Hollywood seems to be all tingly at the movie Brokeback Mountain. It’s nominated for an Oscar in several categories. It is about two gay cowboys who fall in love. It was designed to ridicule a venerable American institution, the dusty, decidedly heterosexual, badly groomed, gun-slinging, rotgut swilling, cowboy. Of course, this is just the kind of thing Hollywood loves.

Can any of us accept this new paradigm? I’m just not ready to, well, embrace this concept. Call me old fashioned but when I think of two angry cowpokes settling their differences by slapping leather I prefer them to be facing each other. I don’t think I’m ready for an Outlaw Josey Wails. I can’t wrap my mind around a new song ‘Don’t take your purse to town Keith’. It just isn’t right for the town marshal to fill his hand with anything but a six-gun.

I’m horrified at the prospect of a new TV series Have Swatches, Will Travel. It gave me some comfort to know you had to wire Paladin in San Francisco and not Kiki. Marty Robbins has to be rolling over in his grave at the prospect of new words to his song Mr. Shorty and Big Iron was about a cowboy with a large shootin’ iron all right, but it meant a Smith and Wesson and it was in a holster on his HIP. I can do Dances with Wolves, but Dances with Pomeranians, no way.

I don’t want my cowboys to be sensitive, well groomed and immaculately dressed. I want gold dust in their saddle bags not hair care products. The only thing I want in the way of body piercing is a slug from a .44 caliber Colt. Somebody please save us. Wyatt, Doc, Virgil, Morgan, where are you when we really need you?

* written by my Beloved Curmudgeon, published here with permission.