Cowboy nation is dead, long live quiet cowboy nation

The Quiet Cowboy Returns -- by H. Brandt Ayers/Anniston Star (Alabama)

If you're an angry voter, depressed about what George W. Bush's War has done to us and our standing in the world, be reassured. The world wants us back — the way we used to be.

At least that is the word from one of the great Georgian houses of England, Ditchley, where in 1941 the seeds of the Atlantic Alliance were sewn at dinner between Winston Churchill and FDR aide Harry Hopkins.

The house now is an assembly point for leaders of business, media, government and universities run by a retired senior British ambassador or minister. This past weekend we dealt with this question, “Must Cultures Clash.”

Of course there already is deep resentment between the world of Islam and the West, especially the United States, exhibited by a tiny minority of fanatical terrorists.

But must our alienation descend to what Michael Harrington called a War of Civilizations: permanent, unbridgeable, armed hostility between Muslims, Christians and Jews?

The conferees, who included a former Tory foreign minister, members of the Tony Blair government, diplomats, top editors, authors and scholars from several countries, didn't think so.

That doomsday scenario might be inevitable if terrorist hatred was fueled exclusively from religious causes. We would be at the beginning of a new series of crusades because questions of faith can't be negotiated.

If there is no looming clash between evangelical faiths competing for domination, then what is the source of the troubled relationship?

A consensus emerged around my own prior conviction that the intersection between a backward, humiliated and weak culture and the powerful, confident, even arrogant West is excruciating for Muslims.

So, how is such a touchy, seemingly irreconcilable relationship going to be improved? The United Nations was mentioned as a forum, but no one thought it would or could save the day.

The consensus was that the United States would have to lead the way, but not as a second act of the neo-conservatives and their hare-brained theory of preemptive war.

My own vision received a strong reaction, which given the multinational and multicultural participants, may reflect the thinking of a wider world of opinion leaders. My intervention went like this:

“You can tell a lot about a people by their myths and their movies. Deep down, I believe American values are represented by a character we've projected onto the screen repeatedly — the Quiet Cowboy.

“Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne. The Quiet Cowboy was no bully or braggart. He walked into the saloon unnoticed, moseyed up to the bar and ordered Sarsaparilla — without embarrassment.

“If he spied some lout messing with a lady, he'd walk over and ask him politely to knock it off. But if the bad guy drew on our hero, it was lights out for him because the Quiet Cowboy was the fastest, deadliest gun in the West.

“In recent years, the Quiet Cowboy has been obscured by an over-shadowing, swaggering cowboy who busts through the swinging doors, preemptive pistols drawn and — Blam! — he drills a guy who looked like he might be trouble one day.

“Two years from now, I believe the Quiet Cowboy will return and, in the stillness of a waiting world, he will summon a voice from the past. It is the voice of George Marshall, only this time he is speaking not to Europe but to the Middle East and Muslims everywhere.

“Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine (or religion) but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

“It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed (for the Middle East). This is the business of (Middle Easterners). The initiative, I think, must come from (the Islamic regions).

“With such a speech, initiating such a program, the Quiet Cowboy — fast guns holstered — will have returned, and once again put on his white hat.”

For the first and only time, sustained applause erupted from that small, distinguished sample of world leadership. It was not for the speaker but for an America that was and can be again.

(H. Brandt Ayers is the publisher of The Anniston Star and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co.)