Author Archives: Lloydville
FOURTEEN WESTERN STORIES
Coming soon to Amazon for the Kindle — within days! In time for Christmas!
These stories deal with traditional Western themes but push the boundaries of the genre a bit, with a lot of strong female characters and some frank sexuality. They’re mostly period pieces, 19th Century, though one is set in the far West at the time of WWII. The locales range from New Orleans just after the Civil War to Mexico, Texas, Kansas, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
IN MY HEART
A VIRGIL FINLAY FOR TODAY
SIX-SHOOTERS
People have often accused Westerns of romanticizing firearms, and there’s truth in the accusation, in the sense that Westerns communicated a respect for firearms and depicted them settling problems. But until the Sixties, Westerns could also be seen as providing instruction in the responsible and even moral use of firearms.
The protagonists of traditional Westerns used firearms only for self-defense or in defense of innocents unable to defend themselves. Transgressing this code identified a man as a villain or as a hero with flaws which had to be redeemed.
Since the Western trafficked in mythology more than in history, the Colt handgun or the Winchester rifle became symbols for any kind of force available to a person, and connected honor and self-worth with using such force thoughtfully and humanely.
All that changed, almost overnight it seemed, with the first scene of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. In that scene, the leader of a band of outlaws, played by William Holden, in the course of robbing a bank, takes a group of innocent unarmed people hostage and tells his cohorts, “If they move, kill ’em.”
Holden and his men are the protagonists of the film. The passing of their way of life is mourned in lyrical terms and they die heroically. They were seen as cool — even though they would have slaughtered their defenseless hostages in the bank in order to further a crime.
To Peckinpah this made them tough, ruthlessly efficient, not wicked, and did not compromise their heroic stature. The commercial success of The Wild Bunch confirmed this attitude as acceptable to many but marked the beginning of the end of the Western, by robbing it of its once-central goal of presenting models of potent but admirable manhood. By beginning the destruction of the traditional Western mythology, presenting a more “realistic” portrait of the American past, The Wild Bunch blocked off one avenue of improving the American future.
IN MY HEART
A MEAD SCHAEFFER FOR TODAY
Click on the image to enlarge.
DICKWAD
Dickwad and prominent Christian spokesperson Mike Huckabee has weighed in on the Sandy Hook murders. He said, “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”
What you’re really saying, Mike, is that God is going to slaughter anybody who doesn’t conform to your idea of how he should be worshiped — with teacher-led prayers in public schools, for example. If only Jewish victim Noah Pozner, six years old, had been forced to participate in Christian prayers at school it would have delivered a clear message to the shooter that we should always respect the individuality of our fellow men.
Mike, why don’t you open a copy of the Bible to the Sermon On the Mount, pull down your pants and take a shit on the book — elucidate your understanding and respect for the words of Jesus in a more honest and dramatic way? Be sure to aim for the red letters.
A COMIC BOOK COVER FOR TODAY
Click on the image to enlarge.
IN MY HEART
A SUNDBLOM SANTA FOR TODAY
IN MY HEART
FROM THE PHOTO ARCHIVES
2010
Click on the image to enlarge.
THE COLLAPSE OF MANHOOD
The collapse of manhood, the absence of viable male role models in a culture, creates monsters — existential nullities, terrified of women, who will do anything to feel “real” again, if only for a few minutes.
As a culture, we’re not allowed to discuss the roll his parents’ divorce played in the Connecticut shooter’s mental state, the fact that his father was living a short distance away with a new wife. No amount of love from his mother could have made up for this, and in some ways the closer she tried to get to him the worse he would have felt the absence of a competent male in the household, the more her power as a woman would have suffocated him.
Her competence with firearms would have only added to his sense of male suffocation, made him want to take control of the only viable penises in the house. He shot his mother IN THE FACE, and all the adults he killed at the school were women. However sick the guy was from other causes, I’m convinced it was his manhood issues that tipped him over the edge. His “death” as a man filled the universe for him, and made the lives of others as meaningless to him as his own.
Why is it only young men who commit spectacular symbolic crimes like this? I think it’s because mothers are not failing our culture — they’re doing the best they can in the absence of competent male partners. Fathers are failing our culture.
NOTHING SAYS CHRISTMAS
. . . like a large number of naked women.
Click on the image to enlarge.