ALAN writes:

One day last week I went into a store that sells old records and movies.  I made a small purchase.  When the lady behind the counter saw that I had selected some of the 1930s-‘40s B-Westerns of Hoppy, Gene, and Roy, she told me she had just watched an episode of the TV series “The Lone Ranger.” Like me, she was old enough to remember that series from the 1950s.  But the thing that struck her most when watching that episode, she said, was “how racist it was.” It was disgraceful how townspeople in the story treated the Indian Tonto, she said, and such disrespect would not be permitted in entertainment today.

 All of this was spoken in a tone suggesting disapproval of that evil “racism” and approval of today’s standards of how American Indians ought to be portrayed on screen.

I listened to her and held my tongue, not wishing to reveal my disagreement.  I was there to make a simple purchase, not engage in conversation about an alleged evil element in a classic TV western.

The most notable thing about what this woman said is that it illustrates how easily Americans can be induced to accept the ideology and vocabulary prescribed for them by Leftists who run the mass communications and entertainment industries.

Implicitly, she accepts the premise that the Here and Now—this moment—is the proper standard by which to measure everyone and everything that has gone before.  Like other Americans, she has been carefully taught to view anything in the history of American motion picture and television entertainment through a lens ground by Leftist propagandists.  What they think they think is determined mostly not by their own capacity for independent thought but by massive propaganda aimed at them from all directions and around the clock.

Observe the judgments implicit in her statement:

White characters in old TV westerns:  Bad, mean, intolerant.

Indians in old TV westerns:  Good, virtuous, innocent.

 1950s American scriptwriters and audiences:  Bad, mean, intolerant.

American scriptwriters and audiences today:  Good, virtuous, all-wise, tolerant, inclusive.

 This woman was not evil or an idiot.  She is an ordinary American woman working in an ordinary job and likely nearing retirement age.  When she watched “The Lone Ranger” at age 10 or 15, she would never have said anything about how “racist” it was because of how the character Tonto was treated by other characters.  Like other American children who enjoyed “The Lone Ranger” (and I was one of them), she had not yet been taught to see things that are not there.  “Racism” is a chimera, a Fairy Tale, a useful device for Leftists whose goal is to control what Americans may speak, write, and think.  Americans are well-trained:  They now see “racism” whenever and wherever Leftist Thought Police instruct them to see it.

It likely never occurs to this woman to weigh and consider the depiction of characters in “The Lone Ranger” television series within the larger historical context.

I daresay she also fails to consider this:  If the Leftist Thought Police and Speech Commissars had their way, much American entertainment from the 1920s through the 1950s would never have existed.  She fails to consider that Leftists do not care a fig about respect, rights, equality, or fairness.  What they crave is power over our language, our thought, and our speech.  “Racism” is a pretext for achieving that goal.

Laura writes:

I haven’t seen an episode of “the Lone Ranger” in many years and don’t remember much about how it depicts the relationship between Indians and settlers. Did it glamorize real injustices to the Indians? I don’t know. But I understand your irritation.

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