“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Gene Robinson, the respected Washington Post columnist, got the blues the other day, so, to lift his spirits, he kicked Dick Cheney – ripping into ole Cheney for being a torturer, the father of black-ops prisons and generally making him out to be the worst villain of the Third Millennium.
 
All that led me to a pretty strange place:  The next thing I knew I was remembering the old classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – where an idealistic young lawyer (Jimmy Stewart) and a cowboy (John Wayne) both come face to face with the old-West’s version of a terrorist (Lee Marvin)  and have two different ideas about how to deal with him.
 
Jimmy Stewart sets out to whip Lee Marvin by waving a law book at him – and it lands him in a whale of a mess. But just before Lee Marvin shoots Stewart stone cold dead in the street, John Wayne (without a speck of idealism) ambushes Marvin out of a black alley, shooting him stone cold dead.
 
Now, Jimmy Stewart’s idealism is quintessentially American. But John Wayne’s cold blooded murder of the villain is pretty appealing too.
 
But, try as he might, Mr. Robinson just can’t see that side of the equation at all. To him anyone who acts like John Wayne (by dispensing with the niceties of the rule of law in dealing with a rat) is, purely and simply, lower than pond scum. In a way, he has a point – shooting someone out of a back alley isn’t a pleasant deed and, on top of that, it involves a passage into a moral twilight zone.
 
But is Robinson right? He and Jimmy Stewart seem determined to deal with our current villains (terrorists) and, at the same time, uphold the niceties of the rule of law and order – while Dick Cheney (and John Wayne) seem to think that’s fine in theory but in the real world it’s no way to deal with a mean varmint with a gun aimed at you.
 
I’m not sure there is a satisfactory answer. But consider this: Watch a rerun of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – then try to explain how it would have had a happy ending if John Wayne hadn’t shot the villain.
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Carter Wrenn

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“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Gene Robinson, the respected Washington Post columnist, got the blues the other day, so, to lift his spirits, he kicked Dick Cheney – ripping into ole Cheney for being a torturer, the father of black-ops prisons and generally making him out to be the worst villain of the Third Millennium.
 
All that led me to a pretty strange place:  The next thing I knew I was remembering the old classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – where an idealistic young lawyer (Jimmy Stewart) and a cowboy (John Wayne) both come face to face with the old-West’s version of a terrorist (Lee Marvin)  and have two different ideas about how to deal with him.
 
Jimmy Stewart sets out to whip Lee Marvin by waving a law book at him – and it lands him in a whale of a mess. But just before Lee Marvin shoots Stewart stone cold dead in the street, John Wayne (without a speck of idealism) ambushes Marvin out of a black alley, shooting him stone cold dead.
 
Now, Jimmy Stewart’s idealism is quintessentially American. But John Wayne’s cold blooded murder of the villain is pretty appealing too.
 
But, try as he might, Mr. Robinson just can’t see that side of the equation at all. To him anyone who acts like John Wayne (by dispensing with the niceties of the rule of law in dealing with a rat) is, purely and simply, lower than pond scum. In a way, he has a point – shooting someone out of a back alley isn’t a pleasant deed and, on top of that, it involves a passage into a moral twilight zone.
 
But is Robinson right? He and Jimmy Stewart seem determined to deal with our current villains (terrorists) and, at the same time, uphold the niceties of the rule of law and order – while Dick Cheney (and John Wayne) seem to think that’s fine in theory but in the real world it’s no way to deal with a mean varmint with a gun aimed at you.
 
I’m not sure there is a satisfactory answer. But consider this: Watch a rerun of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – then try to explain how it would have had a happy ending if John Wayne hadn’t shot the villain.
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Carter Wrenn

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