Narrative Warfare: On The Suppression Of The American Character

The Excellence of Elocution cut a video about the great American literary genre: The Western.

I will make a few observations that Razorfist did not.

You can trace American Romantic adventure literature from the Frontier and Western tales, through which we got the mass media adaptations seen in film, television, radio, and comics. Likewise the American Western is the root for related genres such as the American action film, especially when that action film has the old-school Western morality tale at its core.

I observe that, as business is really a racket, the Western was murdered just as surely as the Pulps were and for the same reason: to fill the void left by Death Cultists seeking to use that medium to spread the poz that is their dogma, and even the Spaghetti Westerns served in some capacity towards that end even if they are some of the best Westerns made.

The murder of the Western in mass media came just a few years after the Rural Purge of the 1970s in American television, where rural-focused programs got the boot off the air on orders from the head offices of the three networks--remember, this is before cable television, nevermind streaming--and while the official stories blame ratings and usual BoomerCon excuses the reality is that a combination of demographic replacement (already felt by then) and deliberate manipulation fixed the results to favor the narrative shift from the Rural to the Urban.

The death of the Western in theaters was the final blow, and it's been struggling to recover ever since; what Razorfist wonders with regard to why every revival seems to get cut short is easily answered with "Because the Western is America at its best and purest, it is the American character, and our enemies do not want this."

Through the Western, America tells its mythology. Mythology is how a nation explains itself to itself from generation to generation, revealing what is in its character by what it values and what it disdains as it tells its own stories of itself to itself. This is why the Western manifests even in its most successful Space Opera (Star Wars), its most iconics action heroes (Dirty Harry, John Rambo), and even foreigners concur that Americans are most true to themselves when they look and feel like Western heroes.

I suggest to you that the Western, like the Pulps, are deliberately suppressed and adulterated specifically to attack the American nation and degrade our character. They fear the American that knows who and what he is, because that American knows that his mythology not only answers his questions about himself and his place in the world- but also answers his questions on how to deal with threats to himself, his kin, and his home.

And that, I suggest, is what terrifies those so stridently trying to keep the Western dead and buried.