Kevin Costner Still Pisses Me Off

I wrote this a few years ago.. Still true today.

​Kevin Costner made me mad the other day. I realize that he was acting in the heat of the moment but his actions were completely uncalled for. Mr Costner was helping his Sioux friends fight off those black-hearted Pawnee or Arapahoe or whoever it was that had the nerve to attack their village in “Dances With Wolves’. They had em on the run and Kevin was blasting away with his army regulation six gun as he rode across a creek. After knocking off a few braves, the gun was empty and there was no time to reload. Rather than tuck that thing back in his holster or in the waistband of his pants, he tossed it- tossed it right into that creek -the only pistol within 500 miles, a perfectly good revolver. That chapped my chaps and if there had been another western on DirecTV right then, I would have changed channels.
I love old Westerns. I grew up on them and cowboys were my first heroes. You could keep Batman, Superman and the Green Hornet. Matt Dillon could take any of em - any day of the week.
As a youngster, I shot more than a few teepees full of Indians out of haylofts, off of ditch banks and from behind brush piles where they were trying to sneak up on me and my pal, Jimmy, and steal our gold. I now know that’s politically incorrect and the proper thing would have been to try and reach some mutually beneficial understanding with those Native Americans and share that gold fairly but we were a bloodthirsty bunch back then and suffered from chronic gold fever. Anyway, that would have required a treaty and a treaty would have required us to pass around a peace pipe and our Mom’s wouldn’t let us smoke. They didn’t understand such things.
John Wayne and James Arness were my primary cowboy heroes but I had others; Robert Conrad, Chuck Connors, Doug McClure, Clint Eastwood, Clint Walker, Randolph Scott and Gary Cooper. I always got Scott and Cooper mixed up when I was a young chap- maybe because they were both tall, thin and soft-spoken.
Neither Jimmy nor I wanted to be the sidekick, so we were both top of the line cowboys- had a kind of Tom Selleck - Sam Elliot thing going on. But we imagined up a few folks to watch our back. Lee Marvin and Lee Van Cleef were by far the toughest sidekicks but they were just a bit too dark for a couple of eight year old boys. Jimmy preferred Slim Pickens or Ken Curtis but I was a Jack Elam man – all the way.
We tried to mimic our favorite shows and movies. We would shoot bad guys from out of his Grandpa’s livery stable (barn loft) or barricade ourselves behind hay bales to hold off hundreds of whoopin redskins til the cavalry showed up. I had a couple of old dogs that could lay in the sun and sleep through anything, so we pretended they were our horses that had been shot out from under us and we used them as shields as we picked off the dastardly bad guys that had killed them.
But there were always a couple of things about western plots that really twisted my knot - things that even our heroes sometimes did that I would never do on the parched plains of the John’s Field or the banks of the mighty Macon Ditch.
Similar to Dancing With Wolves, when that six shooter has fired all 12-15 rounds that the scene required and we hear that click that indicates an empty cylinder, our hero throws it to the ground or worse yet- he throws it at the bad guy. I always figured that if you got out of that scrape (which they always did) you were going to need that gun again and throwing an empty gun at a fella – well that somehow seemed sissified to me.
Or
Some ol’ Cowboy is making his way across the desert. He's lost his horse, the sun is beating down and he’s barely able to take the next step. He's down to the last dregs in his canteen. He turns it up and sucks out the last drops, licks his parched and cracked lips and looks off into the distance before tossing the canteen into the sand. DONT DO THAT!! You're probably gonna need that when you get to the next waterin’ hole. How in the world did these guys expect to make their way across that barren earth without a canteen. Now it’s just laying in the desert, no good to anyone and probably full of sand.
These things bothered an eight year old boy. They still bother me today – maybe not as much as the campfire and beans scene in “Blazing Saddles” but still worrisome. Now - “How bout some beans, Mr. Taggert?”