Last night, having some time to myself, I decided to watch an old western movie. Growing up where I did, how I did, with the people I did, I have always had a love/hate relationship with the genre. 1/9

My family has lived in Texas since the Texas Revolution. One of my ancestors died at the Alamo, I was often reminded.

But mostly my family was not so bold or courageous. They were, until the generation before me, illiterate dirt farmers and petty criminals. 2/9

Horse and cattle thieves, poachers, bootleggers. The very first shotgun I owned was given to me by my grandfather, after all traces of the serial and stock numbers had been carefully filed off. 3/9

All these men wore cowboy hats, boots. All of them drank whiskey, knew how to fix an engine, skin a buck. They built their own homes from the foundation on up, and it would never have occurred to them to call some stranger to do it.

They seemed like cowboys to me. 4/9

And they watched westerns. Loved them. So, of course, I watched with them. The films they curated were the old school westerns, ones with a good guy and a bad guy. Shane. High Noon. They wanted to believe that if they lived in those days that's who they'd have been. 5/9

Never mind that history had already shown that they would not have been either. They would have been sidekicks. Or unnamed men at the saloon. My family was not remarkable enough to have been worth camera time. 6/9

As I grew older I began to see that those older westerns were just my family hiding the shame of who they were. Those movie were an attempt to rationalize and come to terms with their own feelings of inadequacy and frustration. 7/9

Which finally brings me back to the love/hate. Western movies are grossly untrue, of course. A thousand different ways. But, for me, the problem is that it allows men like the ones in my family to think of themselves in terms they had never, ever earned. 8/9

If you believe you are justified in whatever shitty thing you do, you are always the white hat in the story, always the hero. They could point to those movies and smile to themselves, self-satisfied, believing they were watching a version of themselves on the screen 9/9