Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Surviving Those Deadly Wet-Back Infested Suburban Streets.

I'm quite opposed to any immigration, these days.The reason, which cannot be reiterated too often, is simple. America, as a nation, does not stand to gain by further ceaseless development, or by importing a new class of voter-consumers-peons.

It's never too early, however, to ponder the future socio-political effects of our current illegal immigration imbroglio.

The problems of anti-illegal immigration enforcement will, in the future, be blamed on local governments having fostered an anti-illegal mentality.

Quite frankly, locally-elected county officials are inept, not merely as a rule, but always.
They depend quite heavily upon aid from the State and Federal agencies, particularly the Federal agencies, whose bureaucrats cooperate with local officials, rather like the U.S. military’s Civil Affairs officers cooperate with tribesmen in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The problem is that the Federal bureaucrats, who offer advice and assistance to county-commissioners and sheriffs across the country, are men of like passions and in no way superior to their local counterparts.
Consequently we discover that the system has become a powerful machine which barely functions, because it is run by elected amateurs backed by bureaucrats with preconceived opinions and regulated solutions to every problem.
It’s rather like a five-year old child driving a D65 bulldozer being supervised by a ten-year old sitting behind him.

The particularly blatant case of Juana Villegas, professional mother and potential citizen, is a perfect example of this paradox.

It is futile to decry the excesses committed by the Nashville authorites. Moreover, our purposes is, once again, to contemplate its long-term effects.
Mrs. Villegas' story has made the New York Times.

"It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.

Juana Villegas and 2-week-old son in her lawyer’s office Thursday in Nashville. Mother and son had been separated for two days.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said."


It is futile to decry the excesses committed by the Nashville authorities. Moreover, our purposes are, once again, to contemplate its long-term effects.

Is this all we're going to remember, in decades to come? Is an incident like this what goes down into the history books, As an example of the prejudice and injustice faced by immigrants?
But one really can’t see this going over well with future generations, since the whole purpose of brow-beating Americans into conformity with egalitarian principles will have supposedly been accomplished by then.

Lawyers and immigrant advocates say Mrs. Villegas’s case shows how local police can exceed their authority when they seek to act on immigration laws they are not fully trained to enforce.


Blaming local cops for acting like storm-troopers is like blaming them for shaving their heads.
It is no more the average cop’s decision to shave his head, than it is his wife’s to buy Victoria’s Secret Lingerie.
Their choices were creations of the Corporate Media’s excessive advertising,
Cops are simple men, usually from blue-collar backgrounds, and possessed of the simple's malady, belief in the print word, especially if it comes from American Cop Magazine.

Witness this article written a couple of years back which succeeds in fostering an altogether wrong mentality among the constabulary.

Many police administrators will flinch at the thought of their officers being combative. I argue it’s an essential tool of our
primary mission. While 21st century law enforcement is certainly public-service oriented, the primary function is to protect the citizens we serve. Don’t believe me? Go ask ’em. Go out into your community and ask any citizen what they view as the number one function of their police department. They’ll tell you something like, “stop criminals,” “arrest bad guys,” “keep criminals from hurting me or my family” or the ever popular “keep the streets safe for us.” Far too many police chiefs and sheriffs have forgotten this.

Let’s put this discussion into perspective. Picture in your mind you and your significant other walking carefree down the street when you’re approached by someone with a look on their face of great concern, maybe even fear. They tell you, “Down that alley is a suspicious looking person who I think is up to no good.” As a normal citizen, what would
your response be to this situation? Yes, you’ll likely get on the cell phone and dial 911. And, you’ll probably give the alley a wide berth going nowhere near it. Now, let’s picture the same situation, except this time you’re a uniformed officer walking down the street — now what’s your response? Yup, you call for backup and at some point you’ll be going down that alley and confronting this suspicious person. That’s what we do; what we are paid for, what the citizens in the community we are employed by expect of
us. You better have a combative mindset.


Crime is decreasing on every front, due to social-engineering. Were it not for immigration, serious criminality would be nearly nonexistent even in large cities.
Unfortunately, the police are not decreasing in proportion. They are increasing, unnecessarily, especially on a local level.
Needless to say, small-towns and suburbs do not need a dozen heavily armed young men to take the calls of concerned soccer-moms.
Such forces are maintained because they are currently in fashion and every rural county must have its kevlar-bedecked Praetorians, cost be damned.

Such styles won't last forever; it's only a matter of years and years before the American people's representatives catch on to the pointlessness of this six-decade long prevailing fad.
Unfortunately, like all fads in democratic-politics, this one will leave an ugly legacy behind.

Another traumatized race within the confines of the U.S. seeking compensation for grievences suffered by casualties of their invasion.
And the Villegas family can sue for reparations, rather sooner. Preferably from somewhere south of Sonora.
After all human rights are just another catchphrase for nothing left, at all.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The American Perspective


Claim to Fame: Responsible for torturing and killing thousands of Muslims
Status: War criminal


Claim to Fame: Responsible for torturing and killing thousands of Muslims
Status: War hero

It all depends on your perspective.

Friday, July 18, 2008

The King is Dead; Long Live the King


News that Anheuser-Busch, has been conquered by a foreigner, InBev
, is something to celebrate in these quarters in what has been most interesting times for the entire brewing industry.

American hop-heads with entrepreneur minds remade the American beer tradition during our lifetimes with the aid of otherwise insignificant tax policy changes in 1978. High quality ingredients used for brewing produced a product that not only rivaled Continental and Anglo-Irish brewing, but surpassed it when factoring in American refrigeration and attention to consumer satisfaction like clean tap lines (a near epidemic problem in London), and a populist-elite consumer group who supported the artisans of the tradition.

While the microbrews barely put a dent in Big Beer market share, the envy and bruised egos, have caused quite a stir. Beer went from being advertised with athletes and dogs, to Peter Coors and Augustus Busch III claiming Traditionalist roots for their dubious “beer” that in Germany proper, is not thought of as “beer” but an alcoholic malt beverage on par with Zima—though the country isn’t hostile towards Zima or the Hoff. I’ll note that Coors, while the largest brewer associated with Republican politics, is also the one deepest into Leftwing causes, and their Coors Light commercials are disgraceful in light of the comparatively High Culture ads for Coors Banquet (currently narrated by the under-rated Sam Elliot.)

And before you think me a snob, the Big Beer folks, to their ever lasting credit, provided distribution (governed by archaic Prohibition Era laws to this day with no end in sight) for many a microbrew, and Budweiser has spent a fair amount of money maintaining good ties with the “local ale” community through advertising buys in newspapers like Yankee Brew News.

Additionally on the foreign front, the threat of microbrews finally caused the good folks at Guinness to demand the same delivery quality of their stout as they did in Ireland. As late as the mid-90s, dear reader, there were some establishments outside the two entry ports for Guinness (Boston and New Orleans) who were “illegally” selling Guinness. These unscrupulous bar patrons did not use glass lined tubes, or switch from CO2 to nitrous to power the drought systems. Perhaps B-man will recall that even in Boston during those days, certain bars had reputations for a good pour, versus a bad pour.

(The Littlest Pub in the financial district always rated high with me, complete with Irish gin and juice drinker at noon on a weekday watching a MASH re-run. Man, I loved every precious minute in that closet of a watering hole.)

The giant of the microbrews, Sam Adams, and owner, Jim Koch, is a capitalist story unto itself, but I will focus on only the relevant aspects to our cause. The lager he produced , Sam Adams Boston Lager, defies the local ale brewing tradition (it is not brewed in Boston) and is historically, of course, absurd: Sam Adams brewed ale not a Continental lager. It is, nevertheless, a solid lager, competitive with Europe, largely better to my American palette, with great, localist American-style marketing.

Jim Koch represents an early adopter of what would come much later relative to our lives to “politics”.

Budweiser will always be with us, just as Washington DC will be with us through the remainder of our natural lives. In fact, the local ale community might lose a benefactor with a new team at Budweiser. We will miss her in that regard. New owners replace old owners.

The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.


With skyrocketing costs for ingredients as farmers switched to corn to be made into fuel coupled with inflation and a pour hop harvest, American ale brewing in our lifetime, born in a time of abundance, returns to its historic position, as a culinary creation in an age of scarcity.

The point is not pure allegory, but it will do.

With Miller and Coors preceding Budweiser into the hands of foreign ownership, Jim Koch, and Sam Adams, are now the largest American owned brewer.

I salute his improbable triumph.

The local ales on the local shelves have shot up $2-$3 per six-pack--some $9-$10 for 6 ales-- (thankfully, I drink draught at home, supplied direct, so I have avoided the inflation), over the last year, while Sam Adam’s has held their prices steady, $7.50 last I checked.

It’s going to be a nasty fight.

Prepare yourself (a pint of local ale) and take a side.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

A Little Some thing on the Side

In his latest book, Ain’t My America, the incorrigible Bill Kauffman with an incomparable eye for history’s every quirk made mention of Captain Jinks, Hero, a work of late 19th century anti-imperialist fiction by Ernest Howard Crosby.
Crosby, like many of Kauffman’s heroes had one strong point, and that was his anti-imperialism.
He was a devotee of Tolstoy, a humanist, feminist and an advocate of “high-licensing.”
All these beliefs were in hindsight, detrimental to anti-Imperialism.
The idea that the fairer sex was immune to war-fever would be disproved less than decade after Crosby’s death in 1907.
The crusade against spirituous liquors would last somewhat longer, but eventually taper off when early social-engineering in this regard proved a failure.
Crosby’s broad satire doesn’t exactly hold-up over time, but those familiar with the history of the Spanish-American and Filipino Wars, as well as the prominent figures of the day, may find the thinly disguised pastiches amusing.
The novel has strong bourgeois tendencies, which are also more than a little self-defeating. Anti-Imperialism failed, after all.

Captain Jinks is the typical American soldier, brave, unintelligent and devoted to the past rememberances of military glory.
As a cadet at "East Point" he longs to undergo the most brutal hazing rites-and get his wish.
Through bravery and misplaced orders, Captain Jinks rises to the rank of general. He travels to distant lands, meets strange peoples, and generally presides over their masscres, before his own ignominious fall into insanity.


Antiquated style aside, the book is worth a glance. We rarely understand how old this game is, or how long the conflict has been going on in the same old fashion.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Obama "satire" image

B-man makes it to LR?

In any event, expect it to become a staple of the more primitive reich-wing propaganda.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Mama Put My Guns in the Ground

In the Kabuki Theater of the DC-regime, the one area that still holds a glimmer of political imagination to the Dissident Right, is the Judges question.

The Judges Question is a key component of ‘how they do it;” a reminder that no case reaches the Supreme Court with the determination and vote count in doubt, and the nature of the written opinion already decided. And thus we get a case of a DC-employee who wanted to keep a handgun--how inspiring a defense of the 2nd Amendment can one get?

Case in point, the great excitement in the usual quarters but also the Dissident Quarters,
over the ruling on the DC-gun ban, opinion written by the 'Great' Originalist, Scalia.

"look, a 5-4 ruling saved our guns from them liberal commie nazi gun grabbers”

The NRA gets a shot in the arm; Obama and the DNC reduce exposure to the judges question that does them no good, and John McCain can claim some political support for more judges like....vitality is injected into the system.

Are we free yet?

__________________

Sav and I have noted the ambitious project over on Unqualified Reservations:

• Using the blog to it’s full capacity as an aggregator of ideas presented in the current political climate.
• Advancing on the hotlink style generally attributed to Justin Raimondo’s antiwar column standard, the author now puts entire books (Google books) at one’s disposal—bringing the alienated contrarian, closer to being just a contrarian in the pseudo-cognitive elite developing around us—and more importantly evolving the medium to a legitimate intellectual exercise along the lines of the Glass Bead Game.
• Lastly, successful or not, ambitiously setting out at slaying social democratic myths in the context of critical thinking.

Imagine the day when reading such an effort will have its own soundtrack and visuals??

(I suspect I’ll still be on 1990’s style posting boards, but I am an old man in this racket.)

The blog, with a date and time stamp, allows for moments of synergy, sometimes related to current events (superficial), and other times use of vocabulary. MM's vocabulary uses "Progressive", a term I used myself years ago, though in the post-Paul Era, inspired by the Leftist tradition of naming the system, I identify as "social democrat."

Further, what he calls the Cathedral (implying 2nd generation command and control as well as religious overtones) borrows from Tom Bethel's term, picked up by Joe Sobran, the Hive, but I like neither. CS Lewis, the Conditioners is both more ominous and reflective of the current realities.

Before heading to the coast for holiday, I had offered that the author’s project had not developed a localist angle, and to what a great surprise then, this July 2nd offering, which, if you hang in there, employs, as a thought exercise, the city-state model.

Well worth the consumption, as well as the link to his previous entries to get you up to speed, but the radical localist can start with the July 2nd post.

One line that speaks directly to the challenge of undoing the social democratic mind and recalibrating it as a pure Reactionary Localist:

The democratic habit, in which ordinary people …conceive ourselves capable of understanding how a country is best administered, is one to be broken at all costs.

The radical localist has little idea, how to run his own town, let alone his state or country or some other country; his premises are often all wrong.


What he does know is that that system is financially bankrupt.

If the UR posts strike one as being too focused on the dismal science (pseudo-science?) of economics, you have good company on the right: from Julius Evola to the paleoconservative critique of socialism and the slotting of libertarians, classical liberals, and the Austrian School on the Left-Right spectrum of intellectual history…all the more reason to read his ambitious project, if his target audience is the corners of the mind still enthralled with the social democratic paradigm.

Sunday, July 06, 2008

...

Michael Blowhard links to Ann Thompson's criticism of the Western Writers of America's list of Best Westerns.

A posting of this vintage piece; my list of the ten most conservative westerns, seems appropriate.

Here are the first five.

“They love the unbelievable being made believable and above all the fact that good always prevails over evil. To me this is the most reassuring of their reactions,
and all goes well for the eventual salvation of the world because, theirs is the future and it's up to them to make as they want it to be. Hope springs eternal...”—Peter Cushing

Regardless of its current box office status, the Western has always occupied a key position in the heart of every red-blooded American male.
Looking retrospectively at this expired genre, the experience of a coroner is not necessary to determine the cause of its death.
The Western rapidly become unique among historical sagas, even in the early days of silent film. As a popular cash cow in Hollywood it was hijacked in the 1930s by agenda-driven screenwriters who turned out experimental Westerns, socially correct Westerns, Westerns filled with contemporary memes and the sensibilities and social constructs of the eras they were created in.
By the 1960s, the graphic violence of Spaghetti Westerns had eliminated the last vestiges of realism in the genre. Like Science Fiction, the Western had ceased to be a youthful vehicle of triumphant, expansionism and instead become dark, obsessive and self-loathing. So determined were the makers of modern Westerns, to flagellate themselves for the alleged sins of their ancestors that they succumbed to the same snare as their parent’s generation did, and indulged themselves in viewing history through modern eyes, instead of as it was and has always been.
Entertaining films cannot be preachy and dramatized. Westerns were made primarily to appeal to white men, so making middle-class white men the principle villains of every, single western made in the last thirty years, can hardly increase such a movie’s appeal.
Stereotypes killed the western. Negative stereotypes to be exact. For time immemorial the hoi polloi have rejoiced at typecasting, the portrayal of the handsome hero, his “Old Coot,” sidekick, the damsel in distress, firmly strapped to the railroad tracks by the dastardly villains.
But the consistent moralizing of modern Westerns and their stock evil characters has become tedious to the multitudes.
The bigoted preacher, the misled bourgeois vigilantes who constantly manage to hang the wrong man, the unreconstructed Confederate racialist and the Noble Savage and NOBLER black homesteaders whom he oppresses—all these images unconsciously assault the mind of the viewer. To save the day and attract the Whites, the hero of the story must be a single white man, sent to aid his hypothetical inferiors against the nefarious and numerous White villains. For a love interest, an androgynous female, who rides astride and defies every known convention, is thrown into the mix solely to romance the hero in an obligatory, tastefully shot sex scene.
The hero himself is a gunslinger, interventionist, socialist, brutal, amoral, nihilistic—in the best traditions of modern American culture, and differing from Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Western character that no one was meant to find heroic or noble. To this day, Hollywood actually expect its male audiences to identify with the scruffy, loner because he takes the little man’s side, and commits outrages in the name of the people in the most profoundly Menshevik style.
Such Westerns are profoundly degrading, not only to Whites, who are wholly villainized, but also to Hispanics, American Indians and Blacks, all of whom assume the roles of minorities persecuted by oppressive bourgeois White settlers.
This ceaseless depiction of subjugated, downtrodden minorities protected and sustained by the White hero deprives all three races of the principle, and equally important role, which they played in the settlement of the Old West.
The contributions of black men like Jim Beckwourth, Nat Love and Bass Reeves have been entirely neglected, even within the genre of blaxploition Westerns, which preferred to obsess over the ill treatment of black settlers on the frontier, rather than their numerous accomplishments.
Just as black filmmakers took their cue from self-loathing Whites, Hispanics followed such filmmakers as Mario Van Peebles in creating “Victimization” westerns. While there are plenty of noble, Hispanic heroes of the old west like Elfego Baca, the legendary gunfighter and self-appointed lawman, directors and producers, since the 1960s have ignored them to their own commercial detriment.
Native Americans have been hardest hit by politically correct Westerns. Always shown as the Noble, Enlightened, Considerate, Mistreated Savage, Indian actors have been typecast to death.
Wes Studi who rivals Christopher Walken as a dramatic actor is cast repeatedly in the same basic role, in dozens of films.
His best Indian-Western, Geronimo cast him in the title role—but as a secondary character, supplanted by characters played by Jason Patric and Robert Duval.
John Milius, who originally scripted the movie, remarked in an interview that he had written the original script with Geronimo the focal character, as an ‘anti-government’ rebel.
Walter Hill’s re-write however presented the principle plot as two conflicted army officers who feel guilt over their betrayal of Geronimo, and in one scene, not at all germane to the story, gun down some scalp hunters, they meet in a saloon.
Geronimo’s story is basically an aside. According to the movie, he is a chieftain not a Medicine Man, and the murder of his family was committed not by Mexicans but whites.
Walter Hill stated in an interview that his movie was an expression of guilt for the betrayal of the American Indians, but he made this film at the expense of a great man and guerilla fighter who for years waged a successful insurgency against two armies in two countries. His story was far more fascinating than the contrived one, which Walter Hill attempted to tell.

From a paleo-conservative perspective, very few historically correct, and entertaining Westerns have ever been.
Only ten movies come to mind, which an old-school male could find worth watching.

Hombre.

An Ayn Rand western if there ever was one, Hombre was avant-garde, once upon a time. Not wholly Objectivist to Randian purists, this Western is perhaps more Randian than Rand herself.
Unhappily married, Rand found the perfect mates only in her fictional creations, men who endeavored and persevered and in the succeeded, against all odds.
Howard Roark and John Galt are tragic figures, who triumph. John Russell, the protagonist of Hombre is a tragic figure that dies performing his single act of unselfish sacrifice throughout the movie. Yet his death is a stark reinforcement of Objectivist from a masculine point of view, as the audience is forced to ask themselves if Russell’s death to save the unintelligent wife of a corrupt, despicable government bureaucrat was worth the effort.
They might also note that the John Russell does not intentionally seek to sacrifice himself. His plan is sabotaged by the unconsciously actions of the woman he seeks to rescue.
John Russell is one of Hollywood’s rare, positive portrayals of a businessman. A white man rose by Indians, he is amused, but not bothered by the insensible, liberal racialism of his fellow passengers.
A superior man in both words, Russell’s every action is motivated by blatant self-interest.
His fellow passengers are no different; they obscure their selfishness behind a liberal veneer. The villains are government officials and lawmen.

True Grit.

One of John Wayne’s greatest films, this Western is among the best coming of age/revenge Westerns ever made. True Grit’s west is as it was.
In our modern-day world producers seem to believe that to attract audiences, the crimes committed in Western movies must be as garish and atrocious as the murders and rapes of today are.
The only problem is they weren’t. Atrocities were committed, but the depredations of the Rufus Buck gang, the Mormon Danite Bands, and others pale in comparison to the post-modern brutalities committed on a regular basis.
This was largely due to the repressive nature of Victorian morality, which then permeated American society.
Criminals and psychopaths of the 19th and 20th centuries could cross far beyond every boundary set by suppressive behavior of the day, and still fall short of modern depravity.
Today, men’s minds are given full rein to indulge in the wildest and most weird fantasies they can envision and as a result, criminals have become more creative in rapine, murder and pillage.
Mattie’s father is murdered. She hires a deputy-Marshal to track the killer down. The feisty girl-woman is at one point captured by outlaws, but not mistreated.
Honor and courage, even among the thieves is stressed.
The price Mattie pays for her vendetta and her rambunctious transition from child to woman is spinsterhood.

The Life And Times of Judge Roy Bean.

Justice and legality are never confused in this Western. The two, one finds are almost never interchangeable. They are rarely associated being generally polar opposites of one another.
John Milius, Hollywood’s single conservative writer/director, scripted this Western.
Milius, long believed to be an enabler and promoter of the U.S. military, interventionism, and triumphalism, is in fact an opposer of the Iraqi War. His political philosophy seems to merge “Zen Maoism,” with a powerful anarchistic strain, which appears in movies like Farewell to the King.
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, as a Milius creation was dark, with the usual violence that stretched the bounds of realism in a Western. Working on autopilot, director John Huston brought a lighter touch to this film. The result was an unsuccessful amalgamation of the entertaining mega-hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and any movie by Sam Peckinpah.
While this expansive Western was a commercial failure, it is widely acknowledged as one of Paul Newman’s best performances.
Former ruffian and self-appointed Judge Roy Bean, “knows the law,” having spent the majority of his life, “in its flagrant disregard.”
Bean’s version of the justice, financed by his profitable saloon keeping, brings peace and prosperity to an old west town. Peace and prosperity bring scavengers and parasites; lawyers and politicians who subtly expel the Judge from his own town.
He returns in the end, to protect his daughter’s property and administer justice to the town, cleansing it of corrupt law enforcement and lawyers.

Outlaw Josey Wales.

Josey Wales: “Governments don’t live together, people live together.”

Ten Bears: “These things you say we will have, we already have.”
Josey Wales: “That's true. I am not promising you nothing extra. I'm just giving you life and you're giving me life. And I'm saying that men can live together without butchering one another.”
Ten Bears: “It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life... or death. It shall be life.”

Clint Eastwood’s most original tour de force, this is arguably the greatest libertarian Western ever made.
Each and every movie exercises a powerful impact upon the culture and The Outlaw Josey Wales, which appeared on the heels of the burgeoning Libertarian movement, was no exception.
Outlaw Josey Wales was based on the novel, Gone To Texas, written by Forrest Carter, self-proclaimed Indian-rights activist and adherent of the old Southern Ku Klux Klan. While Carter’s book promoted the Neo-Confederate movement, which underwent a resurgence in the 1970s, and has since been linked to libertarianism, it was left to Clint Eastwood to inject the philosophy of freedom and self-reliance into this classic “live and let live story.”
Josey Wales, by turns a neutral farmer, brutal bushwacker and scarred veteran, who finally reverts to a pastoral role after forgiving his penitent betrayer.
The Outlaw Josey Wales is fundamentally anti-government and anti-military, while not denigrating the traditions and veracities of the Old West, or the men who settled it. It’s Indians are not saints, it’s frontiersmen, despite their lack of character, are just humans seeking to cope and survive, within a hostile environment.

Jeremiah Johnson.

Also scripted by John Milius, this intense, solitary Western is the fairly true story of a soldier who for undisclosed reasons deserts the U.S. army during the Mexican War and journeys to the Rocky Mountains to live as a fur trapper.
One of Robert Redford’s favorite films, this sparsely populated film is principally the depiction of one man’s struggle for survival in a rugged and primitive environment.
It is Jeremiah Johnson’s desire to escape the deleterious, debasing and emasculating influences of civilization. Yet even in sparsely populated American west of the 1850s civilization arises to interfere with Johnson’s dreams.
Guiding a party of soldiers to the rescue of a beleaguered wagon train, trapped by winter snows, Johnson is persuaded by an appropriately shrill bureaucrat to abandon his honor and lead the troops through an Indian burial ground. In revenge, the Crow Indians slaughter his makeshift family. Johnson initiates an enduring vendetta against this tribe, only to find civilization once again seeking to secure a foothold in his mountains.
Jeremiah Johnson is not a conservationist film, but rather a serious homage to the Mountain Men, that merchant-ventures who braved the new lands and made their quests financially remunerative by the toughness and initiative which only individuals can display.
This Western is a tribute to Individualism, or at least to the conception of the intrepid Individuals who braves the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the conquest of a new land, only to be supplanted by the masses, upon his arrival.