How The West was Won
by Jim Shankman

Common political wisdom says that the Democrats were run out of office in the 80’s and 90’s because they did three things in the 60’s and 70’s.  They ended the war in Vietnam.  They emancipated women.  They ended desegregation.  In America that should create enough social enmity to ensure your political demise, and so it did.  The Democrats have spent a generation wandering in the wilderness.

The dialectic at work in American politics has been this: the country has a problem; the Democrats provide a solution; the Republicans beat them over the head with it and send them packing.   Lately there is a subtle change at work in that dialectic.  It is this: the Republicans create a problem; the Democrats provide a solution; the Republicans beat them over the head with it and send them packing.

Now the time has come for the Democratic Party to solve the problem of this ghastly war in which the Administration chose to pour gasoline on the bonfire of the Middle East so it could cook a few political hotdogs.  Just when you thought we were back in power, the time has come to drink political kool-aid and end the war by withdrawing financing for military operations.  That’s right.  We have no choice.  It’s the right thing to do.  And we are going to get killed on this.  

It’s that simple.  America wins; we lose.  Everybody says they want the war over right now.  And god knows it’s important to end it.  But you wait. Six months, a year, a presidential election from now, the Democrats will once again face the wrath of a FOXed up electorate for being their conscience, for doing the right thing, Mr. Boy Scout, Mr. Wet Blanket, I told you so, I told you so, those obnoxious, smartypants, do-gooder, help a little old lady across the street and get hit by a bus Democrats.  

Sorry, but that’s why God put us on this earth.  To save this country’s ass again and again and then have to pay and pay and pay for it.  We are like the gunslinger in the old Westerns where the timid, bespectacled merchants and dusty, careworn farmers gather in a backroom at the saloon to grumble and curse about the terrible wave of outlaw violence engulfing the Valley and overwhelming the cowardly corrupt sheriff.  Finally they hire a despicable alcoholic gunslinger (with a romantic backstory) to kill the even more despicable gang of ruthless bandits harassing the good citizens of this town.  And when the last dirty skunk is lying dead and bloody facedown in a cattle trough at the OK Corral, the townspeople timidly peek out of their barricaded front doors (as a chorus hums “Do Not Forsake Me O My Darling”), fork over a little cash (blood money they call it), haughtily thump a bible and tell the badly but not mortally wounded hero to get the hell out of Dodge and don’t never come within a country mile of our fair city again or we will set the dogs on you and whip you from here to who laid the rails (except for one little towhead kid shouting “Shane!  Come back, Shane!” into the echoing foothills).

Nice way to run a frontier town.  I wouldn’t want to be sheriff if you paid me.  I’d rather be a gunslinger.  Better hours, more time with your family and they write those gimcracky dime novels about you, make you into a myth, a legend, and sell them to the gullible city folk back East.  A hundred years from now little boys will pick up those books in the local library and read about the stirring exploits of them olde timey hard-ridin’, hard-drinkin’, kiss the girls and make them cry Democrats and how they Won the West.  Again and again and again.

So let’s do it Democrats.  Let’s get out our mighty pens and cut off financing for this miserable war.  And then let’s get the hell out of Dodge.  Who needs it?  And if they ever come acallin’ for us again, they will know where to find us.  We’ll be at the card table at the back of the saloon with a fat cigar in our mouth, a pretty girl in our lap, a shot of whisky in one hand and a run of aces in the other. And we will be asettin’ where no one can sneak inside without we see ‘em first.  Yessir.  

May 25, 2007