“Who are those guys?”
K hadn’t seen “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” So on Christmas Day, after a delicious late brunch of K&M-dreamed-up heuvos rancheros, modest gift-giving, a He Is Risen romp at the dogrun for Thurb, every day is present day for T-Bone, and for us we went light is right, as in an anytime Escape to New York plane ticket for K, the middle years Sam Beckett letters for me, and last and certainly not least, USB Fridge for M, good for one 8-ounce soda can (read: Diet Coke), designed in American West rustic, the surprise unanimous choice as gift of the season, what M fairly soon decided would be on its way to her Sarah Lawrence College office after the holiday break, sure to attract conversation and giggles and guffaws, and, “Ah, what a perfect husband you have who would think of such a gift,” because M loves her DC in midafternoon so I can live with the pleasure of knowing that she would be the first prof on her block to have one, although given the certain positive reaction, not for long.
Say, a half-century later, if Butch and Sundance had not been gunned down by military garrison in Bolivia, I can see them pulling beers our of an icebox in USB Fridge style (two tone, dusky red and light caramel). I was reminded during the re-watching of BCATSK (1969) how much the movie represented the end of an era. Perhaps even more than director George Roy Hill could’ve known at the time, considering that the only Westerns that still get made in Hollywood are the likes of “Cowboys and Aliens,” the flat-out bomb of 2011, so don’t expect the studios to try again until, say, maybe, 2022.
What strikes as you look at the movie now is how the freedom of the West, the open spaces, are being closed off and controlled and bought up by the encroaching robber baron railroad owners (“those guys”) as symbolized by the bicycle that B so magically rides like a holy fool about the barnyard, thrilling the third wheel sweetheart, Katharine Ross, but when change comes to her men’s lives, in the shape of the robber baron headhunting posse that will not stop until they have their heads, Butch pushes away the symbol, lets it roll and fall into the dirt, a wheel turning and turning, without end, or at least one that these two adventurous dreamers will ever know.
Symbols, what do we need with symbols, more than a century after BCATSK were killed? Women (Katharine Ross) intuit; it is one of the great wonders of women, their sight into the stupid affairs of men, their end, and in her case, KR’s, she left the men she loved to their certain end. Then it was the emerging industrial empire, the tycoons, Andrew Carnegie to JP Morgan. But now the railroad isn’t even the railroad, it’s the person, the corporate person, free to influence every wannabe BCATSK from here to Bagram, the notorious post-millennial prison http://bit.ly/sYwGno run by Robo-cops who when they return to the free world after doing what is asked of them by The Man cannot find gainful employment, the jobless rate of former vets from Iraq and Afghanistan many times that of the national average, and I’m sorry but this is hardly what you may wish to read the days before the new year: New Year’s Day only a couple of days away, the fastest week in the fastest month of the year .¤.¤.
But, hold on, here’s a gem: that drug makers (read: Congress and all the corporate lobby dollars that fund it) are hot on the trail of a new source of cash flow to replace those blockbusters whose growth is now damped by generics – i.e. Prozac, Lipitor, Zoloft, Vicodin, and, yes, Viagra – are set on filling prescriptions vials of a new mega-painkiller from the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli, and yeah, sure, not do a damn thing of any consequence to stop its flow into the black market to feed an insatiable need for more painkilling drugs http://nyp.st/uv5CSI, because from all accounts these babies (first in the pipeline, Zohydro) will be the juice of choice to replace the former fave of addicts (think: Rush Limbaugh), OxyContin, so-called hillbilly heroin. But hey. What better way to fill Congress’ and drug makers’ coffers AND medicate out of any sensible resistance the national adult population than to develop and distribute a drug that packs up to 10 times the potentcy of Vicodin !!
Oy. T-minus five days and counting until Iowa.
Next: Running for Your Life: A Look Back at 2011
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