G. W. Bush, the Cowboy Code, and the Iraq War

Recent polls show President George W. Bush image is getting worse, with the most recent showing him with only a 35% positive rating. Why the low numbers? Perhaps the nation's cowboy president has been watching too many cowboy movies - and not learning the lessons of the cowboy code.

George W. Bush is the third cowboy president for the nation, adding to a legacy first established by Theodore Roosevelt and expanded by Ronald Reagan. Roosevelt established his cowboy image by recruiting a team of cowboys for his Rough Riders.

Reagan was a movie cowboy who adopted the western persona as part of his political image. George W. Bush, the rancher from Crawford, Texas, sometimes epitomizes the American West and the cowboy mentality.

The cowboy code would have a natural appeal to someone like the President. Many Western movies present the hero as a religious-like figure who seeks what Sara Spurgeon called "redemption through justified violence" that divided the world into the "good guys versus bad guys."

Still, violence in the movies was tempered with a moral code which required that the villain get the first shot. This approach was particularly apparent in the B-Westerns of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry.

Rogers was one of the most popular proponents of the idealized values of the B-Westerns. He organized his Roy Rogers Riders Club (with more than 2 million members) with the expressed aim of promoting the Western code espoused in his movies.

As Howard Kazanjian and Chris Enns wrote in their Rogers' biography, The Cowboy and the Senorita, "From 1938 to 1957 boys and girls of all ages flooded into the country's cinemas to watch the ultimate good guy sing his way through danger, capture the heart of the girl, and triumph over evil."

Gene Autry took a similar approach. His "Cowboy Code" was first published in Life magazine in 1948 and subsequently promoted in his radio and TV shows. It evolved from a list of rules that governed scripts for Autry's films. The number one item on the list: the cowboy does not shoot first.

Inherent within this approach is Spurgeon's concept of the "sacred cowboy." The cowboy hero is often presented as a Christ-like messiah who becomes the savior of local citizens. That concept was developed in such classic Westerns as Shane (1953) and overtly represented in Pale Rider (1985) - Clint Eastwood's remake of Shane.

Eastwood's character - appropriately named "Preacher" - rides into town, finding a group of ruffians attacking an unarmed miner. Eastwood steps in, grabs an ax handle (Teddy Roosevelt's "big stick"), and fights off the gang.

After that, Eastwood defeats the bad guys one-by-one until finally facing the leader. He wins that showdown, brings peace to the town, and - like Shane - rides off into the sunset.

Later westerns took a more pessimistic view of society. Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), for example, offered a West in which the hero is justified in engaging in pre-emptive violence. They kill the villains with no warning, shooting one while he is in an outhouse.

Similarly, in Kevin Costner's Open Range (2003), Costner's character identifies the professional gunfighter among the handful of villains and kills him with a single shot to the head, before the gunman has a chance to draw.

Bush's actions in the Iraq War followed the latter two movies, and that may explain the negative public reaction to his policies there. Specifically, he violated two aspects of the cowboy code.

First, Bush justified the invasion of Iraq based upon the idea of a pre-emptive strike that would make the nation safer - an idea consistent with the cowboy vision of Unforgiven and Open Range but at odds with the B-Western code in which the bad guy gets to shoot first. From the beginning, there was some national unease with the decision to invade.

Second, Bush failed to adhere to the script in which the "sacred cowboy" rides off into the sunset. He had the opportunity when, after the capture of Baghdad, he flew into the area, landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim "Mission Accomplished."

In the Pale Rider/Shane scenario, this is the point where the hero rides off into the sunset. Alan Ladd and Clint Eastwood would mount their horses and leave, content to let the locals take control of their own future. Instead, the American military stayed and became an occupation force.

That means the movie analogy also changed. No longer was the president playing by the rules of Pale Rider and Roy Rogers. Instead, Howard Hawks' classic Rio Bravo (1959) became a more appropriate model.

Rio Bravo

Wayne was the law of the town, but most of the local citizens were of little help. They went about their daily business hoping not to get caught in the crossfire. The Duke's only assistance came from a crotchety old deputy with a shotgun (Walter Brennan, or Vice President Dick Cheney?), a monotonic marshal (Dean Martin, or Donald Rumsfeld?), and a young gun from another state (Ricky Nelson, or Tony Blair?).

Unfortunately for President Bush, he doesn't have Hollywood script writers to guarantee a victory over the enemy. Instead , Bush finds himself hunkered down in a besieged nation - one in which he stayed too long.

Given all this, it's hardly surprising that the president's approval rating plummeted. After all, in invading Iraq, he violated a basic moral principle taught through years of western movies: the bad guy shoots first. In remaining in Iraq, he violated another element of the cowboy myth: not riding off into the sunset.

The memories of his role in Iraq will not be positive, even if he rides into the sunset now. That's the price to pay, it seems, when the cowboy president didn't play by the rules of the cowboy game.

# featured John Wayne as a 50-plus sheriff named John T. Chance. The Duke tries to hold a prisoner in a besieged jailhouse against an armed party led by a nearby rancher.