The Weekly Screed (#540)

The Tea Party dialectic of Alan Ladd and Jack Palance
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — There is a vision, I think, in the current political
turmoil. I’m beginning to see it, like the great hazy vista that comes
onto the movie screen right after the Paramount peak fades out. This
vision of America, conjured by the Tea Party and foreshadowed —
currently — by the debt-ceiling crisis, grips a nation that wants,
needs, aches to return, in some ill-defined way, to a past utopia of
frontier individualism.

But how do we get there? And what will it look like when we make it back?

It’s been more than a century since any such reality applied anywhere
in America. But as I struggled to imagine our nation’s return to a
purer time — without taxes or welfare state, with no tree-huggers and
no voting allowed for women or coloreds, when no government “czar”
could dictate your kid’s school, your choice of lightbulbs or the
level of salmonella contamination in your soft-boiled eggs — I
realized I had already seen it! At the Erwin Theater in Tomah,
Wisconsin, when I was in, like, third grade.

It was called “Shane.” It’s all there — everything Americans yearn to
go back to.

In the background, you’ve got countryside, miles and miles of it, all
empty and pristine, except for one tiny butt-ugly town that doesn’t
even have a name.

Into this paradise, “a mysterious stranger rode from out of nowhere to
play a decisive role in the lives of these pioneers.” Is this mystery
man, a cool customer called Shane (played stoically by Alan Ladd), a
cinematic harbinger of Barack Obama?

Well, let’s not make that metaphorical leap yet. First, we have to
examine these pioneers — of which there are two distinct types.

There are the “free” ones, devil-may-care cowpokes typified by Chris
Calloway (Ben Johnson). These entrepreneurs, who disdain any sort of
fixed wage or sissified social safety net, work from day-to-day. They
depend on physical vitality and naked instinct as they herd millions
of lowing dogies across a range as open, fenceless and free as God’s
backyard. If one of them, alone on the range, gets throwed and busts a
leg, well, he don’t look for no government health care to nurse him
back into the saddle. He knows the price of failure in a capitalist
system. Moreover, knowing his Second Amendment rights, he knows he can
shoot himself rather than die slowly of starvation or gangrene.

The other type of pioneers, the “sodbusters” and “tater-pickers” are
the tribunes of socialism. They’re only present in paradise because of
a federal handout called “the Homestead Act,” which subsidizes their
carving the open range into farms which, it turns out, can’t sustain
themselves individually. In order to maintain their business model, in
the face of vandalism, arson and murder committed by the free-market
pioneers — all of which, in this reality, are legal — the socialist
pioneers form… guess what!

That’s right. A union!

The union rabblerouser is your typical business failure, Joe Starrett
(played by Van Heflin), a manure-stained peasant. Realizing that his
farm can’t stand up to the free-market forces of Rufus Ryker (Emile
Meyer), he gets all the sodbusters and immigrants together, to foment
an economic blockade against free enterprise on the range.

Like today’s Tea Party idealists, the epicurean cowboys in “Shane” are
not as cohesive as Joe Starrett’s tater-picker conspiracy. Like the
Tea Party, Ryker’s cowhands are free thinkers whose ideas and opinions
run the conservative gamut from A to B. Luckily for them, however,
corporate power preceded them to the open range. Indeed, the only real
power in “Shane” belongs to two giants of pioneer enterprise. One is,
of course, Ryker, the cattleman who owns every steer in the valley.
The other is Sam Grafton, whose bar, hotel, general store, livery
stable and blacksmith shop represent a monopoly on every necessity for
human survival as far as the eye can see.

The corporate interests in “Shane” support, of course, the open range
and they fund the cowhand/entrepreneurs’ political actions — which
largely consist of bullying farmers. Grafton, a laissez faire
economist, accepts the sodbusters’ money and once in a while advises
Ryker not to kill women and children. But Grafton’s philosophy, like
Ryker’s, deplores the communitarian sedition preached by Joe Starrett,
his pacifist wife Marian (Jean Arthur), and his red-diaper son, Joey
(Brandon deWilde).

One of the film’s most symbolically deep moments is one often ignored
by movie buffs. In this scene, a delegation of free-market pioneers
approach Bolshevik Joe, hoping to talk some sense into him. As they
ride up, their steel-shod horses trample the vegetable patch that
Marian has spent weeks gently coaxing from the rocky soil. This
glimpse of Ayn Randian “creative destruction” offers a powerful lesson
about free markets — that they are sturdy, swift and inexorable.
History cannot deter a determined capitalism. The collectivist efforts
devised to oppose it — although watered, nursed and fertilized by
fanatic believers — will be crushed like bean sprouts and pansies.

Superficially, the movie seems to suggest a sort of eventual victory
by the socialist sodbusters. The free market’s tragic hero, Jack
Wilson (Jack Palance) easily dispatches the feisty little farmer
Stonewall (a sort of smarmy Russ Feingold type played by Elisha Cook,
Jr.). But then, Shane, the mysterious stranger, steps in and murders
both Wilson and Ryker while Grafton stands by, thoughtfully twirling
his mustache.

But is this truly a victory for organized labor and leftist dogma? Look again.

What about Sam Grafton? He’s still in business, fixing prices on
everything from sorghum seed to sasparilla, monopolizing the market,
bleeding every penny earned, spent, saved or borrowed by the plow
jockeys. With Ryker dead, Grafton commands the capital to buy up
Ryker’s every asset and turn the entire valley into his personal
free-market empire. Will he be a benevolent capitalist like David Koch
or Donald Trump? Probably, but not before bankrupting Joe Starrett,
breaking up Joe’s un-American farm collective, marrying Jean Arthur
and shipping Joey off to military school.

And Shane? Is he the hero-template for Obama, or is he just a
Western-movie archetype with no more political conviction than
Randolph Scott or Lee Van Cleef? We could ask him, but… hey, where’d
he go?

Shane? Sha-ane? SHA-A-A-A-ANE!