Blood Guilt Gentility

Even now, I can hardly bear to tell the tale. --McMurtry, in every author's heyday

Despite the time and effort I have put into taxing Safari (outdated) and Chrome, my memory of the mid-nineties, when I was immortal, and actually had a white collar career, suggests that Lonesome Dove had a vibrant currency, but it may not have been the series out of Alberta, where Christianne Hirt, as Hannah Call, is too good to be true. Canadians, being the winsome sops that they are, tried to reference this in the climax to Season One, prior to Baristow developing his bitter streak in the "outlaw years". I only caught a glimpse of Robert Ulrich, in the other variation on the now faded Larry McMurtry franchise of poignant Texan tales, when I had not passed the ladder rung of 35. The show never caught on, though it may have simply been a scheduling conflict. I have been studying the drama only this year, along with Comanche Moon, and admit that the Canadian production is of greater depth and quality than Henry Winkler's partnership with Showtime and Dead Man's Gun, but it still has an undercurrent of being somewhat too holistic, perhaps as a paean to the mythos of American innocence. With this complaint duly noted, however, Eric McCormack more than aptly captures my growing sympathy for the Confederate ideal with his depiction of Francis Mosby. To throw in the usual dowager tire iron, I could almost hate the man for then taking on the part of Will, in that superficial, flinty, metrosexual  comedy, evidence it might be conducive for me to time out the virtual world and fight the barren parameters of my real world existence, but I'll editorialize the white out developed for typing paper on this particular caveat.


Granted, this is a studio presentation of pretty people groomed on the set, costumed to Victorian era corsets, but the voices of Grant, Lee, and General Sherman, can be overlaid on the actor's presentation with some degree of admiration. When it is done right, the power of the aristocratic mien we've lost to industrialization, commercialization, liberalism, is something to be regretted, and Mosby has trace elements of something already entombed in the catacombs during the active years in which the frontier was being subsumed into a superpower that would last approximately 57 years. I date the rise of the United States as starting in 1939, and  beginning to crater around the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Armchair scholars may take any issue with this as they please, as we can say, as well, that American power was predestined in the wealth of the Gilded Age, but I tend to feel the Second World War cemented certainty out of what was before then a likely possibility. I also don't single out the Lewinsky phenomenon to lay blame with the Clintons. The Reagan era ended abruptly with the ouster of Bush 41. Bill and Hillary were only representative of a liberalism that no longer recognized itself, made a feint, and then blindsided neo-conservativism into a grave mishandling of an ideological disaster. I don't think we'll recover, regardless of whether or not Trump is shown the door. I am not attempting to suggest American decline has a genealogy marker, and I haven't read Dr. Ferguson's rise and decline summation of the American Empire. But the Iraq War as solution to September 11th, 2001, opened up a cascade, like a broken vending machine, and the western hemisphere has a yellow underbelly, and my skepticism about China picking up the slack is unchanged. What exactly did the Middle Kingdom do prior to the 17th century other than coalesce the territorial landmass of Asia we currently recognize? I am not talking about gunpowder, or other appropriated technologies. I am asking what the Emperors and mandarins did before the European tea trade at the point of a bayonet? An insulated history, in which non-Han Chinese were "barbarian," still informs what global Chinese leadership could look like fifty years from now. I am not particularly heartened by the picture: it is China which will not allow the Korean peninsula to unify, grow up, develop better living standards. Hong Kong is a game of cat and mouse. I don't know where else to look for a better outcome than to a more realistic stratification of the past, with recognition of the reality of caste. Mammalian primate hierarchy isn't a polite fiction. It is an ecological reality for complex living organisms, hence the character of Francis Mosby, and nobelesse oblige, the uniting force of that within group dynamics to which we unfortunate, and remarkable finely tuned apes always turn: I've written enough in my embittered online voice for today.