Come Back, Shane?

My brother was named after a cowboy movie. It’s something that tells you a great deal about the era in which we grew up. In Shane, Alan Ladd looks down at the boy who adores him and says, “I’m alright, Joey,” before riding off toward the sunset. The hero cannot escape being a gunfighter. He saves the town and disappears into the horizon with a bullet in his side and his conscience intact. Whether he lives or dies is left politely unresolved, which is Hollywood’s way of letting you believe whatever helps you sleep.

My Dad loved that picture, enough to name his firstborn after it, though I doubt he lingered over its subtleties. What he saw was the clean-shaven man in the white hat: the good guy who occasionally had to do unpleasant things so the rest of us could live decently. My father admired America in much the same uncomplicated way. From our vantage point in Canada, the United States appeared enormous, confident and impossibly shiny. We were the kid brother gazing up at the gunslinger and assuming that all the glamour must rest on a firm foundation.

Of course, even then there were hints that the smile was a shade too perfect. The racism wasn’t hidden, we simply decided it was their domestic affair. The violence in distant countries wasn’t secret, we enjoyed the cheap goods that flowed from the wreckage. We knew about the wars, the coups, the convenient dictators. We knew because we read about them over breakfast and then turned the page to the sports section. Every movie needs a few explosions, and every empire needs a few Nicaraguas. We were happy to attend the show as long as the popcorn stayed cheap and the blood stayed off-screen.

The difficulty is what happens after the cameras stop. Sets are struck, makeup is wiped away, and the noble cowboy can turn out to be a rather shabby man with a penchant for teenage girls and weak excuses. The confident hero we thought we knew turned out to be a brutish carnival barker: loud, relentless, promising prizes he never intended to deliver. While the crowd kept its eyes on the spinning wheel, he was busy lightening their pockets and groping their daughters.

For most of the last century the performance continued with professional polish. In 1953, the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government because the man had the temerity to suggest that Iranian oil might belong to… Iranians. This was presented as saving the Middle East from communism. In 1973, they did it again in Chile, installing Pinochet because Salvador Allende’s crime was winning an election while holding socialist views. Henry Kissinger, accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, said this was all in defense of freedom—which I suppose it was, if you define freedom as the liberty of American corporations to extract resources without local interference.

The bombings of Laos and Cambodia were “regrettable.” The support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s was “complicated.” The invasion of Iraq in 2003, sold on lies so blatant that Colin Powell’s own staff called them fabrications before he delivered them at the UN, was a mission to spread democracy. Which it did, in the same way that a brick through a window spreads fresh air.

We knew. All of us knew. We simply agreed not to call it by its proper name because the alternative, admitting we’d built our modest comfort on someone else’s misery, was unpleasant. Canada sold asbestos to India long after we’d banned it in our own buildings, but we slept soundly because we’d filed it under “trade policy” instead of “manslaughter.” The Americans were simply more ambitious in their hypocrisy, and we were content to be their apprentices.

That same curtain has now been yanked down with a theatrical flourish. The current ringmaster sees little need for old disguises. The language of ideals has given way to the language of acquisitions, and what startles is not the shift in policy but the enthusiasm of the audience.

When the president muses about purchasing Greenland as if it were a beach house in need of new ownership, the response is instructive. Senators like Tom Cotton appear on television to explain that Greenland is “strategically important” and that its purchase would be “in the best interest of the United States and Greenland.” They offer these ideas this with the straight face of a man discussing a real estate transaction, not the annexation of another nation’s territory. Tucker Carlson, no longer content with mere advocacy, declared that Greenlanders would be “lucky” to be liberated from Danish colonial rule by, and here the irony apparently escaped him entirely, American colonial rule. The same voices that spent decades wrapping empire in the language of liberation have simply removed the wrapping paper and are now surprised that we notice it’s the same box.

The mask slips, and instead of recoiling, millions cheer the revelation. The comment sections fill with citizens explaining why this is perfectly sensible, why we’ve always been too squeamish about American power, why it’s refreshing to finally have a leader willing to speak plainly about taking what we want. The carnival barker has done us one perverse favor: he’s made it impossible to pretend we didn’t know what we were watching all along.

I sometimes wonder what my father would make of it all. He died before the scenery fell over and the wires became visible. Would he still look south with the old admiration, or would he feel a quiet embarrassment at having mistaken a set for a city? Or, and this is the question that troubles me, would he have joined the cheering, relieved that we could finally stop pretending the gunslinger ever cared about saving the town?

In the end, little Joey calls after the departing hero, begging him to return. It is a touching moment because the boy believes, as children do, that the good man can always come back if we only ask loudly enough. The rest of us, a little older now, are left to decide whether we are watching the end of a movie or the end of a very long illusion.

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