Dear Conservatives:

Yesterday Michael McGruther said, “The Right is going to react and mock its way to another defeat. It’s depressing. Nothing builds up the Left’s candidates like the Right’s theatrical antics. Who is POTUS is exclusively determined by the Culture. What is Culture is determined by corporations and depth men.” 

Is this inevitable? No. It is not. But preventing yet another defeat requires us to seize this moment.

And a tin cup.

I’ll explain.

Again, we need to seize this moment. More than a moment, it’s a movement. A movement that will lose momentum if don’t all get out and push. It started at the Republican National Convention last week, believe it or not. After a near tragedy we didn’t see anger, we didn’t see rage. No one was frothing at the mouth for vengeance. There was joy. There was a sense of fun. How can you look at Hulk Hogan and not smile? 

Fun is exactly what we need to win the day. And yes, I know fun is a feeling.

It’s been said ad nauseam that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” which is inevitably true. Unfortunately, the people who say it most think that DESTROYING ARGUMENTS with facts and logic is helpful. Facts don’t need us to defend them or to be used as a cudgel to kill an untruth. Facts just are. Whatever we want to tell ourselves, they will bear out in the end. Getting all worked up and self righteous about having them on our side isn’t destroying arguments.

It’s destroying us.

So fellow conservatives, today I’m begging you, stop worrying about the facts and start having fun. It’s okay to love your country and rejoice in the truth of your convictions. Enjoy being who and what you are. Celebrate it. Leave politics to the politicians and pundits for now, and for heaven’s sake stop being so defensive. We know the facts on our side. Why can’t we let that be enough? The Left is in chaos right now. There’s anger, confusion, and hate, all of which are decidedly not fun.

So let’s party! Not because we hate them, but because we’re having a good time all on our own.

Donald Trump isn’t fighting a candidate. He’s fighting a corrupt system, and systems are defeated by culture. Building a culture is our fight, yet with MAGA he laid the groundwork. We can build on that with or without him now. I won’t worship Trump as the second coming of Jesus Christ, but I’m willing to be his fan as much as I’m a fan of Spiderman  and Sylvester Stallone. There’s no reason for us to get weird about it. Trump is an awesome character, the leading man in the crazy narrative of US history. And it’s much easier not to inordinately idolize a character when you love the world (culture) of which he’s a part, of which we are a part, more than a man.

This is how we win people to our side—we show that we’re having a better time they are.

Remember the scene from Tombstone when Doc Holliday spins a cup? Doc could have killed Johnny Ringo right then and there with the fact that he was faster with a gun, and everyone would have known it. What did he do instead? He entertained himself and everyone in the saloon. Destroying Johnny Ringo would have made him respected, maybe feared. Indifferently mocking him and going on with his evening won him friends.

The fact that bad men come to bad ends came later. As it always will. 

So friends, through the rest of this election season let’s spin some cups, crank up some feel-good tunes, watch some old Hulk Hogan matches, and amuse ourselves by telling stories about the things we love. The moment is ripe! We can organically grow something really special. 

Let’s make pop culture great again!

Love him or despise him, no one can take their eyes off Donald Trump. Is he the best man to be president right now? No, probably not. Yet we cannot let go of him and allow the once and future commander in chief to fade into obscurity any more than he can allow himself to do so (for better or for worse). His chosen path will take him back to the White House, and I can’t blame him even as I wish he’d decided to buy a movie studio like Paramount instead. 

But we should ask ourselves, what makes the man so magnetic?

The answer isn’t obvious, yet we feel it in our bones.

Trump is the living embodiment of The Hero’s Journey, and his story isn’t finished yet.

Sasha Stone explained it very well back in May, and you should definitely read her article which is delightfully prescient today. But in light of recent events, I think it’s necessary to expand on her theme. Again, regardless of how you feel about Trump, he instinctively knows how to cast himself as the hero and play into the story beats that make the hearts and minds of humanity dance. 

Start with that escalator ride.

Image is everything. Always has been. Trump could have walked out to a podium in a parking lot or arena to announce he was running for president. By choosing to arrive on a golden stairway he was Crossing the Threshold from his Ordinary World of business and into the Special World of politics in a way no less resonant that Dorothy stepping out of her black and white house into the Technicolor world of Oz. We don’t know what Trump’s Call to Adventure was specifically, but like any good storyteller he brought in the audience exactly when he intended for the story to start.

Then he spent the next four years in the midst of Tests, Allies, and Enemies.

Sometimes he failed the test, chose poor allies, and made the wrong enemies.

After losing reelection the liberal establishment went after him with lawfare. Back in May Stone correctly said Trump was “now headlong into the Ordeal.” And once again we got an iconic image in his mugshot. This is Dorothy going toe-to-toe with the Wicked Witch, the pivotal moment of the story. Anything can happen. But this is only the midpoint of the story, sometimes called the “false climax.” We’ve heard thousands of stories by now. We feel this intuitively.

That’s why so many support Trump and even those who hate him follow the man so closely.

We need to know the end of the story.

Writers know, or should know, that the Hero’s Journey model is not strict framework. Sometimes things get told out of order. Last Saturday night we jumped ahead a few steps to the Resurrection moment. By all rights, Trump should have been killed. He was Indiana Jones strapped to the post when the Nazis opened the Ark and without a means to escape. While the hero can receive aid, the story really only brings the audience catharsis if he’s the one who delivers the final blow to the evil.

You see where I’m going here?

That the bullet only tore Trump’s ear is a miracle, an absolute instance of Divine intervention. No hero completes his journey without scars (Luke Skywalker lost a hand, after all). But the bullet missed and Trump survives, changing the course of history. That he escaped death would have been enough. Yet Trump lifted his fist in defiance of all the opposition and cried, “Fight!” In that moment, he crushed his enemies and likely claimed his Reward. Now we wait to see if the Road Back takes him into the Oval Office with the Elixir our country needs.

One last thought.

Taking the Journey changes the hero. I hope and pray that Trump’s character arc has made him a better man. I hope and pray it's drawn him to God. In the coming weeks and months we’ll find out. But what I do know for sure, as surely as his life was spared by God Himself, is that not one of us is taking our eyes off Trump until his story is complete. It could’ve ended Saturday night in tragedy, yet a Higher Power determined a different outcome. No matter what, Donald Trump is an absolute legend.

While audiences don’t seem to be flocking to Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, it does seem to have people talking about westerns again. That’s always a good thing. The western is to story what jazz is to music. Both are as close to purely American made as you can get. Of course one can easily trace these things back across oceans and time, but neither could have ever come into existence anywhere else. In the 1960s, it’s been argued, we got cowboy fatigue like today we’re talking about superhero fatigue. But did we really?

Maybe filmmakers just lost sight of what made those genres special.

From the birth of film through the early 70s Hollywood pumped out hundreds of oaters. Eventually, other countries started getting in on the action. Now anyone who wants to explore them can find it intimidating, as friend of mine recently confessed. There’s just so many, and the ones with the highest praise tend to be serious and depressing. I love westerns for their aspirational aspects, and, while I can appreciate the more serious and realistic films, if I just dove in on what’s considered the best of the best I’d burn out. The Searchers is amazing.

It’s also as depressing as heck. 

Within the genre, there are movies for everyone: those who want realism, those who want to escape, movies for children, melodramas for the ladies, and outrageous comedies. The fun thing about the comedies is that the more westerns you watch the funnier they get, because they tend to be very self-referential. A James Garner spoof, like Support Your Local Sheriff, which I’ve seen countless times since childhood, is even better now that I’ve seen James Stewart’s Winchester ‘73. 

Jimmy didn’t feel the same, of course.

So where does one start? With John Wayne, of course! If you can stand really old movies, Angel and the Badman is a great film from early in his career, before he became a star. Then I’d suggest moving on to Stagecoach (50% at Amazon at the time I’m writing this), the movie that made him an icon. From there, just alternate between the movies he did with John Ford and Howard Hawks for a nice balance between serious movies and fun actioners. Though basically the same movie done twice, Rio Bravo and El Dorado are two of my favorites. 

But what if you get tired of The Duke?

Well, James Stewart’s westerns, like the aforementioned Winchester ‘73, are definitely worth a look. After seeing him as a romantic lead, or a confused man in a Hitchcock film, one might not expect him to have the grit to pull off a gunslinger. But there was steele in his backbone and ice in his eyes when he needed it. Another actor I’ve only recently come to appreciate is Audie Murphy, whose soft voice and boy-next-door good looks were very deceiving. The most decorated soldier of WWII in real life, he could bring intensity to a black hat role in No Name on the Bullet (arguably the best performance of his short career) and humor in Ride a Crooked Trail (both available in a nice box set, along with the very good Duel at Silver Creek, that’s 49% off right now).

After that, the comedies.

I’ll keep this short: Support Your Local Gunfighter, The Sheepman, Maverick, and of course Blazing Saddles are all essentials if you love westerns. There are many other comedies out there, and some are very good. But these are the four on my shelf that I’ll watch again and again. They’re all clever and made with true affection for the genre, while still good stories in their own right. Sometimes parody signals the dying gasps of something once nurtured. These films remind us why we’ve always loved westerns.

Finally, the one-offs.

If you find that you really love westerns and want to hit some of the greats that don’t have John Wayne, James Stewart, Clint Eastwood, and others who defined, and were in turn defined by the cowboy movie, there’s still plenty to explore. Shane stars Alan Ladd, who more often did noir films, and is  iconic. Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney star in The Oklahoma Kid, which is also very good. And if you’ve only seen the 2007 remake, you owe it to yourself to see the original 3:10 to Yuma (45% off at the moment). 

High Noon can kick rocks.

Be sure to check out my friend Rob’s list of the 100 best westerns of all time, which is mostly wrong (I’m kidding, Rob!), and still 100% better than the recent list from Indiewire.