Well a man come on the
six o’clock news.
Said somebody’s been
shot. Somebody’s been abused.
Somebody blew up a
building. Somebody stole a car.
Somebody got away.
Somebody didn‘t get too far.
They didn’t get too
far.
For someone who never really paid attention to country music
until a few years ago, I’m a big fan. I spend much of my working day listening
to old songs by Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers as it emanates from the
diorama behind me every 12 minutes or so. Just about every day, people ask me
if it drives me crazy? I tell them no, because the songs are the same songs I
heard in my childhood in the 1950s.
I, like most people my age, experienced early television
with Roy, Gene, and Hoppy (Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy). As I
grew a bit older, Marshall Dillon laid down the law in Gunsmoke, Pallidan had a
gun and would travel, and there seemed to be a zillion Warner Brother’s
westerns on ABC (The Rifleman, Maverick, Sugarfoot, and many more).
And so when I heard this “Beer For My Horses,” it brought
back memories of the days of the wild west as shown by early television. It was
glamorous. It was brutal. We watched people gunned down and hung nightly. Is it
any wonder how screwed up my generation is?
The song is originally by Rodney Carrington and Toby Keith and I understand it is from a movie of the same title. I listened to a version with Toby and Willie Nelson and I thoroughly enjoyed it. You can view it on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1JOFhfoAD4
One of the biggest disappointments of my wasted youth was I
didn’t get my cousin’s six shooters when he outgrew them. They remained in
storage in the guest house. What a set of cap guns. Now if you go into toy
stores at Wal-Mart, K-Mart and other places, you won’t find cap guns. But the
tourist trap toy store where I work has all sorts and the kids flock to them. I
spend much of my day listening to pre-schoolers shoot each other with popguns.
And I swear in at least a half dozen “deputies” every day as they promise “by
the code of the west” not to shoot their brothers and sisters and never use
them in the car. This is not just a “boy” thing. Girls can get their capguns
with pink holsters. Of course, there are also pink and lavender cowgirl hats
too. It is also clear that this is a gun control related issue. Inevitably, gun
owners let their kids buy the capguns while non-owners drag their kids away
from the merchandise with loud “nos.”
Grandpappy told my
Pappy back in my day son,
A man had to answer
for the wicked things he done.
Take all the rope in
Texas, find a tall oak tree.
Round up all of them
bad boys, hang ‘em high in the street.
For all the people to
see.
I remember when I was a reporter covering the Morris County
(NJ) Courthouse in the early 1970s, the sheriff brought out the gallows onto
the courthouse lawn for people to see. The role of the sheriff at that time was
to run the county jail, and serve civil court subpoenas. When asked, they would render
assistance to local police departments, but that was very, very rare . . .
usually for searching the woods for missing persons and a rare suspect.
I used a wide-angle lens and photographed the sheriff
through the noose with his arms twisted and the gallows in the background. Of
course it made our front page. But public hangings, and other forms of
execution no longer exist in this country. I suppose some bleeding heart
decided that it was too embarrassing to the criminal, or too violent for
children.
Whatever it was, it brought to mind a photo I saw of a
hanging. It was in the south and a bunch of white people were having a
celebration underneath a tall tree where a black man was hanging.
That justice is the
one thing that you always should find.
You gotta saddle up
your boys, you gotta draw a hard line.
So do we need public executions? I don’t know. I know we
kill too many innocent people, not to mention people who are incapable of
understanding their actions. I certainly would not want to be subject to Texas
or Florida justice.
We got too many
gangsters doing dirty deeds.
Too much corruption
and crime in the streets.
It’s time the long arm
of the law put a few more in the ground.
Send them all to their
maker and he’ll settle them down.
You can bet He’ll set
them down.
But there is a basic wrong in our society today. Criminals
are optimists. First of all, they think they can get away with the crime. Then
when they get caught, they think they win a trial, or get a great plea bargain.
And when they are found guilty, they think they can get off with a light
sentence. And too often their optimism is justified.
And as I thought about it, it comes from childhood and the
schools. A student knows the law well before they enter the sixth grade. They
have learned that disobedience holds little consequence. They know that if a
teacher touches them, the teacher will lose their job. They know their parents,
who are both working, aren’t home when teachers call and there are rarely
consequences at home either.
That wasn’t always a fact. When we were kids, you pretty
much respected the teacher, though a sub got some grief. A call home, where mom
was a housewife and not working, meant problems when you walked in the door and
“Wait till your father gets home,” meant a very uncomfortable bottom.
When the gunsmoke
settles, we’ll sing a victory tune,
And we’ll all meet
back at the local saloon.
We’ll raise up our
glasses against evil forces, singing
Whisky for my men,
beer for my horses.
Of course no one ever listens to me, but how about a society
where justice is swift and sure? In this era, I don’t know how it’s possible.
Cops have always been corrupt. I suspect it’s worse than ever. I have a friend
who did hard time because he tried to defend himself against an off-duty cop
who chased him all over town -- and never identified himself as a cop.
No, justice has to be just as well as swift and sure. Just
as their student’s test scores shouldn’t judge teachers, their number of
arrests shouldn’t judge cops. Because if the cops are judged by the arrests
they make, they aren’t judged by the arrests that didn’t happen because people
fear the consequences.
When I was a kid, the death sentence applied to crimes other
than murder. I remember there was a lot of news coverage about a black man who
raped a white woman being given a death sentence back in the late 1950s.
And so I wish we could, just once, round up all the drug
dealers, find that tall tree with all the rope and hang them for the people to
see. I wonder how much better, or worse, our society would be as a result. What
do you think?
When the gunsmoke
settles, we’ll sing a victory tune,
And we’ll all meet
back at the local saloon.
We’ll raise up our
glasses against evil forces, singing
Whisky for my men,
beer for my horses.
