From Old Tombstone To Today . . . What You’re Allowed To Say Can Spell Dangerous Results
By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — When families get together for social gatherings, the saying goes, don’t talk about religion or politics. That could upset emotions.
Well, what did acquaintances talk about around the saloon card tables in, say, Tombstone, Arizona Territory, in the latter nineteenth century? Just whiskey and gambling?
As of 1881, the year of Tombstone’s fabled October 26 gunfight at the OK Corral, the end of the Civil War was only 16 years in the past. That nightmarish conflict, whose end included the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, must still have been a raw memory for many.
But how many Westerns give us saloon dialogue about any topics of that time except perhaps slighted honor, liquor, card cheating, or rustling?
In fact, politics was on the minds of those in and around pre-statehood Tombstone. City residents were more likely Republicans, those with business interests, and the Earp brothers faction. Their newspaper was the fabled, and pro-Republican, Tombstone Epitaph.
On the other hand were the rural people, generally Democrats and Confederates, including the “Cow Boys,” a term meaning rustlers then, not wranglers. The anti-Earp Clanton gang was in this corner. Their newspaper was the Nugget.
One might think that in today’s zeal to uncover long-dead Confederacy and slavery sympathizers, media might rain down condemnation on these old rustlers and outlaws. But that would be to pin the racism tail on the Democrat donkey, a historically accurate but painful task for many current media pseudo-sleuths.
Westerns, like many other movies, have had varying degrees of accuracy, including those about the gunfight at (actually, near) the OK Corral. The 1957 Gunfight at the OK Corral, with major stars of the day Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, had a risible shootout scene, portraying the Earp faction jumping into a ditch for cover, the Clanton gang protecting themselves behind a covered wagon, while a high hill was directly in the background.
Tombstone is on a mesa, with no high hills just next to it.
The superior 1993 release of Tombstone, with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer, more accurately showed a face-to-face battle near C.S. Fly’s photography studio. (Wikipedia says Fly “was an Old West photographer who is regarded by some as an early photojournalist and who captured the only known images of Native Americans while still at war with the United States.”)
However, you’ll look long and hard for any Western — or, for that matter, pretty much any movie depiction before a twentieth-century story line — to remind us of the daily fact of life that animal-based transportation, whether by horseback or wagon, entailed animal droppings.
Believe me, when I was on a New Mexico cattle ranch some years ago to cover a story for The Wanderer, I saw this reality all over the ground and roads as I never thought of it before.
To watch the movies, you might think that some dust or mud was all that wranglers had to worry about on their boots. Which — may we make a momentary historical discursion? — makes it all the more horrifying to read about surgeons in New York City, at about the same time as the Tombstone gunfight, sharpening their surgical razors by stropping them on their boot soles from off the city streets.
In his book Fifty Years a Surgeon, Robert T. Morris, MD, who trained for medicine in the latter nineteenth century, reminded us of how primitive doctors’ knowledge had remained throughout much of history.
No wonder hospitals still had been places where you had a substantial chance of dying simply from a medium illness, not cardiac or brain surgery, as nurses used a common sponge on one infected patient after another.
However, dangerous germy journalism remains as infectious as it ever has been, whether spread via handset type on a primitive flatbed press or electronically to personal devices.
Even before he was elected president, Republican Donald Trump was opposed pretty thoroughly by dominant media, who would have done almost anything unethical to stop his candidacy. Shocked to death at his victory, they paused only momentarily then grew even more vicious during his first term in the White House.
Now they’ll do about anything to prevent his reelection. One tool is to portray his physically failing opponent, wan bad Catholic Democrat Joe Biden, as a highly desirable and moderate alternative. He’s to be “Catholic Joe,” even though Biden’s “Catholicism” is so private he doesn’t even practice it himself except as an insincere actor donning a costume.
You might think that “Catholic Joe” wouldn’t dare say he’d compel the Catholic Little Sisters of the Poor, of all people, to provide contraceptives and abortifacients after they’d fought for years against this, even winning the support of the morally inconstant U.S. Supreme Court for their side. You would be wrong.
Biden would force the nuns to do this if elected president because his media pals will minimize the controversy while his radical staffers insist that the old man remember who got him the win.
Imagine the issue for the media if Trump improbably announced he would force daughter Ivanka to renounce her Jewish faith. But Biden airily says he’d impose what objectively is mortal sin not only on an order of Catholic nuns but also anyone else in the nation he can duck-walk into this.
Rather than moving more toward the center as he is assumed to be the party nominee, Biden totters ever further left.
Like those Western movies that don’t bother to show what’s really all over the ground, Biden’s record and his campaign positions simply will continue to be ignored where inconvenient as we head to November.
He’s fully for unlimited permissive abortion and, as of last year under leftist pressure, for mandated taxpayer funding of it. That’s where leftists see their opportunity with the fragile, figurehead Biden, who buys into socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ platform positions to win over those votes while figuring votes are guaranteed to come in from his other flank out of habit.
Unashamed Marxist Angela Davis, who favors sanctions against Israel, supports Biden for president, saying he can be “effectively pressured” from the left, The Federalist website reports. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic, radical left-wing Democrat Cong. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweets that “a vote for Biden is one for ourselves.”
The aging Angela Davis doesn’t get so much publicity these days, but, starting in the 1960s and going forward, she flaunted her political Communism in California on front pages around the world while signing on to such causes as abolishing prisons.
Just releasing the inmates? Why, think of that. Who might have whispered that idea into governors’ ears these days?
Commentator Christopher Bedford posted at The Federalist site on July 14: “Last week, Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ ‘Unity Task Forces’ released the 110-page results of their negotiations — negotiations that the Sanders team appears to have dominated, nearly tripling Hillary Clinton’s 2016 tax-hike proposal, offering free college, planning an acceleration of the Democratic ‘zero-emissions’ plan, and a heaping…‘full scale’ audit of American border-security officers, on top of citizenship for illegal immigrants and every other leftward lurch of the past few months.”
Radio talk host Rush Limbaugh, struggling with cancer himself, made an interesting point on July 15 when he noted that the Democrats’ two most recent presidential picks, Hillary Clinton and Biden, are older people obviously impaired with health issues.
One might say that power-hungry Hillary wouldn’t let anything stand in her way — even if she literally had trouble standing up — to get the Dem nod finally in 2016. But when the 2020 Dem presidential nomination might have gone to someone obviously healthier like U.S. Sen. Cory Booker or Hawaii Cong. Tulsi Gabbard, how did the backroom arm-twisters decide Biden was the guy?
Biden, who told voters to their faces in pre-COVID times that they’re full of, you know, that stuff on the ground at cattle ranches, or who weirdly told an inoffensive college student that she’s “a lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” now there’s a befuddled guy who’d say some interesting things at important public appearances as president, if his handlers get him out of the basement.
But how much close-up action can anyone expect in the age of COVID-19 from this frail, elderly bad Catholic?
Speaking of Catholicism and media messaging, those who were alive back in Vatican II times saw Catholics leaving the Church because of poor catechesis as rapid changes arrived. A person who’d been told a hamburger on Friday would send him to Hell now was told he could eat as many burgers as he pleased on the last workday of the week. People may have felt they’d been gypped or fooled.
It would have been far better if careful explanations were more widely disseminated for the changes, such as that the burger itself was perfectly fine, while this mandatory Friday penitential practice of denial could be applied in other ways.
Depths Of Depravity?
Major media these days already have damaged themselves in many ways with their intentional deceptions. Could it be that they’ve undermined themselves further with their hawking whatever left-wing shards of nonsense suddenly spring up, instead of treating them more skeptically?
News consumers suddenly see aggressions given credibility that would have been laughed or booed off the stage only weeks ago, from statues of U.S. heroes needing to be destroyed, to police needing to be defunded and disbanded, to racism motivating everything from Mount Rushmore to California missions, to looting, arson, and beatings being the search for social justice.
After Trump’s uplifting, patriotic July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore, truly celebrating national heroes, columnist Conrad Black observed, “The Washington Post editorial board declared that he had reached ‘new depths of depravity.’ This is an outrage worthy only of the press of a totalitarian country describing an opposition figure.”
When a New York Times opinion editor, Bari Weiss, resigned on July 14 because of being hammered by harassment from her coworkers, that pretty much told the story of how far left dominant media staffing had gone, after her own boss, Times editorial-page editor James Bennet, had been driven from his job by the same in-house mob in June. Talk about a hostile workplace.
One might have thought that a bisexual, Never-Trump, pro-same-sex “marriage,” pro-abortionist would have fit in pretty well there. Those were some of Weiss’ qualifications as itemized back in July 2018 at the Reason magazine website, nearly two full years before the breaking point came.
And how could it hurt to be Jewish at a newspaper owned by generations of a Jewish family since the end of the nineteenth century? Actually, being considered a friend of Israel aroused hostility among Times workers – or wokers — these days.
Because the Times, like so many of its media kindred, had so badly missed how Trump would beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, Weiss, viewed as a centrist, was hired, to help put the paper back in touch with the United States — by, as Weiss said in her resignation letter to her publisher, “bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives, and others who would not naturally think of the Times as their home.”
But the Times grew even wilder in those few years. Even though Weiss thought most people at the Times don’t hold the radicals’ views, they’re cowed by them, with the result, she wrote, that “(t)he paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”
However, this record is published to affect the way we Earth people live and vote. Will it continue to poison our little corner of the universe? The results of the November 3 election will be an indication. That will be just over 139 years after the October 26 gunfight at the OK Corral.
