Clint Eastwood's Cowboy Economics

1001 Movies to Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 33
Clint Eastwood (director/star), Pale Rider

For me, the iconic image happens when Preacher (Clint Eastwood) begins sledgehammering a large granite boulder. Hull Barrett (Michael Moriarty) believes there’s untapped gold under the stone, but he cannot reach it without breaking the stone first. And he daren’t drill and blast, he explains, lest he divert the stream the other prospectors depend upon for their meager living. Barrett cannot bear hurting the other prospectors, not even if doing so would make him rich.

Not surprisingly for a movie starring a character known only as Preacher, this movie is replete with Biblical references. Moses, in the book of Exodus, struck a rock at Meribah and opened a stream, saving his people. Likewise, the prospectors of Carbon Canyon, inspired by Preacher’s resistance to the capitalist LaHood and his violent thugs, join him in striking Barrett’s rock; indeed they find gold, which saves the prospectors from destitution. Preacher is apparently Moses.

Capitalist Coy LaHood owns nearly all his domain. He has renamed his town LaHood, and has replaced slow, tedious panning for gold with a hydraulic system. His technology has made him rich, but gradually destroys the land it occupies. Most workers around LaHood have accepted their subjection and work the mines, knowing they’ll never profit much. But why fight it? LaHood bribes state regulators and federal marshals to ensure every conflict breaks in his favor.

The prospectors in Carbon Canyon, by contrast, don’t have bosses. They have legal claim to their smallholdings, provided they stay put. Though they lack a formal hierarchy, Hull Barrett has achieved enough trust and respect that they treat him as unofficial mayor. The prospectors’ relative independence galls LaHood, who longs to control everyone and everything. So he dispatches his employees to destroy their settlement, hoping that will bring them to heel. Instead, they start praying.

Many critics have observed that this movie pinches tropes from multiple prior Westerns. The mysterious stranger who rides in to deliver the oppressed (Shane). The avenging preacher (Heaven With a Gun). Small operators standing fast against a corrupt, thuggish establishment (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Even Eastwood’s own High Plains Drifter. One could make a sport of spotting moments which screenwriters Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack pinch from the great canon of prior Westerns.

But this criticism misses the point. This creative team doesn’t want to open new territory; they’d rather make a point about the present, viewed through a mythologized past. Coy LaHood embodies the violent coercion inherent in unrestricted capitalism. He owns both the lawmakers and the lawkeepers, and fears no consequences for his actions. His money distorts his ethics, making him mercilessly destroy anybody who prevents him making even more money. Lucre is cause and consequence.

Opposite LaHood’s massive, dehumanizing greed, the Carbon Canyon prospectors have a distributed economy based on everyone minding their own patch. As Barrett explains in a moving speech, they aren’t panning for gold to become rich; they’re working to maintain their own patches, put down roots, and become ordinary citizens. LaHood sees money as its own goal; the Carbon Canyon community long for small holdings, distributed power, and family. They’re Distributists, before the term was coined.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting, this movie ignores that the land the prospectors’ land was stolen twice, once from Indians, once from Mexico. It also ignores that, while they pan for gold, nobody’s growing crops or manufacturing goods. Their community couldn’t survive long without more diverse production, and indeed it didn’t; prospector communities quickly dwindled in history, because somebody needed to hoe corn. Like most myths and fables, this one only extends so far.)

This parable of smallness and honesty versus bigness and corruption, remains tearfully relevant because we face this issue today. Anybody who’s tried filing a stolen wages claim against a major corporation recently, or faced an eminent domain claim, knows the system rewards those already well rewarded; to paraphrase Preacher, the system cannot serve God and Mammon. Preacher gets the credit for stopping the corrupt marshal with guns. But the community stops LaHood by standing together.

This movie was one of several Westerns released in 1985. Following the disaster of Heaven’s Gate, which tanked so badly, it destroyed United Artists Pictures, Hollywood became reluctant to touch Western themes. However, as the profligacy of the 1980s, with their cowboy President, became more overwhelming, Hollywood finally returned to the hero cowboy legend. After all, the present is always morally corrupt; from medieval romances to Singing Cowboys, true Virtue always lives in the past.

Nathaniel Rateliff's Old-School Blues Reunion

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 14
Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats

In the summer of 2015, an unexpected track hit American airwaves, a song with a capella stanzas that sounded like a traditional Gospel choir. Audiences who didn’t listen to lyrics too closely could’ve been forgiven for snapping their fingers and humming along, thinking they were hearing something from an earlier era of American music history. At least, until the musically loaded chorus, where the featured vocalist suddenly shouted “Son of a bitch! Gimme a drink!”

Nathaniel Rateliff paid his dues on the Denver music circuit, where he became a local headliner while polishing his songwriting chops. He tried his hand, at various times, with straight-ahead rock music, more sober folk content, and carefully arranged chamber rock. He finally received success when he organized the Night Sweats, a more upbeat combo focusing on a retro Memphis soul sound. But, like their platinum-scoring breakout single, their sound often conceals much deeper sadness.

That lead single, “S.O.B.,” propelled Rateliff’s ensemble into national awareness, perhaps because Rateliff’s ragged but tuneful vocals reflected the then-current mix of disappointment and optimism based on the culture and economy. Rateliff never sounds anything but soulful, but he also sings with a distinct burr in his voice, possibly reflecting his having worked as a carpenter and a loading dock operator while perfecting his style. This man knew the sounds of existential disappointment.

Audiences primed by that single, however, were undoubtedly surprised by the album. Rateliff’s actual sound was less Tom Waits, more Otis Redding, salted with a broad tour of American musical history. Stops in Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans, and the Piedmont gave his album a tenor that spoke to everyone, equally, at the same time. His mix of blues, folk, and rock offered crossover appeal, and he succeeded at an age other musicians are preparing to retire.

The opening track, “I Need Never Get Old,” is built like a standard blues-rocker, but supplemented with an unexpected brass section that offers a depth of sound missing from others of its kind. It’s the kind of spitfire that Chess Records would’ve released around 1954, hoping to capture an elusive White audience. So it comes as something of a surprise when it transitions into the second song, “Howling at Nothing,” a somber epic of loneliness.

Nathaniel Rateliff (center, bearded) & the Night Sweats

This pattern obtains throughout the album: one muscular rocker, followed by an introspective folkie number. “S.O.B.” swings directly into “Wasting Time,” a slower piece with heavy steel guitar, which sounds like something Jim Croce would’ve recorded at his peak. But even at its most melancholy, this album’s sound remains bolstered by the spring-loaded boom of hollow-bodied electric guitars. Rateliff’s complex, layered arrangements definitely play for grown-up attention in an otherwise youth-dominated music market.

Rateliff’s most unexpected track, late on the album, is “Shake.” Where the other songs sound like early proto-rock’n’roll, this track sounds like the kind of music White record labels rush-released to counter rock’s sensual appeal. It combines bluesy guitar with a percussion line influenced by North African folk music, not unlike when White companies tried floating Cuban and other Caribbean music. The lyrics, however, have a sexual frankness Desi Arnaz could’ve only obliquely hinted at.

Arguably, this reflects the entire album: musically, much of it sounds like it could’ve been recorded fifty or sixty years ago. But lyrically, it’s definitely current, and its themes reflect many of the realities of adulthood. Rateliff’s narrative voice enjoys the autonomy that growing up offers, but he isn’t immune to maturity’s disappointments. Conjoining songs like “Thank You,” about enjoying having a grown-up relationship, with “Look It Here,” where he has to beg for recognition, emphasizes this.

Audiences periodically feel drawn to music from another era, usually during a time when social values are changing from gung-ho optimism to existential disappointment. Creedence Clearwater Revival at the end of the 1960s, for instance, or the Squirrel Nut Zippers in the middle 1990s, repackaged sounds from a prior generation and made them new and contemporary. Nathaniel Rateliff speaks to that same audience motivation, and probably for the same reason, as 2015 was pretty disappointing.

Sadly, Rateliff still hasn’t found Top-40 success. “S.O.B.” and several follow-up singles topped the Adult Album Alternative charts, suggesting he quickly found a full-grown audience eager for more complex sounds. Like Rateliff, who was pushing forty when he had his first hit, his audience probably feels alienated from the present. We aren’t necessarily running from the world; we just aren’t fooled by its pretty promises. The commercial mainstream will never quite have a place for us.

The Streets and Courtrooms of Modern Harlem

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Died, Part 102
Walter Dean Myers, Monster

Steve Harmon, sixteen years old and Black, is on trial for felony murder. That’s a technical term for the charge when someone dies during another felony—in this case, armed robbery. His co-conspirators say he was their lookout man, while he… remains strangely noncommittal. Locked up amidst convicts two and three times his age, he keeps a journal describing his Dante-like journey through the hell of the New York State penal system.

Walter Dean Myers was a remarkably prolific author. In a career stretching half a century, he wrote over a hundred books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the African American relationship with power. His histories of Civil Rights pioneers are frequently required reading in public school history courses, while many English classes assign his novels. This novel remains probably his most widely assigned, because it’s so universally accessible.

Steve, a regular at his high school film club, keeps his journal in the form of a first-draft movie script. In it, he describes his trial, before an apparently mixed-race jury, from his untempered teenage viewpoint. He attempts to communicate with his White attorney in plain English; she responds in legal terminology, while warning him to prepare for the worst. If convicted, he faces twenty-five to life, if the jury feels lenient. Steve, who again is just 16, could get life.

Interspersed with these scenes, Steve includes flashbacks to his pre-arrest life. Raised in Harlem, he spent plenty of time sitting on front stoops needing to prove his manfulness credentials to petty criminals who burned out before turning twenty. But he and his brother long to emulate Batman and Robin. And he argues with his film teacher about whether a story’s resolution should be predictable or abrupt, a clear nod to him not knowing how his trial will resolve.

Perhaps Steve’s most striking characteristic is his complete lack of introspection. Though an aspiring artist with, his film teacher assures us, a remarkable eye for telling detail, he never turns that eye toward himself. His proposed movie describes everyone around him: the Harlem street toughs whose respect he longs to earn, the overwhelmingly White criminal justice system, and his mother, brother, and favorite teacher. Steve himself remains beyond our reach.

Walter Dean Myers

Because of this, we never discover whether Steve actually did what he’s accused of. He tells his attorney he isn’t guilty; she reminds him that’s a far cry from innocent. Unlike, say, Harper Lee’s character Tom Robinson, Steve’s culpability remains murky, even as we sympathize with him. Regardless of his guilt, he fronts bravely, telling the jury he scarcely knows his accused co-conspirators… even though we know, having read his prior journal, that that’s a lie.

The screenplay format permits Steve, as Myers’ stand-in narrator, to keep things external. He describes his life and trial in terms of camera angles and cross-fades, not thoughts and memories. His friendships and family relationships come across in telling moments, but Steve never lets them touch him personally, admitting, in his copious handwritten notes, that he must remain detached and aloof, lest he weep in prison, the worst place to appear weak.

Intermittently between blocks of text, we get photographs, drawings, and handwritten thoughts. This book is illustrated by Christopher Myers, Walter Dean Myers’ son, and between them they create a multimedia text that’s potentially more accessible to today’s school-age readers, who weren’t raised on the printed word like prior generations were. They establish Steven as someone who thinks in images, and communicate with an audience who probably thinks likewise.

When this book appeared in the late 1990s, the highest-rated television drama was a courtroom procedural called Law and Order. Black Americans have long recognized this phrase as dog-whistle language for institutional racism, especially back then: Steve Harmon name-checks Mayor Giuliani among the forces steering him into a foreordained outcome. One hears echoes of that whitewashed vision of “the criminal justice system” in Steve’s plaintive story.

This novel, like most of Myers’ corpus, is considered a young-adult book. That’s because it features a teenage protagonist, plain English storytelling, and no vulgarities you couldn’t repeat in school. But like most young-adult literature, it offers copious rewards for adults reading, too, on issues of race, crime, and at what point our society considers a man “grown.” It’s published with a readers’ guide. Share this volume with your students, church youth, or your own kids.

Because I hate to say it, but many things about American justice have only gotten worse in the twenty years since this book appeared.

Star Trek, the Frontier, and the Borg

“We are the Borg,” the faceless cube intones in the movie First Contact. “Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” These words have struck such fear into a generation of science fiction fans that the final sentence has escaped the genre pen and become a larger cultural touchstone. Simply say the words “Resistance is futile,” and most people, sci-fi fans or not, will immediately understand exactly what you mean, and fear appropriately.

Throughout genre history, American science fiction has frequently had a frontier element. Whether it’s Han Solo promising to move quantities of goods to market without revenuer interference (“selling whiskey to Indians”), Commander Adama plotting a course beyond the Red Line (“light out for the territories”), or Malcolm Reynolds’ all-around cowboy ethic, science fiction has pilfered generously from America’s frontier mythology. That goes double for Star Trek, which Gene Roddenberry pitched explicitly as a “space western.”

Captain Kirk announced the original Star Trek by describing himself traversing the “final frontier.”  He made it his goal to encounter undiscovered peoples, several of which, in the original series, are depicted as having Native American qualities. (These qualities are broad stereotypes, and often played by White actors in heavy makeup, though that’s too many themes too address here.) Though the Prime Directive stops Kirk becoming an out-and-out conqueror, he’s nevertheless frequently a White Savior.

Perhaps that’s what made Picard’s contact with the Borg so terrifying: colonists and empires don’t like having their own actions thrown back at them. In the original series, Kirk and the Federation dealt intermittently with the Klingon threat, a metaphor for America’s interactions with the Soviet “menace,” but never investigated that in detail, perhaps because, in light of the ongoing conflict between two global superpowers, creators couldn’t face the implications. America was an empire, too.

As the Cold War wound down, though, such investigation became available to Picard. The Next Generation included more scrutiny of the Federation and its operant principles, which were primarily White, male, and expansionist. The series still held itself back in service to the tastes of its time, and Roddenberry’s humanist philosophy, but we began seeing rot and disorder among the Federation hierarchy. White humanity’s innate goodness wasn’t something the Federation could take for granted anymore.

A Borg drone (Hugh) from the episode "I, Borg"

White America’s history with indigenous peoples will never escape the taint of racism. Forced removals and the Trail of Tears; state-sponsored missionary activity designed, in no uncertain terms, to abolish native culture; the Carlisle Indian School. And that’s just our interactions with Native Americans. The phrase “Your culture will adapt to service us” accurately describes the philosophy underlying how White people viewed Native American culture until very recently—and, in too many quarters, still does.

Funny enough, while America saw itself as a bastion of rugged individualism, it painted the “Evil Empire” as a faceless collective bent on assimilating citizens’ identities into a top-down social stratum. It’s almost like, viewing from within, we saw ourselves as individuals with goals and personalities, while viewing our “opponents” from without, we considered their people the sum total of their government’s belligerent rhetoric. One wonders how Native Americans saw the Cavalry crossing the frontier.

American frontier myth, to work, always requires viewing from the White side. Whether it’s children playing Cowboys and Indians, or NASA pledging to establish colonies on the Moon and Mars, somehow the White settlers always win. But science fiction, which regularly abandons moorings in the putatively “real” world, has liberty to speculate on big themes which we’re often denied in reality, including the possibility that, someday, somebody new may cross another frontier and find us.

That’s what happens with the Borg. After decades of Roddenberry’s mythology assuming humans, mostly White males, would win the colonial enterprise, the Borg upend this assumption. They enter our space. They want to conquer us, and make us part of their, ahem, enterprise, rather than us inviting strangers into our Federation. And though, pursuant to the needs of episodic television, the humans always successfully resist the alien invaders, they nevertheless remind us, victory isn’t certain.

Our frontier myth has frequently tainted America’s interaction with the wider world, as historians like Greg Grandin have noted. The myth has faltered significantly in the 21st Century, but still basically drives our foreign policy. That’s why we need something like the Borg, to remind us that, viewed from outside, we probably don’t look like the Federation. We probably look like an anonymous mass of technological monstrosities, bent on yoking other peoples to our vision.

Jewish Jesus

1001 Books to Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 101
David H. Stern, Ph.D., Restoring the Jewishness of the Gospel: a Message For Christians

Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef was Jewish. So were his Apostles and earliest converts. Even Paul, the “Apostle to the Gentiles,” never stopped calling himself Jewish. Though Yeshua’s ministry included stops among Samaritans and Romans, his outreach centered on fellow Jews, and included extensive citations from the Hebrew Tanakh. But after the last Apostles died, Yeshua’s ministry became dominated by Gentiles. During Bar-Kochba’s Rebellion, Jews and Yeshua-followers split permanently.

Dr. David Stern, a Princeton-trained economist and lifelong Jew, became persuaded in middle age that Yeshua was the Messiah of prophecy, the promised one to reunite the scattered people of Israel. He has written about this conviction since the 1970s, becoming a leader in the Messianic Jewish community. But, half a century later, confusion remains around what Messianic Judaism means. Dr. Stern hopes to solve some of that confusion.

History hasn’t been kind to Jews who believe Yeshua fulfills the Covenant prophecy. Such Jews were rejected by fellow Jews, particularly surrounding the violence enacted by Roman conquerors. Then Gentile Christians required Jews who wanted to follow Yeshua to abjure their Judaism, contrary to Scriptural messages from Jesus and Paul. Only since the middle 1800s has the Venn diagram of Judaism and Yeshua-belief reclaimed the overlap that once dominated.

Messianic Judaism isn’t Christianity. Stern emphasizes that, the few times the word “Christian” appears in Scripture, it always describes Gentile converts. Instead, Messianic Jews remain Jews, with all the controversy of identity that this entails (for instance, should we keep kosher? Stern and his family do, but he refuses to criticize others who don’t). As such, the Hebrew Covenant continues to govern his people, who continue living under the Law of Moses.

This causes some confusion, since Paul’s letters, and to a lesser degree the Gospels (particularly John’s) proclaim believers’ freedom from the law. Doesn’t that mean the Hebrew Covenant doesn’t apply? No, Stern insists, and uses the historical context under which Paul and the Evangelists wrote to prove his point. He makes a persuasive case that, while Gentile converts live under a New Covenant, the Hebrew Covenant still governs Yeshua-beliving Jews.

Jesus as a young Jew, painted by Rembrandt

Moreover, he writes, Christians owe Jews heavily. Stern describes what he calls “olive-tree theology,” based on an analogy Paul writes in Romans, Chapter 11, that all Israel is a cultivated olive tree, onto which new believers are grafted. New Yeshua-believers needn’t necessarily become Jewish (see Acts 15), but based on statements from Paul and Yeshua, Stern believes Gentiles are grafted onto Israel, and eventually both will become one tree.

(It’s worth asserting here, that some organizations calling themselves “Messianic Jewish” aren’t Jewish in any true sense. Though they use Jewish liturgical language and selectively apply kashrut law, their theology is Evangelical Protestant. Dr. Stern doesn’t address these organizations; his interest is in actual Jews who consider Yeshua the Messiah of prophecy, and his message is unambiguous: Jews who become Yeshua-followers never stop being Jewish.)

As such, since new believers become joined into the Hebrew Covenant, Jewish believers have a different relationship with Yeshua than Gentile Christians do. Gentiles are invited into covenant which begins with relationship with Yeshua. But Jews already have their covenant; they don’t need invited in. Instead, for them, Yeshua becomes the culmination of a covenant they already possess, the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy, and the unity of the Jewish nation.

Based on this, Stern believes it’s anti-Semitic for Christians to not extend outreach to Jews. Many Christians, he acknowledges, are justifiably reluctant to evangelize Jews, because historically, Christians have used high-handedness, even violence, to forcibly convert Jews. But Stern asserts this doesn’t mean we should refuse to evangelize; it only means our evangelism must begin in humility, willing to seek forgiveness for our forebears’ failure to follow their own teachings.

This synopsis does Stern’s theology a disservice. Though brief, his book is dense with references to Jewish and Christian history, deep dives into Scripture, and careful analysis of ways Yeshua and (especially) Paul speak from categorically Jewish foundations. He carefully translates these concepts into laypersons’ language, aware that he’s writing for a diverse audience. But he doesn’t shy away from complicated theological arguments.

Recently, I’ve heard much about Gentile Christians becoming curious about their religion’s Jewish foundations. Not long ago, the firewall between Christianity and Judaism was difficult to breach, but not anymore. Dr. Stern writes for Gentiles willing to learn more about where their religion originated, and Jews eager to discover the figure Yeshua who claims to be the Messiah. Both audiences will find much to discover.

On a related topic: Indigenous Jesus