We Arizonans adore the image of our state as one of the last bastions of the “Wild, Wild West.”  We are, after all, the forty-eighth state (the last on the mainland), the home of Geronimo (the last Indian renegade), and Tombstone (perhaps history’s most infamous gunfight).  We also boast Senator Barry Goldwater, the rugged individualist who was probably the last national politician to forgo image consultants.  Senator McCain has carefully cultivated his image as a maverick, it is this tradition that Sarah Palin and Scott Brown seem to aspire to.

Formal Western American Romanticism as an art form started (as many things originally American things did) in Boston; however, its real genesis probably started in Northern Europe whose populace held America up as the land of opportunity.

Academia tells us that Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which is probably true, but it is historical irony that the Industrial Revolution produced the very tools used to conquer the last bastion of the wild and romantic West.

The early practitioners of Western American Romanticism were Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Bierstadt (of the Hudson River School).  Real people, however, seemed to embody and perpetuate the myth–people like Davy Crocket, Mark Twain and Kit Carson.  Perhaps no one embodied it better than Theodore Roosevelt, who led the charge up San Juan Hill, and against the likes of Tammany Hall and Standard Oil, but who also somehow managed to be the nation’s first environmental President.  It is worthwhile to note that Roosevelt was linked to both preservation (Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Parks), and to development (Roosevelt Dam).  Interestingly, Teddy was eventually squeezed out of the Republican Party.  He then formed his “Bull Moose Party,” and went down to unfamiliar defeat to Woodrow Wilson in an election that signaled a real switch in American politics, and perhaps, the true beginning of the Twentieth century.

Jumping forward to the ‘60’s, President Kennedy skillfully usurped Romanticism’s powerful image in front of a televised audience in his “Last Frontier” speech, and, as I pointed out in my last post, Presidential politics have never been the same since.

Hollywood continued the evolution of the art form, combining it with another, perhaps even more powerful story-telling archetype—that of single combat.  In this art form the Western “big man” stands against corruption and the forces of evil, usually to protect a good, but needy small town, unable to fight off the big-bad black hats by themselves.

Make no mistake this is powerful storytelling.  It has resided in our collective conscience since the dawn of pre-history.  It is based on our ancient tribal need to avoid total devastation, which our ancestors accomplished by appointing a single champion.  And so we have Achilles, David, King Arthur, Gary Cooper, Frodo, Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter all coming out of the same literary tradition.

The problem is that Arizona is no longer a small territorial state.  We have big cities, big budgets and complicated problems.  So too, the United States is the undisputed leader of a huge and quickly modernizing world.  Although we yearn for simpler times and rededucted storylines, we must face the reality of life in the twenty-first century.  We must develop the ability to separate our desire to cast things in simple black and white, and do the harder thing, which is to embrace complexity.  Therefore, I am suspicious of any politician on either side of the aisle who appeals to this base instinct[1].  That goes equally for both Tea Party ideology as well as Obama socialism; they are two sides of the same coin.  

All of this reminds me of a powerful line from the song The Last Resort by Don Henley of The Eagles; it goes like this:  “There are no more new frontiers, we have got to make it here.” It’s as simple as that.

[1] For a well-reasoned discussion of this issue see the book “The True Believer,” which I discussed in the post “The Politics of Hate” last September.