NYT Journos Just Can’t Wrap Their Heads Around Why Americans Love Cowboys
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The very serious journalists over at The New York Times apparently just can’t wrap their heads around why Americans love “all things country and rural.”
In an attempt to get to the bottom of this supposed mystery, the Times assembled a crack team of experts to investigate this supposedly new phenomenon and explain why Americans love cowboys, country music, and everything down home.
From the names on the byline, it’s safe to say that the investigation didn’t get very far. Times Opinion editor Meher Ahmad sat down with photo editor Emily Keegin and columnist/sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, and the transcript detailing their conversation, titled “The Aesthetic That Explains American Identity Now,” contains just about all the self awareness and insight you’d expect from an outlet that still, a decade later, doesn’t understand why people voted for Donald Trump.
There’s been “an ongoing mainstreaming of all things country and rural. Think shows like ‘Yellowstone’ and ‘The Hunting Wives,’” Ahmad began the conversation. “So what does the mainstream embrace of this aesthetic say about our society and about our politics?”
Of course, they determine that Trump deserves at least some of the credit — or, in their minds, the blame — for the “rise” of the country aesthetic.
“I think that what Donald Trump does is he becomes associated with rural life because of how often he has appealed to Southernness, when he, of course, raises the specter of racism or raises the specter of genteel womanhood — all of those things that the South is kind of known for.” McMillan Cottom proposed.
They discuss the trend in terms only used in the critical studies departments on college campuses, never in the honky tonk. They theorize about power structures, systemic racism, and symbolic nostalgia to try to explain why normal people like cowboy hats, country music, and the show Yellowstone.
“So power goes back and taps into the cowboy when it is saying there is some new horizon that we need to capture, tame and own, and it is dangerous. The reason we like the cowboy is because it is safety in a dangerous world,” McMillan Cottom said. “The cowboy comes into a lawless land always full of a dangerous ‘other’ — whether it is Indigenous people, whether it is immigrants.”