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True Aristocracy.

Some time ago, a friend of mine posted an article on a discussion board about the nobility in John Kerry's bloodline.  My response was that whatever regal nobility flowed through Kerry's veins, it had been thinned into unrecognizability by many ideological  transfusions.   It's not so much a matter of bloodline as it is of spirit, and if I remember correctly Tom Jefferson made comments along these lines in his musings on "Natural Aristocracy." By this measurement Bush beats Kerry handily. I think this Victor Davis Hanson article  speaks to the issue: www.nationalreview.com/ha...130813.asp

It's funny when folks call Bush a "cowboy" in an attempt to demean him. When certain folks over on a certain Orthodox discussion list whose name I will not utter here -- Orthodox Christians, including a certain OCA bishop and some pinko priest from Ireland -- were engaging in this kind of name calling, I posted the following response from a letter to the editor to the Rocky Mountain News:

(The French) refer to Americans as 'cowboys,' thinking it is an insult. Actually, most Americans do not mind being called cowboys. In American culture, the cowboy has always stood for honesty, courage and hard work, three areas that the French have forgotten about . . . or perhaps never learned.

Somewhere in my research on chivalry I ran across an article about how the chivalric code survives in the American cowboy culture, and I believe it to be so. Bush's kind of aristocracy is not like that of the sniffing, liberal "East Coast elite" to which Hanson refers, and to which John Kerry belongs. Those folks have pretty much spent all of their intellectual, moral and spiritual and hence royal capital. Accordingly, they are paupers, not kings, and consequently not fit to lead.

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Posted on Wednesday, December 14, 2005 at 12:30AM by Registered CommenterCaedmon | Comments3 Comments

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Reader Comments (3)

In the Army I even got called 'Cowboy' as an attempt at an insult by folks from the Northeast. What were they thinking? I'd gladly say 'yeah, I'm a Cowboy': I think the 'Cowboy Code' (which wasn't so much a code, but the 'natural etiquette of Anglo society) is very much an American remnant of chivalry.
December 14, 2005 | Unregistered Commenteraristibule
The "cowboy code" was created by Hollywood [Roy Rogers]and had nothing to do with the hard life and times that actual cow-boys [one who works cows] endured.
October 31, 2006 | Unregistered Commentermike
Mike writes, "The "cowboy code" was created by Hollywood [Roy Rogers]and had nothing to do with the hard life and times that actual cow-boys [one who works cows] endured."

Two quick responses:

1) You're mistaken: http://www.tocquevillian.com/articles/0095.html ; and

2) The existence of a chivalric-like code among the cowboys has nothing to do, it would seem to me, with how hard their lives were.
October 31, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterCaedmon

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