note: The Corner of Beastie & Harlot: The Drogstore Cafe has been moved to its rightful place at March 25, 1994
The Corner of Beastie & Harlot: The Road Back from Extinction
What are bandits, really, but soldiers who just keep on fighting, after the cause has been lost? Billy the Kid was a tactical specialist for the Union, who went a little crazy after his strategic advisor, Alexander McSween, was ambushed and treacherously slain by an advance unit of the Ku-Klux Klan. The Jameses and Youngers who were the strategic advisors to the Other Side had been given the most excellent military educations when they had served in the special ops regiment of Captain William Quantril, C.S.A.
So long as the God of Extravagant Usury is allowed to preside over the pantheon in the clouds of Hegel’s Idealist Heaven, decent citizens shall find that their life-savings have been captured to fund the operations of the bandits. Since the interest rates exceed the productivity of naturally cultivated farmlands, Unrestricted Capitalism forces it’s captains to commit acts of imperialistic aggression.
We see now why Schiller wrote paens honoring the Bandit’s Den, and even the great Goethe left offerings at the gate of this shrine. So long as Babylon’s Captains compete for the honor of sitting on Lord Apollyon’s divine Omphalos, there shall be losers who cannot accept defeat. Like the James and Younger gang, they often follow ideologies which were fashioned over the ages in Apollyon’s disinformation factory – but the quality of resistance they exemplify as they endure their painful downgoings arouses our faith to believe that someday, after the Sermon on the Mount has been joined to the Firm Handle (compulsion is not religion), the victims shall join hands, not in battle against flesh and blood, but in demonstrating to the people that, when we care about the people, honor the sacred mountain, and hold fast to the Firm Handle, it really is possible to resist the lethal enchantments of Felon Apollyon.
The trouble in New Mexico continued until the president appointed special agent Lew Wallace to be the territorial governor who squelched the flames. When he wanted to write his recollections, he had to disguise them. The result was a historical novel which he titled Ben Hur. But Mr. Wallace’s best fictional creation lies in the New Mexico soil.
It was, and still is known as, the Myth of the Wild West. It is a true myth because it commemorates a short period of positive peacemaking. In our times it is a myth which needs to be re-examined, because in terms of social justice it does not go far enough. But in its own time, it required a great deal of personal courage for Mr. Lew Wallace to be able to negotiate a sort of a mythical truce which would allow Native Americans, Spanish-speaking Mexicans, the new and now dominant Gringos, more than a few Afro-American cowboys, and too many die-hard Confederate sympathizers to all live together in the same state. As part of the bargain, the Hispanics were allowed a version of Billy the Kid so mythologized that those who had known the real William Bonney did not recognize it was the same Billy until they were shown the photograph. The Die-Hard Confederates were allowed their Jesse James, so long as he remained mythical – but they were emphatically reminded he did not live in Missouri any more.
The Indians agreed to stay out of the White Man’s mythologies, at least until the White Missionaries were willing to admit that certain Native visionaries might actually have talked to Christ. The railroads were admonished, that so long as their captains of finance made secret deals with the Underworld, they could not be surprised to discover that Jesse James had detonated a bomb and derailed the bank’s mail train.
Documents in the anthropology section of the American Museum of Natural History will demonstrate that the primary motive for all of this myth-making was the rather holy terror that, if these wounds of the post-Civil War infantada were ever to be reopened, the Mexicans might forget their old grudge against Maximilian, and accept military aid from the Kaiser.
