Lone Ranger and Sherman Alexie

These two readings were kind of the two poles to the graph. One side was all about a Native American perspective and how Indians were portrayed in Hollywood and popular culture. One was about the typical cowboy hero and his adventures fighting outlaws and Indians. The two could not be farther from being apart, but for some reason, I had trouble taking the two readings as separate, since they both fit on a time line. They melded together in a weird way, almost as if there were undertones from each of the opposite. I think that back in the time of The Lone Ranger (probably circa 1950's or '60's), there was the typical Hollywood view of the "Wild West" and that by the time that Sherman Alexie played Tonto, a growing realization of what really happened back in the day was starting to occur. For example, in the reading about Sherman Alexie's time as Tonto in a movie ("I Hated Tonto (Still Do)" -- An Essay by Sherman Alexie), Alexie started to talk about how the Native Americans were having some problems and that they had "learned to be happy with less." He also said that "We made up excuses", which shows that at some point, people at least started to realize what they had done. In contrast, during the first episode of The Lone Ranger which aired decades sooner, there was still this commonplace ignorance and denial.

OF ALL THINGS, WHY THIS?

When I have to go and read some Cowboy and Indian nonsense, I cannot help but feel vast disappointment about how we somehow managed to study this stuff instead of The Matrix. Thinking about the things that we would be studying, the interesting philosophy and religious parallels in the series, had we gone with the Matrix always seem to distract me whenever I try to focus on this stuff. I am trying really hard right now to not say overly-negative things, but just to put it into context for everyone, I should probably say this much: I HATE COWBOYS AND INDIANS. The entire "Wild West" thing, with the leather, the guns, the lack of honor, the loss of the gentleman, the end to a culture, and the white man's total lack of shame for what they have done to Native American culture, is repulsive and uninteresting. I would have rather studied anything other than this stuff, and that is the truth.

The sad part about all of this is that the 3 movies that make up The Matrix Trilogy are probably my 3 favorite movies of all time, and because of ONE person who decided that they just could not handle a semester of Keanu Reeves, I missed the opportunity to spend a semester analyzing them. I'm not exaggerating, either. It may seem like I'm just blowing this all out of proportion, but I really hate Cowboys and Indians that much. I have just been peacefully avoiding the whole subject for years, even during Thanksgiving, because until now, I have had no reason to read this kind of...stuff (for lack of a more mature term). It's just such a huge contrast in interest that I couldn't help but to say something. I'm thinking about making the background of my blog the scrolling characters from the computer screen in The Matrix in rebellion. I may not be able to change what has already begun, but I can definitely complain about it!

To wrap up: I know that there are important lessons to be learned through this literature and I normally do not have a problem pulling out important concepts from things like this, but it is almost too much for me to just sit here and read it. I do it for the grade because I owe myself that much, at least. However, do not expect me to enjoy the readings. I will do my best to stay appropriated, though. Lastly, if this entry seemed accusatory or angry, just know that I wrote this at 3AM and that I am tired and not thinking too clearly. I just wanted to start writing something to get me going on the blog entries for our HW, but I ended up writing this. I didn't want to erase it because I frequently write how I feel on Facebook or something to vent, but then erase it before I post it because I don't actually want to tell anybody how I feel for fear of the ever-present and long-lingering drama that seems to encircle many of the people that I choose to associate with on a daily basis (I mean my friends at home in Monroe, not you guys =P).
...Wow...looking back up, I wrote a lot, and I'm getting to the point where I am swaying between emotions. At first I was angry, then I calmed down, then I got sappy, and finally, I'm happy. I should really try not to be so crazy, but I really can't help it. I'm so tired that my face is numb, so my mental stability was bound to go sooner or later.

Dime Novel Discussions and Jesse James Essay Topic

Something that I noticed while talking to everybody in the class about the stories that they read was that everybody was disappointed with the characters and the way that they were presented vs. the way that they actually were.  In Jesse James, Jesse was presented as this super-human outlaw who could do anything and never die, but in the end of the story, he was a coward and ran away from Lawson to avoid being killed. People in other groups were telling me similar stories about how the main character just suddenly got killed or how they were not what they were expecting, so I know it wasn't just in Jesse James where things like this happened. Clearly these novels were not meant to be anything more than a quick read, since any analysis shows that there are some serious flaws.

If I were to write an essay on Jesse James, The Outlaw, I would have to write about how the Good VS. Evil struggle between Jesse and Bill Lawson made both of them seem almost super human. The scene on the train where Jesse James darted between dozens of bullets at once is not something an ordinary man could do. Lawson was the good guy of the story, and the only way to keep the story going was to let Bill escape all of the death and destruction that would have befell him if he weren't having a story written about him. His luck was almost inhuman. No man would have survived the things that these two characters have, especially considering the time frame in which this was written.

Jesse James 3

By the end of the story, I was having no problems with reading it anymore. Jesse James was written in a much different time and it took me so long to finally get used to it because I go out of my way to avoid literature like this. The Wild West is all gun-slinging and horse-riding, so it's hard to motivate myself to read a story and find out what it is about when I already know about 95% of what is going to happen. I admit, the train may have knocked that percentage down to 85% this time, which made it a slightly more interesting read than last time.

In the last part of this story, I have several things that I could rant about, but I see an important theme that needs to be addressed. At the end of the story (SPOILER ALERT), Jesse James turned out to be more cowardly than previously thought. He wore a bullet proof vest under his clothes to protect his chest and he was hiding his face behind the body of a little kid. That really ruined the image of the invincible Jesse James in my mind. The author spent all of this time building him up, making him dodge bullets more effectively than Neo (from THE MATRIX) and do a triple backflip off of his horse and stick the landing perfectly (jk. That didn't happen, but they worded him dismounting his horse "Dancer" a lot like that frequently, especially during confrontations.) just to have him run away like a mortal wimp. Some of his invincibility was preserved, though, as he did get away in the end without getting killed. (In my opinion, that was a major cop-out by the author. I felt cheated. I sided with Bill Lawson the whole time and then Bill doesnt' even get to kill Jesse? Lame. Very lame.)

One last thought: How good was the technology for bullet proof vest in this time period? It is strange for me to even think that they had "Iron-clad" shirts at all...

Jesse James 2

Alright, I admit it. This has gotten interesting. If you haven't read Jesse James before, as I originally hadn't, then you probably don't want to read this post, as it would contain some spoilers for you. William Lawson, or the doctor from Boonville, got exposed for who he really is and Sheppard shot Jesse James in the neck, but the bullet only grazed the skin on the back of his neck. Instead of just yelling "Ouch!" or something, Jesse James actually faked his own death, and when the time was right, he ran away. Dodging bullets left and right, he made it all the way through a train-full of people and mounted his...what did they call that thing? A "Sorrel"? What the heck is that? Let's see...

Merriam-Webster Dictionary states that a "Sorrel" is:
"a sorrel-colored animal; especially : a light bright chestnut horse often with white mane and tail."
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sorrel)

Well, I guess they were calling the horse by the description of the horse...Not too confusing now that I've looked it up. I did have to look that up before it made any kind of sense, though, which is how quite a few of the descriptive words used in this text have been for me. Anyway, the story has started to pick up nicely, and I can't wait to read the rest of it this weekend! I think I've made it through the minor language barrier problem I was having, too. We'll see how it goes.

Jesse James 1

I know this isn't a creative writing class, but I had some major problems with this work. I found the reading, as interesting as the story is becoming, to be painfully dull. The way that the story was written took all of the excitement out of it. I almost couldn't finish reading the four chapters that my group decided to read before class this Wednesday because the language stole the life from the story and, by proxy, the reader (me). The literal and factual manner of speech and narration may have been commonplace in the time that this story was written, but it is slow and tame, which creates a poor contrast between the action-packed nature of the story and the words that make it up.  Short of the occasional "Bang! Ping! Thud!"s that appear to describe sounds, the first few chapters were really controlled and funneled with precise dictation. The story did start to pick up a bit during the train robbery, but that, too, was muffled by the puffy words. I am a bit of a hypocrite on this issue, though. I write in the same wordy and fluffed-up fashion to properly convey thoughts. Hopefully, I one day learn to stop writing like this myself, though, as I tend to suffocate my writings in the same manner. It must be infuriating to my professors!

Baum, Charlot, and Deloria

Baum was a jerk, to say the least. From the two excerpts that are presented in the paper we were told to read, he was basically saying that Indians are no good and useless, that they lost all of their spirit, and that they should just be wiped from the faces of the Earth now than to let them continue to waste air. What is worse is that he is actually trying to rally people to do so! While reading this article, I couldn't halp to think "What, is he the Native American version of Hitler, but without the political power?"

Charlot was right, and I agree completely with what she was saying at the time. The white man had no right to ask for money of any kind from the people that they basically imprisoned. We took so much from the Native Americans, and asking for taxes doesn't reverse that process. In fact, we should have been giving them money on the reservations as compensation for their cooperation.

Deloria wrote about something rather interesting to me. That the Boston Tea Party was such an organized event is impressive, but there were two things that caught me off guard. First, that the guards of the ships were 'sympathetic' and let the "Indians" onto the ships after not but a verbal warning is strange. Why would the guards be sympathetic? Did they think that the Import Taxes on the tea were wrong? Second, why on Earth would the band of misfit "Indians" that just came onto the ships "forcefully" and trashed the ship's cargo take the time to stay after the raid and clean up? It presents a sort of gentleman-ly view of the Tea Party, but provides and interesting contrast. Why would they be acting so nice and civilized while dressed up as the Native Americans if they thought that the Native Americans were nothing but savages? Maybe some of the Americans of the time actually sympathized with the Native Americans' plight.

Zitkala Sa, Helen Hunt Jackson, and "Noble Savage"

Seeing how this is the first post on this blog and I'm not entirely sure as to what is expected of me here, I'll just quickly summarize what I have read in an effort to get something on paper to prove that I read the articles.

Zitkala Sa was an Indian woman who was educated by white men in the late 1800's who later acted as an advocate for Woman's Rights and Native American Rights, as well. She lived in the early 1900's as well, and she wrote an autobiography. The autobiography is of her as a child and she frequently speaks of her mother's hatred of the "Paleface" white men that were making life difficult for the Native Americans back then. Around this time, the Federal Government "closed" the frontier, which meant that they were no longer just giving out land out west. The government was also corralling Native Americans into reservations to keep them in check, and then established educational programs to essentially "kill the Indian" in them and to "keep the man". She fell into a coma and passed away in 1938.

The Helen Hunt Jackson excerpt was from her book "A Century of Dishonor." She was born in 1830 and died in 1885, only 4 years after her book "A Century of Dishonor" was published. When "A Century of Dishonor" was published, the federal government passed the Dawes Act to help investigate into the security an well being of those Indians on a reservation. The Dawes Act was also responsible for breaking Tribes apart and sticking Indians together with small family units instead of communities, which is ironic because the Dawes Act was meant to help the Tribes stay strong as a whole. We tried to inject our culture plan into theirs and it didn't work.

The "Noble Savage" is a derogatory term that was adapted in the 1800's to describe the Indian people. It was meant to imply that the Indian people were simple, but that is only because we never took the time to get to know their culture. To me, calling an Indian or a native of a specific Geographic area a "Noble Savage" is like calling a lion a "big kitty". You are just devolving the true nature of the jungle cat to a level that you are willing to accept and ignoring all of the other parts that make up the whole. Frankly, it's downright insulting and I certainly wouldn't want somebody calling me that.

~Kyric NeonSilver (Richard Hassinger)

Before any kind of assignment...

First, please allow me to take this opportunity to explain why I have chosen the name of the blog to be "The 3rd Party". In almost every event in my life where two people have clashed on an issue, I have had to intervene as the third party to explain how both sides were just being biased towards their view and that both parties were at fault. This, in and of itself, is a good enough reason, but I do have something else that I find rather interesting that would effectively illustrate my point. You see, I often fantasize about the afterlife. Not the angelic, puffy marshmallow-of-an-eternity known as Heaven, and not very often about the ash pit below us, either. I love to ponder on the nature of the middle ground between the two extremes, the grey in relation to the blacks and whites of life and death, and Limbo, Purgatory, and other such themes fit this bill nicely. This extends beyond the abstract concepts of life after death, though. This is about the right to be indecisive. People care to much about being one thing or the other, and frequently will assume that if somebody isn't one thing, they are the opposite. This is an unfortunate programming of our minds that many of us didn't even realize was present until the damage was already done. The long forgotten 3rd Party, like me, remains strong in the face of neglect and dissatisfaction, and will always be there as a last resort when both of the previously exclusively understood options fail and people are left with nothing more than a memory of a concept. This middle ground would encompass many things, from the 50/50 mix to the lack of anything at all, which are possibilities that not many people wish to consider; however, to me, that makes it all the more appealing of a possibility. So I say now, "You have now joined The 3rd Party." Enjoy the middle.

~Kyric NeonSilver (Richard Hassinger)
(Picture by The FisFis on DeviantArt.com)
http://the-fisfis.deviantart.com/art/Middle-Ground-110556824