the new type of Western hero his distinctive characteristics—a touchy sensitivity to insult ("When you call me that, smile!"), a chivalrous regard for women masked by tongue-tied shyness, a proficiency with the pistol that spoke louder than words, a love of law and order combined with a willingness to fight outlaws by adopting their own methods. The genre of the "Western" dates from this turn-of-the-century transformation of the Boone-Bumppo archetype into the he-man. The formula established at the outset remained essentially unchanged in hundreds of novels, radio serials, movies, and comic strips. More unambiguously than Boone the advance agent of civilization, the gunfighter still rides off into the sunset when his work is done, unable to bear the constraints that come in the wake of his triumphs; but although he remains a loner, for whom marriage and a cottage covered with morning glories would be unthinkable, he serves only the settlers who stay behind, not the higher calling of nature. If he takes on the qualities of an outlaw, it is only to bring outlaws to book.

Transposed to the urban wilderness, this new-model Western hero becomes a tough cop sometimes forced to operate outside the law in order to circumvent the slow-moving machinery of formal justice, even to adopt criminal disguise in order to penetrate the secrets of the underworld. As a defender of freedom in foreign wars, he has to contend not only against the enemy, for whom he learns a grudging respect, but against military and civilian bureaucracies and against misguided peace lovers, ungrateful beneficiaries of his prowess, who weaken America's will to fight. No longer even-tempered by virtue of an intuitive appreciation of natural beauty, he becomes, in his latest incarnation as Rambo, a creature of pure rage, more savage in his righteous strength than the savages he pursues. In politics—for it is hardly to be expected that imagery so deeply embedded in popular culture would fail to shape perceptions of political leaders, even their own perceptions of themselves—some of his characteristics can be discerned in half-mythical figures like Joseph McCarthy, whose supporters excused his rough methods in the struggle against subversion on the grounds that it was dirty work but someone had to do it, and of course in the more genial person of Ronald Reagan, himself a veteran of the screen and therefore an ideal choice for the real-life reenactment of a role that sums up the chauvinistic, self-righteous, expansionist implications of Western mythology.

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