YEE HAW, MOTHERFUCKER

The Western is the most enduring and most successful Hollywood genre in history. John Wayne. Robert Redford. The Williamsburg Hipster. The cowboy represents the desired image of America by embodying a specific set of traits.

Independence
Autonomy
Ownership
Strength
Virility
Protection

But the cowboy is not unique to America. It evolved out of the medieval English knight. Our cowboy -- that we have constructed and shaped to our needs since the turn of the 19th century -- is an archetype that furthers a dominant ideology. What these figures do is provide a central icon around which to establish an identity as a nation. The cowboy offers a myth that seems to substantiate the ideology behind it, which is certainly capitalist. At the turn of the 19th century America needed to cultivate an idealized self-image characterized by the individual, self-reliant, transient qualities of the western hero in order to further capitalism as the dominant ideology. The myth prevails and masks the violence of the West, class and racial unrest in America, and capitalism’s control over American culture.

Cowboy boots. So damn American. We wear them as aspirational participants in the myth in considering ourselves to be strong, independent people. And maybe we like seeing them because at some level we like to feel that we have a strong, independent leader to take ownership of us and protect us against the evils in our lives.