I've never read True Grit. Of course, growing up as a child in the 70's, the image of a craggy, eye-patched John Wayne was a fairly identifiable piece of pop-culture iconography. I grew up with tv and movie westerns, Gunsmoke, the Big Valley, Bonanza, the John Ford/Wayne canon, spaghetti westerns, all pretty much until Star Wars and Close Encounters in 1977 knocked me headlong into science fiction and fantasy worship.
Perhaps it's my age (likely). Perhaps it's some growing conservatism (less likely), but more likely, it is a response to my decade of living in New York City and the pace, and perhaps the lack of an identifiable horizon. I think I'm longing for a time where you got somewhere when you got there, and the rides, though they be long, held the promise of a boarding house to get cleaned up, a saloon to take a drink, and maybe a town to save from a black hatted gunslinger. I'm not fooling myself that the times were any simpler or less problematic than our own, but I revel in the escapism, and the western is the closest we in the US come to having our own Illiad and Odyssey.
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