Growing up, kids born in the late 1940s and early 1950s took westerns for granted. Watching them via television was hard for me because tv was in its infancy and set reception was problematic. Today I typically watch more tv in a day than I did in a week as a child.

I saw most of my westerns as part of double bills on Saturday afternoons at the Indian Chief theater in Saluda, SC. 25 cents, two shows. Nothing stuck in particular but cowboys chasing Indians was embedded in my head from what I saw and translated into moving plastic figurines of western figures on dirt in play formations. That and, of course, small plastic Army figurines. Hours worth of imagination were born from movie shots and translated in movement of plastic heroes and villains in dirt patches surrounded by grass.

What I distinctly remember is Larry Powell and some other kids getting into trouble for standing up beside their front row seats and pulling out their caps guns to shout “Bang, bang!” during exciting parts of cowboy action. I preferred to sit a few rows back and was more retrained: I left my guns and holsters at home. Sometimes Mr. Buck, the theatre manager, had to walk down front with his peculiar flashlight that showed red along a tube and came to a spotlight of white. He quieted down the excited kids.

Larry Powell was a classmate and is shown above in a photo from a Christmas at my in-laws in Saluda decades later on the right. Nita’s brother Jerry invited adult Larry over to eat some holiday fixings. The memory of cowboy Larry remains vivid as does my first “date” at the Indian Chief. I wore my new corduroy jeans and whatever shirt I primped in last for a chance to sit with Glenda. I remember waiting for her out front and the meeting of our hands during the picture. She was so beautiful and I was so shy but that is another essay.

About a year ago I fell into watching Death Valley Days, a show that I sometimes saw on television. It is an anthology series created by Ruth Woodman that played from 1930–1945 on radio and on tv from 1952–1970. It was sponsored by Twenty-Mule Team borax, a type of detergent additive that my mother used to get my Lee Riders free from grass stains on the knees.

The photos show remains of the borax industry in Death Valley, California from my May 2017 camping trip out West. Death Valley Days begins with filmed shots of the twenty-mule team at work but includes programs related to all of the western United States. Each show is a discreet presentation that re-enacts stories related to that part of the country.

Death Valley, California, is on the eastern side of the Rockies not far from the Nevada border. Go once and never forget. The arid heat makes breathing hard but the short hikes to historic sites with artifacts preserved by the arid environment is first rate. Death Valley Days was filmed mostly in the park.

Each program was introduced by a host starting with Stanley Andrews, Ronald Reagan, Robert Taylor, and finally Dale Robertson. The black and white landscape shots satisfy me as much as the history explored in each episode. For nearly thirty minutes I leave the divided current time of impending turmoil to find release in America’s expansiveness. Respect, dignity, telling the truth, and human kindness show up in each program.

Unlike Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy was just a vague name from childhood until I fell into my daily dose of The Hopalong Cassidy Show. I had seen his image and likely one or more of his movies but they reach far back for someone my age.

“Show” is misleading because the first part of the series is actually a collection of sixty-six movies that the show’s star, William Boyd, bought along with the rights for the series from Clarence Taylor. (Most factual attribution is taken from Wikipedia). Boyd saw promise in the new invention of television and went station to station in 1948 to rent his acquired properties that rapidly lead to the shorter tv series and the explosion of the western on America’s new at-home small screens.

Sage Flat Campground north of Death Valley is in the Owens Valley near Kings Canyon National Park south of Lake Tahoe. Owens Valley was home to most of the filming of Hopalong Cassidy. I camped there after leaving Death Valley on my way to seeing the nearby Methuselah trees or bristlecone pines, the oldest living trees on the planet (probably). Difficult to access Shulman Grove is close to Sage Flat Campground.

The stunted bristlecones of Shulman grove appear half dead but are living remnants of time before the United States and Jesus Christ. They grow at altitudes from 9,800 to 11,000 feet. The oldest one known in Shulman Grove is 4,856 years old (unmarked). The giant mountain redwoods in nearby Kings Canyon are younger.

The Hopalong Cassidy Show took advantage of this landscape with giant panning shots surrounding the characters, especially in the movies that are appended to the beginning of the tv series. It became the first network series and sold a lot of metal lunchboxes for Aladdin. Hoppy is played by William Boyd as a mature adult. Hoppy’s character is lot like that of Sheriff Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show: he mediates disputes and reserves gun fire.

Most cowboy heroes that linger in memory fail to capture empathy. The roles of John Wayne come to mind. Way too much swagger for my tastes. William Boyd’s portrayal of Hoppy has a pureness. He comes across like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. He does not run off at the mouth. The camera follows his gaze as he looks around in a problem situation and seems show his mind working. He thinks more than he shoots. He cares about others and fairness. Call him the Golden Rule personified.

Watching these Westerns–I give myself a small but steady dose daily–takes me away from time I live in when American justice seems like a joke to this kid from the late 1940s. They lighten my mood and give a view a vistas with twenty-mile sight lines that clear the clutter in my brain.

Until recently I would have responded “The United States of America” in an eye blink. I am the son of a WW II veteran and a veteran myself. Born in the late 1940s, I imbibed patriotism from the very air that surrounded me in small town Saluda. As a boy I recall poking poppies in my button holes on Memorial Day and feeling quite proud.

I read the American Legion Magazine and remember the politicians of the day speaking to audiences with rhetoric soaked in the red, white, and blue. William Jennings Bryan Dorn and Strom Thurmond bounced their words about patriots and the communist menace off my ears in person.

My patriotism expanded seeing the success of the Civil Rights campaign. I got it. We are a country that values democracy and fair play. Ironically it deepened during the Vietnam War era, despite Nixon’s prolongation of the conflict. His promise to end the war was hollow but American protest ended the war. Democracy worked. LBJ pushed through laws guaranteeing Civil Rights. I loved America with my teenage soul.

My country the greatest clung to me. One of the most profound joys of my life was to retire from my regular work after 34 years and fall into idea of camping in every state. I have slept on the ground of 47, most more than once. I have visited most of America’s national parks and know her beauty and grandeur first hand. Reading books about the Civil War and Truman or Hoover would send me on history camping expeditions to walk its battlefields and see where Presidents grew up.

I have gone volcano camping in the West and traced the Nachez Trail and followed the Mississippi from its humble creek bed origins in Minnesota to New Oreleans on various camping trips. The majority of the time I put my tent on pads in parks designed and built by the CCC during FDR’s Presidency. America’s parks are proof of it greatness and a permanent testament to its citizens hard labor.

The re-election of former President Trump jolted me. My off and on melancholy turned to border-line depression. I do not mind the rise of mercurial extreme rightwing politics so much as I hate Trump for instigating an insurrection and denying his loss to Biden. Trump has changed America and me by fomenting, directing, and instigating an attack on the seat of government for all of us to see on TV. His supporters damn near killed Vice President Pence and one of them took time to drop his pants to defecate on the Speaker of the House’s desk.

Call it a slow-developing epiphany. I came to realize that my love for America needed to re-examined. I have taken my love for her off the shining top shelf. She is still high up, especially the idea of her as a location for immigrants–we are all immigrants–who come to the land of opportunity and literally constitute the nation’s motto: E Pluribus Unum.

Never before have we had citizens anxious to show fealty to a would-be dictator/king. I have seen him in person at rallies belittling others. His junior high school bully boy style has created more cliques than I ever saw in my years of overseeing children in hallways and cafeterias. Who would have ever thought that a former President’s name-calling would come to be adored? I accept his election but disdain his divisiveness.

The “out of many, one” notion is under attack by dark forces that do not respect others. Recent news of Trump’s purposeful nomination of cabinet officers who do not have the credentials that required to do their jobs is disturbing as is their complete fealty to Trump which seems to supersede their loyalty to the Constitution.

All of President Biden’s cabinet has remained intact, even though some of them have told hard truths to Biden. All of Trump’s former cabinet changed over time again and again in the span of his first tumultuous term; he had five Secretary of Defenses. He proudly, publicly proclaimed that he was smarter than the military’s leaders.

We could be in for a very destabilizing time which would delight Trump and Musk and the other billionaires who have coalesced around the incoming administration. I think the instability could cut the legs off our democracy as it currently functions. A type of autocracy could develop.

We will see but I feel calmer now with my epiphany. America is a mighty country, a good country, but it is obsessed with division, not unity. The super rich and powerful are in ascendence; MAGA Trump tribalism is all the rage. I am still an American but I am not a proud American who automatically thinks his country the best. Its very union is threatened but the memory of Lincoln remains as an inspiration we came come back to.

If George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Liz Cheney were elected to serve beginning in 2025, I would not be happy but I would be reasonably sanguine. I had respect for the Republican Party before MAGA: it represented classic conservative values just as most Democrats represent progressive values.

I am a moderate who has voted for Republican and Independent candidates, though I am more progressive than conservative by far in today’s world. I took the Civil Rights struggle to heart in my youth and consider myself an environmentalist. I will die thinking that public schools that bring all of us together is one of America’s best inventions.

In factual, verifiable terms Donald Trump is a man of bad character who instigated an attack on the Capitol creating millions of dollars worth of damage and killing several people. He was twice impeached. He is a convicted felon. In the closing days of his recent campaign he joked that a bullet might find a way through protective glass toward him but would likely kill a member of the press, which he suggested would be a good idea. He talked about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia in a campaign appearance. That he said and did all of this is public record as is his insult of war hero John McCain and his recorded interview proclaiming that he could touch women at will.

The leader of a country is the symbol of the entire country. To the world at large Trump is America. We now have a strong man leader like Putin of Russia. Sure, theoretically he is more restrained than Putin but he is our American Putin. “Work hard, be of good moral character, and tell the truth, and you can grow up to become President” is out the window. Trump is a refutation of Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, and Reagan. He dirties the office he holds.

NYC ran out of places to park refrigerated trailers to store deceased COVID victims. Trump presided over the epidemic often shouting down the country’s scientific advisors. He did despatch a Navy hospital ship to New York’s harbor. His voters forgot the seriousness of the epidemic and the world-wide economic downturn that it precipitated. Broken supply chains take time to reform.

The Biden administration spent big to revive the Trump economy they inherited at the end of January 2020: the Democrats pushed through the infrastructure projects that Trump promised but never delivered on. The Biden administration also brought back advanced chip factories to U.S. shores. The consensus of economists is that the spending initiatives spared us from a recession.

Steady economic growth has exacerbated one of our country’s fundamental problems. We are short on workers. The approximately 14 million illegal migrants in our country clean our hotel rooms, install shingles on our roofs, cut our meat, care for our sick, and pick our produce. American business brought them here and depends on them.

The Biden administration capitulated and Democrats voted for new border controls as per Republican leadership’s wishes. Trump vetoed the vote on the bi-partisan bill to help his candidacy. He needs to keep the border controversy alive to stoke controversy.

In my mind Trump won because most of his followers are low on information. Truth Social, X, and Fox are organs for spin, lies, and propaganda. Outside of those three media players, all other sources are considered “main stream” thus unworthy because they put objectivity over Trump worship.

I am a citizen. Of course, I hope the Trump administration is successful. It could be if he shelved his bully/ insult artist act for policy debates followed by Congressional votes. Maybe we should discard free trade and put tariffs on imports. I would love to see that idea debated in a way that could win me over. Perhaps we should use the nation’s police forces and military go door to door/ business to business to root out the aliens. Put the plan in the form of a bill and hold a vote. Perhaps we should discard health care access achieved by Obamacare. I would love to read the text of Trump’s plan.

Cut taxes further for the the richest; a trickle down could help the middle class this time. Discard the environmental initiatives to reduce carbon pollution. Maybe we are silly for considering environmental stewardship. Perhaps NATO is not worth the effort and Putin should be allowed to take neighboring countries.

I want to see all of this that I have heard Trump propose but I want to see it in the form of legislative debate that puts the ideas clearly before the voters who think they want such initiatives. He should encourage public Congressional debate as did LBJ in my youth who put this great question before the people: “Should we maintain segregation and unequal treatment or integrate to make all citizens equal?” I remember that contentious debate well that moderates and progressives won in the time when America was not great.

Putting something in writing seems to have helped me with my frustration. I am aiming to be a cooperative “elite” and see what billionaires Trump and Musk have in store for us. We will have an exciting four years of rule by Trump from his mansions and golf courses. He has the right to rule because he won. The majority should rule.

The forty-seventh President inherits a country that has at last ended the unnecessary war in Afghanistan, the world’s best economy, and an out-going administration that promises cooperation in the change of administrations, not insurrection. The new President should strive to leave his term with the best economy and absence of war as Joe Biden has.

I am going to remember President Carter walking to his inauguration every time I hear people like me called elites by the elites just elected. Doing so helps my blood pressure.