From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Cowboys and Europeans
An anti-Bush slur shows that America is on the right track.
You know America is on the right path when European cartoonists start drawing our president in a 10-gallon hat.
That's what's been happening to George W. Bush this week on his visit to the Continent. The German paper Die Zeit featured a cartoon of a cigar-chomping President Bush coming through the Brandenburg Gate as though he were walking into a saloon. In Moscow, street vendors are hawking wooden dolls with the president's face under a Stetson. In Berlin, the anti-Bush posters depict the president as a smiling cowboy with eyes painted a deadly red.
As a Times of London story puts it: "Many Europeans regard George W. Bush as a gun-toting, semi-articulate cowboy whose bellicosity extends far beyond the battlefield and whose unilateralism is damaging everything from trade to the environment."
Alas, the Europeans haven't grasped that in America only college professors and actors consider "cowboy" an insult. Thus Susan Sarandon achieved honorary European status for remarks earlier this month, when she summed up terrorism and the U.S. response as follows: "When you have a guy who thinks the best act is to blow himself up, along with others, you have to ask, 'What leads to that?' And is the response more violence? A cowboy shoot-'em-up?"
Note to Ms. Sarandon: Rent "High Noon" and get back to us after you see how Grace Kelly resolves that particular issue.
The truth is, we Americans still revere our cowboys. A page-one story in this week's Los Angeles Times notes that "Americans are buying Western art" at a "startling rate." Starz Encore reports that its Westerns-only cable channel is its most popular. And though he's been dead more than 20 years, John Wayne continues to make the Harris Poll's annual list of the public's 10 favorite movie stars.
Garry Wills, author of a critical Wayne biography, has said that the secret of John Wayne's endurance is that his films tap into "the primary American myths--the myth of Manifest Destiny, the myth of the frontier, the myth of American exceptionalism." And, of course, the reality of evil that must be stood up to, alone if necessary.
The last American president our European cousins liked to call a cowboy was Ronald Reagan--when he deployed the Euromissiles, when he bombed Libya, when he called the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire." So it shouldn't bother a man from Texas to find the Euro-set calling him a cowboy: He's wearing the white hat.
