Ever see the movie
Shane, a cowboy movie from the 50s? I have. It's a great movie. What I didn't know is it explains a lot of what modern American politics is about, at least according to this guy. He seems to think it captures the dreams of the Tea Party and a lot of other Americans. His matchups are a kick.
QUOTE
This vision of America, conjured by the Tea Party and foreshadowed — currently — by the debt-ceiling crisis, grips a nation that wants, needs, aches to return, in some ill-defined way, to a past utopia of frontier individualism.
But how do we get there? And what will it look like when we make it back?
It’s been more than a century since any such reality applied anywhere in America. But as I struggled to imagine our nation’s return to a purer time — without taxes or welfare state, with no tree-huggers and no voting allowed for women or coloreds, when no government “czar” could dictate your kid’s school, your choice of lightbulbs or the level of salmonella contamination in your soft-boiled eggs — I realized I had already seen it! At the Erwin Theater in Tomah, Wisconsin, when I was in, like, third grade.
It was called “Shane.” It’s all there — everything Americans yearn to go back to.