When I was a kid -- (here we go again, an old timer reminisces) -- When I was a kid you could get into the Saturday afternoon double feature at the local movie theater for fourteen cents. And you could watch two new movies, a travelogue, two or three cartoons, a newsreel, a comedy serial, and if you were lucky enough, you could get to see a new Roy Rogers Western. At least once a month, Roy would be fighting off Wild Indians (those two words were inseparable in those days). And sometimes he'd be on his valiant horse Trigger (a kind of four-legged good guy), galloping across the badlands in a cloud of dust, pursued by two dozen or so Wild Indians, and he'd turn around and get off one shot from his trusty silver-plated six-shooter and three Wild Indians would immediately fall off their mounts, deader than a doornail. And we never questioned the logic behind this implausible scenario because he was the good guy and the Wild Indians were the bad guys, and the good guys had special powers that the bad guys didn't have. This was why we were going to win the war, because we were the good guys and the good guys always win.
Now, I know how simplistic and foolish this all sounds -- good guys, bad guys -- but then again, we, the good guys, did actually win the war, and the bad guys did actually lose the war. And before we're all too quick to dismiss this whole ridiculous paradigm it might be worth remembering that -- as I pointed out in an earlier article -- two historians of the caliber of Sir John Keegan and Professor Gerhard Weinberg both agreed unequivocally with the characterization of WWII as being a battle between Good and Evil, a war which the Good ultimately won. So perhaps there was something cogent about this simplistic paradigm after all. Perhaps --
When I was a kid things were simpler. Notice, I didn't say they were better -- that probably comes under the heading of a personal subjective opinion. But I doubt if anyone would argue that things were not simpler then. Bad was bad and good was good. It was always pretty obvious who the good guys were -- most of them looked like us, or at least the way we imagined that we might look someday when we got older. And the bad guys mostly didn't look like us. They looked like Wild Indians or Savage Zulu warriors or Space Monsters or especially Japs. And even if they did look like us, somehow they looked meaner and less trustworthy. Anyway, you could always tell who they were. And -- now here comes the really controversial part -- the good guys were almost invariably white guys. I'm sorry, that's just the way it was. Sometimes they might be old white guys, like Gabby Hayes, or sometimes (but pretty rarely) they could be colored guys, and sometimes they could even be recently-converted Wild Indians, like the Lone Ranger's loyal sidekick, Tonto. But, chances are, some white guy was probably in charge.
Then came those fateful cultural upheavals of the Self-Righteous Sixties and everything changed. Now, the surest way to alienate that good-looking brunette you were talking to at that Saturday night party was to say something -- actually, say anything -- at all derogatory about American Indians or colored guys. It would have had about the same effect as saying something derogatory about our fathers and brothers in uniform during that great war two decades earlier. The tables had turned and you'd better be careful now about what you were saying and who you were saying it about. The good guys weren't necessarily the white guys anymore. In fact, the chances were pretty good that the white guys were now the bad guys and those other guys were now the good guys. There was a different take on that same old scenario. Now, the Indian (no longer stuck with that unpleasant modifier, 'Wild') was being chased by two dozen white calvary soldiers, and he'd turn around and get off one shot with his bow and arrow and immediately three white calvary soldiers would fall off their mounts, deader than a doornail.
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