WASP boys were raised to worship two dimensional B-movie cowboy-warriors who lived out and upheld chivalrous values and virtues as attributes naturally expected of great US American heroes (at least in their legends); heroes who would die before they would tell a lie; heroes who shot the gun from the hand of the villain rather than kill
unnecessarily; who fought so-called "no-good" Indians who hated White settlers for "no reason" but were friends with assimilated "good" Indians who possessed no defined identity outside their relationships and roles among Whites; heroes who rode flashy horses with lots of impracticle, gaudy rhinestones on their bridles and saddles, sometimes on their shirts and boots; heroes who never let the Flag touch the ground; heroes who never questioned the European concept of land ownership or brought it up that Columbus and those who followed after who were like him, were racist, murdering, slaver Imperialists who now have High Schools named after them; heroes who settled arguments the so-called manly way, with their fists and who were otherwise inarticulate; heroes who usually rode with a side kick for comedy relief, an incompetent back-up who was usually of doubtful intelligence, but who had either musical ability, was a ventriloquist, talked funny, or was just good natured and would always volunteer to go into town to check out the hostile climate first; heroes who sided always with the down trodden and poor against the local Saloon owner/Banker/Businessman/Tycoon Rancher, who was working on a scheme to take treasure, land, mineral rights, customers, and/or dignity from good people who couldn't defend themselves from villains who always hired thugs on brown (?) horses, who rode in a tight bunch and lived in a hidden line shack somewhere in the hills, from which they descended to do their dirty work against a beautiful woman and her nice old Father who had lots of pride, but who couldn't defend himself against the real world and who symbolized the stricken poor and defenseless. Sometimes the hero sang and played guitar, but it wasn't required and sometimes his side kick was Latino or Indian, or he was Latino or a 'Breed', but mostly, he was Anglo. No one can remember any Blacks in either role.Everything about 1950's television was in black and white, melodramatic, over simplified, naive, and moralistic, slanted toward the White perspective or blatantly racist, and historically inaccurate or just wrong and school text books were just as biased. The B-western and B-war movie hero, generated out of a search for national heroes from our own US history, written from the White perspective, became known collectively as "John Wayne" whether Marion Morrison from Winterset, Iowa (who ironically began to believe his own mythology was really true) was in the film or not, and was simplistically virtuous whether he got the girl or not, because being a two dimensional hero in the on going struggle against two dimensional community sized villains and greater two dimensional evils was/is its own reward in the two dimensional melodrama formula. In the Sixties, a cartoon character named Dudley DoRight of the Northwest Royal Canadian Mounted Police was created that presented the absurdity of the self righteous Buffoon hero. And Slim Pickens played a pilot who kicks loose a stuck atomic bomb from its moorings in its bay aboard a B-52 and rides it to ground zero, whipping its flanks with his Stetson and yelling, "Yippy-Ky-Yea!", all the way in FAIL SAFE, but there are those who today work to return us to those unrealistic, juvenile, and oppressive movie-like times, claiming they are the victims, not those they will victimize again if/when they are given half a chance to do so. They even elected a B-western movie cowboy-warrior Buffoon President once, who had a ventriloquist side kick, and expected the rest of us to not laugh at how transparent and two dimensional they were.
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