The Wild West

[Paul Mackin]

On Sep 6, 2006, at 4:36 PM, rich wrote:

> Hi Paul--
>
> MCMurtry has another review in the latest issue of the NYRB on the  
> Texas Rangers myth
>

Thanks, I hadn't gotten to that yet. It's very relevant.

Also in the issue Tony Judt reviews several books dealing with past  
and present Marxism.  As I read it I was trying figure out where on  
the Left Pynchon might be placed.


> '
> Gary Clayton Anderson, author of this thunderclap of a book, lives  
> in Norman, Oklahoma, which is just a hop, a skip, and a jump from  
> Texas, far too close, I would think, for a scholar who has now  
> suggested that the Texas Rangers—our heroes, our protectors —are  
> pretty much the moral equivalents of certain paramilitary units  
> from the former Yugoslavia—Balkan death squads, in effect. If I had  
> made that comparison I would immediately check out the housing  
> situation in Spitzbergen, where there's lots of dark to hide in.  
> Certainly I would settle as far as I could get from the Texas  
> Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, which is in Waco, Texas, a very  
> short distance itself from the famous ranch house where it was once  
> suggested that Laura Bush sweep the porch.
>
> Already Byron A. Johnson, director of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame  
> and Museum, has come out fuming, in a review that accuses Professor  
> Anderson of being ignorant of a host of disciplines and study areas  
> that he ought not to be ignorant of. [*] Why is Byron A. Johnson  
> fuming? Probably it's because The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic  
> Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820– 1875 is the most intense and  
> persistent attack on the character of nineteenth-century Texans,  
> including the Texas Rangers, that I have ever read'
>
> Later in the review he mentions this:
>
> 'A few tough-minded studies, nearly as critical of the Rangers as  
> Gary Anderson's, have appeared: Charles H. Harris and Louis R.  
> Sadler's The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The  
> Bloodiest Decade, 1910– 1920 is unsparing in its treatment of the  
> Rangers; Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers by  
> Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, and Albert Pena is also important, since  
> it gives the Chicano point of view.'
>
> Interesting to see if AtD connects Revolutionary Mexico with the  
> Texas Rangers in any way
>
> Rich
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20060906/02e0c0b3/attachment.html>