COWBOY

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The cowboy is an enduring symbol of rugged American individualism, part of the mythology of the nation. The symbol came into being over a relatively short period of time, between the late 1860s and the late 1880s, when cattlemen in south Texas sent herds of longhorns on epic trail drives north to Kansas.

But why Kansas? Why Dodge City, Abilene and Wichita, towns whose names still resonate in the frontier legends of America? Because these were all early stops on the Transcontinental Railroad as it pushed its way west from St. Louis.

The Transcontinental Railroad was a an enterprise conceived and organized by the people’s elected representatives in Washington, Abraham Lincoln among them.

It was subsidized, through land grants and guaranteed loans, by the American nation collectively. The people also, again acting collectively, sent regiments of the U. S. Army west to guard the construction of the road from hostile Indians in its path, protecting their investment.

It takes nothing away from the entrepreneurial daring of the Texas cattlemen, or from the grit and gumption of their trail drivers, to recognize that all of that would have had no raison d’etre without the collective national determination to build the Transcontinental Railroad, with its ability to ship cattle that were all but worthless in south Texas back east, where they were worth a very great deal.

Rand Paul’s notion that entrepreneurial initiatives by rugged individualists brought the rail lines and highways of America into being is a lunatic delusion. We the people, working together, built those lines and highways and the entrepreneurs followed in their paths.

BIG CHRIS

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At the Republican National Convention tonight, Governor Chris Christie said that his mother, a Sicilian, always told him it was more important to be respected than to be loved — which can be translated as “when a hungry person approaches you and stretches out an empty hand, be sure you’re carrying a baseball bat and not a loaf of bread”.

ANN

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Ann Romney gave one of the best political convention speeches ever tonight. All the commentators, mostly men, missed its quality and power, but it was powerful. The sneering liberals mocked her for claiming to empathize with “ordinary women”, when she was so rich and privileged, but she talked more about the issues that apply to women in all stations of life, especially mothers.

A rich mother doesn’t worry less about her kids than a poor mother does, even though a poor mother may have more to worry about in a practical sense. All mothers worry about their kids — it’s what mothers do. Motherhood, practiced with this sort of intensity, was once celebrated in the culture — now it’s criticized, if it seems too obsessive, or seen as one more role to be fitted into a full and busy life.

In truth, as Los Lobos once sang, “A mother’s love is like a story never told” — at least now in our culture — but Ann Romney spoke as a mother to other mothers, and it was startling. She’s a woman who “has it all” if there ever was one, but she made it clear that having it all isn’t everything. The kids, and by extension the marriage, are everything.

It’s too bad that the convention planners wheeled out an animatronic figure of Mitt Romney to awkwardly embrace Ann after her speech.  Or was that robotic thing actually Mitt himself?  I don’t even want to go there — the thought is too terrible to contemplate.

It was, however, a brilliant idea to have John Candy deliver the keynote address after Ann’s speech.  Many, like myself, who thought that Candy was dead must have been delighted to see him alive and well, robust and animated, and doing such a spot-on impersonation of Winston Churchill as a New Jersey thug.