"You know Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich I might have been a really great man."

The quote is from Citizen Kane, and I eagerly await my cease-and-desist letter from Warner Brothers. You see, Warner Brothers is contemplating a suit against the White Stripes for stringing together lines from Citizen Kaneto make a song. (You'd think Warner Brothers would learn . . . Groucho Marx famously ridiculed Warner Brothers for a similar attempt to claim ownership of the word "Casablanca.") We're in real trouble if Warner Brothers prevails. Jack White's composing process is precisely that which Americans typically endorse. In short, he takes an existing work, lets it resonate, and responds by transforming that work into something now. The film Finding Forrester is little more than a celebration of precisely this methodology , in which F. Murray Abraham plays a loathsome, villianous administrator who just doesn't get it.(The irony would be delicious if the film was a Warner Brothers product, but it isn't.) Indeed, though courts are typically hostile to this argument when the copyright holder is complaining, the White Stripes' song almost certainly has a positive effect on the market for Citizen Kane. Jack White has, in effect, said to his listeners, "hey, take a look at Citizen Kane, there's some cool stuff in there," but Warner Brothers appears ready to take this gift horse and punch it in the mouth. If Warner Brothers does sue, each of us who has seen the movie should make a point of telling five people what "Rosebud" is, thus despoiling the market for the film.

No, don't do that. It's a great film. It's the film's heirs and assigns that would deserve the despoiling.

Cowboy in Flames

Susan Faludi's op-ed piece, "An American Myth Rides Into the Sunset" does an admirable job of articulating the ways in which the Bush administration has distorted the historic American cowboy mythos. In her piece, Faludi argues:

Of course, American identity has always contained competing models; even the original frontiersman, the cowboy's immediate ancestor, had two faces. He was either Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett -- that is, either the man who rode into the wilderness to build and nurture a society called Booneville, or the man who ventured out only to collect and count the pelts. . . . As the nation industrialized, however, Crockett's heaps of dead pelts became the equivalent of America's capitalistic might, and his own profile began to rise from pathetic joke to vaunted hunter and Alamo hero. The honored activity was no longer husbandry but dominance.

As striking as Faludi's argument is on its own merits, it resonated even more for me when paired with this editorial from the Arab News. which, coincidentally enough came out on the same day. Here's the key quote:

Imagine instead that one of Davy Crockett's men had volunteered to charge a wagonload of explosives out of the fort and straight into Santana's forces surrounding the Alamo, in an attempt to break the Mexicans' aggressive resolve. Would not that man now be high in the pantheon of US heroes? Indeed are not Davy Crockett himself and the rest his volunteers roundly honored for their bravery and self-sacrifice, which held off an invader long enough for his campaign to lose momentum and falter?

Were Davy Crockett and his men terrorists for throwing away their lives in a hopeless action against vastly superior might? If an American answers that they were not, then he is accepting that neither was the Iraqi suicide bomber in his taxi.

Davy Crockett is a hero to the Americans. Every citizen remembers the Alamo. Can Washington therefore appreciate that the Iraqi in the taxi is going to be a hero as well, when his name and his self-sacrifice become known, and that he will be a hero not just in Iraq but throughout the Arab world ?

The Arab News editorial is unsigned, but the writer demonstrates (roughly) as keen an understanding of Davy Crockett's mythic function within the U.S. as Faludi does. The writer appears to know America extremely well, knowing this myth far better than most Americans know anything about Arab cultures. The editorial concludes with a "surprise" ending. that caught me off guard. It shouldn't have. Right now I'm wondering how and whether America will reclaim those positive elements of the cowboy myth that made it reasonable and sometimes even wholesome (think Roy Rogers) to root for the guy in the white hat.