Guest Column: Trump should put away childish things

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on March 21, 2018.

President Donald Trump and I have things in common. We are, for example, the same age and both males. We also watched a lot of television when we were boys. We did not view the programs together, physically in the same room, but we might as well have been on the same couch. We surely watched TV westerns, a dominant entertainment in the 1950s, and that fact helps explain the social mess now unfolding south of the border.

Donald and I belong to the first generation of kids to gather life lessons and role models from popular television shows. Significant hours of our formative years were spent soaking up attitudes and values in front of the tube. Unfortunately, this early social training included a worship of guns and a deep confusion about women.

For people of my generation, the mere mention of the name “Gunsmoke” revives images of family nights when audiences across North America watched the stolid Matt Dillon reveal what real men were like. Honest, reliable and above all powerful, the marshal represented law in the old West. Enforcement of the law, we learned, was never further away than a trigger.

Guns were the life blood, ironically, of the television western series. In many cases, they were treated as characters, given central roles and even had shows named after them. The title “Gunsmoke” is an obvious hint of the bullets about to fly. Chuck Connors as “The Rifle Man” took his screen name from a customized rapid fire Winchester rifle. We also had “The Restless Gun” and “Have Gun, Will Travel,” where Paladin, a mercenary, traveled with an arsenal: Rifle, handgun and derringer. In many western storylines, the gun became the embodiment of peace officer, judge, and executioner.

The western hero, from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood, was a man of few words but plenty of ammo. Kids like Donald and I soaked this stuff up and dreamed of growing up to be like them, men who made the world right because, well, these guys knew what they were doing. The heroic male might have to stand alone against the legions of evil but he had the right caliber, or several of them, to prove equal to the challenge.

These men were often alone, either in fact or in their fantasy world. We didn’t have to guess why they called him “The Lone Ranger.” We saw his type in other heroes like Paladin, men who were self-directed, free to roam. Nick Adams, in “The Rebel,” was a loner, a post-war confederate drifter, homeless and eternally sad. In “The Rifle Man,” Chuck Connors played a widower and single parent. So did Lorne Greene in “Bonanza.”

Where were the women in all of this, and why was their absence such a popular story thread at the time? One of the most often repeated lines in these shows was “Things could get dangerous, ma’am. You best be indoors.” Often women were seen scurrying across the dusty street to safety before fearsome men with revolvers arrived. Or they were the pretty, capable, but unmarried schoolmarms. Or the tough barmaid with a heart of gold hanging out with Marshall Dillon. Women were types, not full human beings.

The message seemed to be that women were important to civilized life, but not vital. Men could survive alone or with their son or a harmless sidekick. There weren’t many female roles in these oaters, unless they played against the type like Annie Oakley. She once said “I ain’t afraid to love a man. I ain’t afraid to shoot him either.” The way to survive in a man’s world, evidently, was to sleep with a Colt .45 under the pillow.

So Donald Trump and I grew up learning some simple but powerful lessons from our favourite TV shows. Men were tough and happily married to their guns; women were pretty but dimly seen, like satellites. Sons would forever miss their mothers.

America continued to grow and so did we. But as I aged I followed old advice and put away childish things. Donald did not. His heroes are still those from childhood television: Men who live in the community but are wedded to the violence that threatens its very existence.

Today, guns and women are at the centre of an American civil war of values. The clash is fuelled by an immature man who still prefers the fantasies of television over reality. We need leaders who are willing to reject a fake world where guns make the man and women need to step aside.

Instead, the current president sees himself in a family photo where he is the hero with one hand on a firearm, the other somewhere on his prize, a fantasy woman. A child, his son, waits awkwardly in the background. This is an outmoded and sinister family portrait. All people today should demand a retake, one that instead shows real people who love and respect each other.

Lyle Weis is a writer of books, articles and stories who loves history and good conversations.