with dressing up like some medieval janitor and going out for a night on the town? Who could care? Maybe we should look at this from the other direction…
Let’s set the wayback machine [assuming it'll go both ways] for the late twenty-first century. The computer has recently evolved from the palmtop into the wetwired chip implanted into your corpus callosum. Cars run on man-made fuels–possibly even promethium 147, if the world can get that much less stoopid in only a hundred years. But, assuming not…
It’s Friday. Not that it really matters now that over ninety percent of the world are effectively self-employed, providing various quasipsionic services over the satphone-based internet. And, after a hard week’s thought, you want to unwind. So you go out to the pubs [one of the last standing commercial structures, of course] to unwind and have a drink and listen to music and so on. Where do you go? If you’re the sort who, in 1998, might have gone down to the Broken Horseshoe, you’ll probably wind up at a themepub where everyone dresses up in coveralls and steel-toed Doctor Martens. Welcome, one and all, to the labourer bar. You haven’t got a belt buckle, but you’ve got the biggest damned pocket protector in the joint. And if you’re really hoping to make an impression, you’ll have brought, not your sixarm, but your tasslemop. Feeling groovy yet? Elvis would laugh at you.
And now, back to 1998. For a little while. Another week or so, and it’ll be 1999. Then 2000. And then, the twenty-first century will be upon us. And in all likelihood, we’ll still be plagued with a bunch of losers who dress up to look almost nothing like real cowboys and listen to some cacophany of mistuned guitars and uninspired yodelling. Why? Because no one ever listens. Because no one’s willing to take five minutes to look something up before they assume they know it all. Because…well, because the cowboys of 1998 are a bit like the cowboys of the 1880s: brainless, unoriginal twits with just enough free time to go out and do the sorts of things the rest of us would never even consider. And in that regard, maybe the modern day advertising executives and network middle management who pretend to be John Wayne on Friday night are a little closer to the real thing than they might appear at first glance.
That’s just my opinion; in a hundred years, it’ll have been altered beyond recognition.
–Gremlin