Jefferson gets to be a left-wing hero again! It’s been awhile, but Ho Chi Minh and I always knew he had a comeback in him. Actually, the whole cause of right-wing historical revisionism may suffer some blowback from this ill-advised shot at Mr. Jefferson. They have gone a Founder there. There are lots of relatively conservative Americans out there who still revere the Founders. They hear a few stories like this and they may just conclude that guys like Dental Commissar McElroy are a little too sketchy to be allowed to control their children’s lives.

"George Washington" collecting signatures for the Mount Vernon Statement

After months of non-stop, often costumed stalking by the hysterical far right,  the Founders finally caught a break this week, thanks to the  Mt. Vernon Ladies Association. It seems that the keepers of George Washington’s estate did not let the conservative promoters of the so-called “Mount Vernon Statement” hold their big media event on the premises mentioned in its title. The far right has long enjoyed projecting its obsessions on the Founders, of course, but the Tea Parties have made the phenomenon a full-on reactionary fad lately. No conservative gathering or press release seems complete unless dressed up in Ye Olde Colonial drag. The substance of the statement is only historical in the sense of being rooted in the politics of the late 20th century, rather than the 21st or the 18th. The real point of bringing poor George Washington into this vague farrago of conservative pieties would seem to be keeping longtime Beltway rightists relevant in the Tea Party era.

There have a number of enjoyable stories on the MVS debacle, but the best headlined has to be the Christian Science Monitor‘s  “A fake Hitler outdid conservatives.” That’s only the middle of the headline, actually, but that phrase is what jumped out at me from Google.
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Now playing: The Young Republic – She’s Not Waiting Here This Time

There has been a crush of interesting recent articles on the contemporary tea party movement, which I thought I’d highlight.

Today’s New York Times has a very long feature that tries to tie together the tangled strands of the movement.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

…

The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure. Not everyone flocking to the Tea Party movement is worried about dictatorship. Some have a basic aversion to big government, or Mr. Obama, or progressives in general. What’s more, some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party.

But most are not. They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).

…

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

…

Local Tea Party groups are often loosely affiliated with one of several competing national Tea Party organizations. In the background, offering advice and organizational muscle, are an array of conservative lobbying groups, most notably FreedomWorks. Further complicating matters, Tea Party events have become a magnet for other groups and causes — including gun rights activists, anti-tax crusaders, libertarians, militia organizers, the “birthers” who doubt President Obama’s citizenship, Lyndon LaRouche supporters and proponents of the sovereign states movement.

It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.

Other articles of interest:

In the New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky observed the protests of September 12, 2009.

Earlier this month, Ben McGrath took stock of the tea party movement in a nice piece for the New Yorker.

On the Washington Post website, David Waters was skeptical that the Christian Right would join forces with the tea party movement (H/T John Fea).

In HNN, Jim Sleeper offers a cursory comparison of the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and today’s tea party movement, and (rather too optimistically) tries to link today’s tea party movement to anti-corporate sentiment.  While there were anti-corporate elements in the original Boston Tea Party, as  Thom Hartmann points out here, I think Sleeper goes too far in hoping that Sarah Palin’s Nashville audience will take up Hartmann’s cry.

Finally, at Jeff Pasley’s request, I’m linking to the videos of two lunchtime talks I gave at the Old South Meeting House in December 2009.  John Fea kindly mentioned the videos on his own blog (which all of you should be following), but in any case here is the first talk and here is the second.  The talks are called “Teapot in a Tempest: The Boston Tea Party of 1773,” in part because that’s what I thought the title of my upcoming book would be.  The title has now changed, but I am happy to say that the manuscript is currently off to the press and due out in fall 2010.

I can’t say this connection had occurred to me consciously, but it made only too much sense to see that in one suburb, at least,  two outsized, fearful items of modern conspicuous consumption have converged: Hummers and assault weapons. It does indeed seem to take a similar mentality to think that suburban personal safety requires driving to the supermarket in an armored personnel carrier and that personally acquiring enough munitions to capture Iwo Jima is a good idea. And to regard living that way as somehow cool and manly. But let the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tell it:

Chesterfield Hummer dealership fights declining sales with guns

Like many of his competitors, Hummer dealer Jim Lynch is fighting for survival.

Unlike the rest of them, Lynch reached for a gun. Lots of them, actually.

Faced with declining sales and an uncertain future, his Chesterfield dealership has expanded in a direction that’s drawing national attention. It’s what happens when you replace some of those pricey Hummers with dozens of Glocks, Sig Sauers, Colts, Berettas and Brownings.

For Lynch, those guns are the solution to a problem that’s been hounding him for months.

“We’ve got a beautiful building with a big mortgage,” Lynch said. “The Hummers weren’t going to cover it.”

In the good old days — way back in 2005 — Lynch’s dealership could sell 70 Hummers during a strong month. But high gas prices, a sour economy and the auto industry’s ongoing struggles have wreaked havoc. These days, he’s happy to watch 10 of the gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles leave the lot. But the money he pockets selling guns makes up for the profit on about 15 Hummers.

But why guns? Why not flowers? Or lawn mowers? Or jewelry?

That’s easy. The people who like Hummers also tend to like guns.

The story goes on rather matter-of-factly from there, with the dealer, his customers, and even a Marketing professor from Philadelphia treating guns-n-Hummers as the most natural thing in the world, which I suppose it is, at least in this part of it.

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Now playing: Jon Auer – Six Feet Under
via FoxyTunes

I hardly get to read the now-venerable H-Net email lists any more, but this morning I did catch a good post from H-LAW and H-SHEAR patiently explaining to the lawyers and right-wingers who swarm those lists on certain topics that the Constitution should not be read the way fundamentalist Christians read the Bible, as an “inerrant” text every word of which is divinely inspired. The author of the following is constitutional historian R.B. Bernstein, and he was responding to a post asking somewhat bitterly whether the last five words in Article I, Section 6, Clause 2 of the Constitution  “are anything but a complete nullity,” as though it was news that there was some not eternally-applicable language in there:

I also think that the question, as it stands with its note of suppressed dismay and outrage at language that might be a nullity, targets a constitutional straw-man, a general assumption about the Constitution’s text that we ought to discard once and for all — that the text is not only authoritative but somehow transcendantly so, clear and dispositive far beyond the powers of mortal men.

The framers of the Constitution were human beings, working under very difficult conditions that sometimes meant that they did not write — or “frame” — with the focused, unwavering attention to clarity and guidance for posterity that posterity has too often attributed to them.  One example, memorably elucidated by Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, now distinguished university professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, is the arrangement for who would preside in the case of a Senate impeachment trial of the Vice President.  The constitutional text, read with care, indicates only one possible answer: the Vice President.  The explanation is that the framers added the Vice Presidency to the Constitution at a very late stage of the game, and they may have meant to modify the language governing presiding officers in Senate impeachment trials to have the Chief Justice preside over the impeachment trial of a President or a Vice President, but they didn’t do a thorough enough mark-up.

Further, the reverence for the text of the Constitution that suffuses today’s constitutional and legal culture may not have been present at its creation, and for very good reason.  The framers and their contemporaries lived in an era of rapid constitutional change, in which they all lived through three or even four forms of American constitutional governance (British empire to 1775 or 1776, Continental Congress from 1775-1776 to 1781, Articles of Confederation from 1781 to 1789, and Constitution from 1789 on); they also each lived through at least two and sometimes three different versions of state constitutional arrangements — charter or other colonial organization to 1775-1776, provision or first constitution in 1776, with at least one and sometimes two later constitutions, depending on the state. (The only exception is Rhode Island, which marked up its colonial charter to remove references to the British Crown and then did not do anything to revise or replace that reworked charter until the Dorr Rebellion in the late 1830s and early 1840s.) When Jefferson referred to the Articles of Confederation in late 1787 as a venerable fabric, he was not writing with the sarcasm that some later scholars have attributed to him. Given that rapid succession of constitutional frameworks on both state and national levels, it’s unlikely at best that the framers of the Constitution or their contemporaries thought that the Constitution proposed in 1787, ratified in 1788, and put into effect in 1789 would last more than a generation.

It may be true, as James Madison argued in an essay for the NATIONAL GAZETTE on 19 January 1792, that “every word [of the Constitution] decides a question between power and liberty,” but that is a description of the Constitution’s purposes and functions, not of its consistent literary excellence, and we would do well to recognize this fact.

Not my thoughts exactly — much more judicious — but perhaps this is the sort of cool reason that ahistorical abusers of the Constitution and the Founders might be able to heed? Probably not, but they should.

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Now playing: Los Campesinos! – Don’t Tell Me To Do The Math(s)
via FoxyTunes

. . . lived in Missouri, apparently. From local newspaper columinist T.J. Greaney, one more reason the Founders really should wonder about the quality of the p.r. representation they have been receiving. Apparently one of their recently-deceased modern legatees liked to spread his message on bathroom stalls:

In the 1960s if you entered a restroom or a phone booth, there’s a chance you might have noticed a three-inch-square sticker at eye level. A closer look might show the image of a rifle crosshairs superimposed over a menacing text:

“See that old man at the corner where you buy your papers?” the sticker read. “He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milkman? Arsenic works slow but sure. … Traitors, beware! Even now the crosshairs are on the back of your necks.”

The author of this screed is Robert Bolivar DePugh, and his goal was terror. For more than a decade, DePugh led a shadowy militia group known as the Minutemen. Their stated purpose was to use guerilla warfare to repel the Communist invasion they always believed was at hand. Later, they vowed to root out Communist spies they swore were entrenched in the U.S. government. War, in their minds, was always imminent, and a group of armed patriots was the last best hope for the Republic.

“He saw himself as the Paul Revere of the 20th century, that he was going to save the United States from Communism,” said Eric Beckemeier, who grew up in DePugh’s adopted hometown of Norborne and wrote a book in 2007 chronicling his movement. “It was delusions of grandeur, almost.”

Almost? Anyway, the whole piece is well worth reading. Not exactly a heart-warming local human interest story, but also not exactly not.

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Now playing: Graham Parker & The Rumour – Stupefaction
via FoxyTunes

I am driving off to the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR) annual meeting in beautiful downtown Springfield, Illinois, this morning. Worthwhile national history conferences in easy ground transportation range of mid-Missouri are something of a rarity, so I would not miss it. Perhaps I will “live blog” some of the proceedings. Also, perhaps I won’t.

Just one brief item before I go: Dan Mandell of Truman State called my attention to a Wall Street Journal article discussing the latest target for Texas shootin’ irons in the educational culture wars: our own field of U.S. history. This kind of history standards debate is not new, of course — we can say a little prayer of thanks that Lynne Cheney never got her own CIA hit squad, or whatever Dick’s most recently revealed scheme turns out to have been. Yet back in the day, it was usually conservatives complaining about what was left out of the National History Standards; in present-day Texas, they are looking to put a tendentiously right-wing Christian view of American history into the public schools. The agenda seems to go considerably beyond LCheney-like complaints about the insufficient love given to George Washington. I will supply some key passages for myself or others to take up in the comments or later. The whole thing is worth reading, if you are feeling calm:

The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms.

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith, and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

“We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp. . . .

The three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities, including Mr. de la Teja, a former state historian. The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America’s Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgments on the nation’s sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

Colonial historians, would you like to take a guess about what figure some of the Texas reviewers wanted removed from the curriculum, apparently as part of this biblical program? From the specific suggestions listed at the end of the story:

• Delete Anne Hutchinson from a list of colonial leaders

Students learn about colonial history in the fifth grade, and three reviewers suggested that the standards not include Anne Hutchinson, a 17th century figure, among a list of significant leaders. Ms. Hutchinson was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for teaching religious views at odds with the officially sanctioned faith.

So rebellious female Christians just don’t count when it comes to America’s biblical principles, and/or Puritan orthodoxy is alive and well deep in the heart of Texas. I don’t think that’s what Bob Wills intended, do you?

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Now playing: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys – Cotton Eyed Joe
via FoxyTunes

. . . when I probably should have been doing something else.

• The Tea Party protesters do not even like the Republicans any more, if they ever did. They are also the number one source of “comment spam” on this blog, or at least of the stuff that gets through the filters. That is just how revolutionary they are. Teabaggers go where online slot machine and Canadian payday loan purveyors fear to tread. [Actually, I think the spammers must think the teabaggers are a little bit confused and thus a good target market for people who sell things by getting other people to click on links accidentally.]
• Sarah Palin is in it for the money. Some conservative pundits do not approve, but Rush is all for it. Making money is the highest social good in their philosophy, right? So I guess they have to take the greedy with the bad.
• People who comment on the American political scene for national publications should be forced to read a pile of several hundred student papers. Then they would not find Palin’s habit of speaking/writing “in half-expressed thoughts and internal contradictions” so singular. It’s more or less the norm as far as I can tell, here in the mid-ranges of higher education that Sarah could not quite hack. It’s also pretty common to just disappear from classes or change schools in mid-semester, with or without explanation. Of course, it takes a truly special person to take that approach to being governor of a state. That said, making fun of a populist leader’s syntax, as the MSM and liberal blogs like to do with Palin, just plays into their hands. Ask the Federalists how well the supercilious grammar criticism tactic worked against various upstart northern Democratic-Republicans.
• Racist humor (and, one might add, racism) is fairly common, and often tolerated, in some conservative circles. Actually, I already knew that from personal experience, but it is quite revealing that some young white conservatives thought nothing of slapping that kind of thing up on Facebook.
• You can learn colonial history on Hulu. I learned that  Captain John Smith worked out a lot and liked to hang around in Jamestown with his shirt off. It was surprisingly hot, dry, and dusty there in the Virginia Tidewater hills. Also, John Rolfe was his sidekick. And Pocahontas looked good in her miniskirt. Ahead of the curve fashion-wise, as well. To be honest, there’s something to be said for the 50s he-man version of John Smith over Colin Farrell’s big-eyed nature lover in Terence Malick’s The New World. Smith is a rather sensitive fellow for a globe-trotting mercenary in both versions, which probably says something about how Americans like to remember their conquering forebears: a little sentimental, with just a hint of tears as they regretfully wipe off the blood.

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Now playing: Beulah – Queen of the Populists
via FoxyTunes

Just in time for a planned follow-up post to the one last week on fantasy-based politics, we have the spasm of fictionally-inspired idiocy over the Gitmo closure. Check that, according to the keyboard waggers at the New York Times, idiocy is now called a “singular political opportunity” for the Republicans.

Gitmo prisoner as envisioned by John McCain and friends

“Where are we going to send them?” Mr. McCain said in an interview on Fox News, just days after the inauguration. “That decision I would have made before I’d announced the closure.” Referring to the not-in-my-back-yard uproar over the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, he added: “You think Yucca Mountain is a Nimby problem? Wait until you see this one.”

. . . The conflagration has been fanned by the determined focus of Republican leaders, fed by the alarms of talk-show populists and aided by the miscalculation of a new president who set a date for a closing without announcing a detailed plan for the inmates. The debate now threatens to make it much harder for Mr. Obama to keep his campaign promise.

Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles.

Talk radio and cable news hosts warned viewers that dangerous terrorists might end up in a neighborhood jail, with Sean Hannity of Fox News even broadcasting an online video from House Republican leaders that juxtaposed the security of the detainee camps with images of the twin towers in flames. And from California and Virginia to the small town of Hardin, Mont., Democratic lawmakers began fending off questions about whether they would admit terrorism suspects into their own communities.

Since presumably not even “talk-show populists” are claiming that Obama is going to place the “detainees” as 3rd-grade teachers in those local communities, the ever-so-deep fears in question would seem to turn almost wholly on the action movie and comic books trope of the superhuman killer that no prison can hold: through some combination of manipulation, luck, and mad skills, the mad dog will get loose and continue his criminal career, wiping out all his path. (Perhaps some sort of radiation-based powers will be involved, as McCain seems to suggest. Radioactive Man from the Iron Man comics [see image] was a Chinese Communist, which is pretty much the same thing, or plays the same function, in the GOP POV.)

More likely the scenario the Republicans want to suggest is some kind of Islamist version of Con Air. Unless you assume inevitable escape, it is hard to see a mechanism by which the Gitmo prisoners would threaten any American communities where they happen to be imprisoned. By this logic small-town Americans should be horrified at the idea of building any prisons in their communities, because that would amount to bringing rapists, murderers, and child molesters to live right there in River City or “the small town of Hardin, Mont.” On the contrary, small towns all over the country have competed to get prisons built to replace lost factory jobs.

In the real-life United States, escapes by well-known criminals or mass murderers from maximum-security prisons are incredibly rare, and long-term getaways almost unknown since Dillinger. Yet in fictional melodramas spectacular escapes have become almost the norm. Melodramas are usually only as good as their villains, and good villains are very difficult to create, so they tend to get reused. The trend probably started with comic-book supervillains who constantly came back for more. Where was Batman without the Joker every six months or so? Where was Spider-Man without the Green Goblin? (Actually, recurring villains probably goes back even further than that, to adventure comic strips in newspapers and the pulp novels that inspired them.)

The jailbreak habit was picked up in the 80s by a sequel-addicted Hollywood, and since then villains (and jeopardized heroes temporarily challenged by jail time) have been escaping as a regular, expected thing, even in non-sequels and non-serials. We in the audience know that any emphasis placed on the rigorousness of the prison’s security procedures is only setting us up to be more impressed with the character who inevitably breaks out. We’re just waiting to see how they do it. One of the most indelible and influential escape scenes ever filmed came in the period I am thinking of, involving one of filmdom’s most popular supervillains. That would be Dr. Hannibal Lecter in 1991′s Silence of the Lambs. [The film clip in this post keeps disappearing. Look it up on YouTube.]

Now that I think about it, the trope of the escaping villain goes right along with the modern conservative drive to diminish everything government does, even if it is something they agree with, like punishing criminals. According to decades of conservative propaganda, reinforced by popular culture, the constitutional protections of the American legal system only serve to let clever criminals thwart justice. The elaborate prison cells that the Hannibal Lecters of fiction escape so easily serve as a semi-conscious metaphor for a democratic government’s supposed powerlessness against evil.

Next time I come back to this political fantasy theme, I promise to have an early American history angle. Certainly the problem goes all the way back, even if Jefferson and Jackson did not get their political fantasies from the movies.

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Now playing: The Exploding Hearts – Boulevard Trash

This one has been developing for a while . . .

Last week, I mentioned the abiding American belief in the superior efficiency of the private sector, contradicting all evidence. Since then, Dick Cheney and family’s torture offensive has raised a question I think historians do not deal with enough: the power of fantasy in American political life. I do not just mean Cheney’s fantasies about himself or the constitutional powers of his former office, or even the inconsistent tales the Cheneys have woven about Dick’s past actions. I mean the tendency to base whole policies and ideologies on made-up stories that we try to will into reality.

We knew that Cheney and the people around him were anything from nasty opponents to downright evil, depending upon one’s viewpoint, but the latest reports are lower than anything we have yet seen. Apparently Cheney’s office pushed to have not only terror suspects, but a legitimate Iraqi P.O.W., repeatedly tortured, harder than military interrogators thought was useful or humane. This torture was ordered from the highest office or second-highest office in the land, not to prevent a bombing or save troops, but instead to document a pet political talking point about the link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam, the link that Cheney kept mentioning despite the nonexistence of evidence to support it.

Cheney and company were trying to conjure two fantasies at once: the fantasy of a pan-Arab or pan-Muslim conspiracy against American civilization, somehow masterminded by failing military strongman Saddam Hussein, and the more sweeping and brutal fantasy that hidden truths can only emerge through force and pain. “Torture works” is really only one element of the second fantasy, which is part of the larger attraction in the conservative mind toward absolutist formulations and coercive solutions as the only “realistic” and lasting ones. It fits the dark, pessimistic, vestigially Calvinist view of human nature at the root of American conservatism.

Throwing Calvin in there may risk overintellectualizing, because the currently prevalent “torture works” fantasy (especially the willingness of nonconservative ideologues in the media and the public to entertain it) clearly derives from popular culture. Up through the 1960s, scenes of torture and “enhanced” interrogation were the province of only the most hard-boiled crime, spy, and war films. They were relatively rare, and almost always the audience was expected to identify with the person being interrogated. Tying people down and hurting them was for Nazis, psychotic criminals, and corrupt cops. Indeed, the use of torture was a key signifier of despicable villainy, showing the depravity and sick desperation of the people or civilization that used it. If my memory serves, in classic Hollywood films torture was generally associated with Asian enemies, from Fu Manchu to the Japanese to the Turks in Lawrence of Arabia.

That started to change with the reactionary crime films of the Nixon era, in which audiences were somewhat transgressively encouraged to identify with rough, rule-breaking cop characters like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, shooting and pistol-whipping his way to a truth only he had the “guts” to seek. This linkage between the lone hero’s true insight into the world’s evils and his willingness to shake off restraints and be brutal in exposing and destroying them helped form the key elements of the fantasy that guys like Cheney seem to be trying to live out.

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