"If nothing was done after Newtown, nothing will be done after Las Vegas."

So predicted BBC network anchor Katty Kay to Charlie Rose on PBS last week, days before a Baptist church near San Antonio became a ballistic butcher shop.

Newtown is the Connecticut hamlet where a deranged young man mowed down 26 teachers and little kids at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. He did so after killing his mother who paid the ultimate price for having a household full of unsecured mass murder implements.

Irony of ironies, at deadline (pardon the expression), the Tejas body count is exactly 26 muerto.

I am most revolted by weaklings who assert that all of this is somehow "God's will," an attitude reminiscent of 1990 Texas Republican gubernatorial nominee Clayton Williams who once echoed mercurial Indiana/Texas Tech basketball coach Bobby Knight. Both likened rape to bad weather: "If it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it."

Late, great columnist Molly Ivins noted that Williams was really running for state cowboy. (Fortunately, he was trounced by the late, great Ann Richards.)

In many respects, cowboys illustrate the American sickness. We are a barely-adolescent nation still enamored of playing cowboys and Indians with our six-shooters.

Created by 19th Century pulp fiction and turned into pseudo-fact by Hollywood, the cowboy myth afflicts us today and will for the foreseeable future.

Cowboy mythology has been perverted to sell Americans just about anything, from cancer to crash-prone vehicles. Cowboy hats with upturned brims? A creation of Hollywood directors needing to see actors' eyes, the better to market mass-produced products by claiming that buying them makes you a rebel who breaks the rules.

Baah.

We glorify the Teddy Roosevelt cliché of rugged individualism when America is actually a textbook case of teamwork. A culture reinforcing every male as an island of his own wonderfulness results in the macho mamas' boys banana republics that plague western societies from Italy to Mexico to Tierra del Fuego.

Slicing and dicing gun atrocities clouds the big picture: Guns make it too damned easy to kill ourselves and/or others. Countless millions of jobs depend on weaponry, one helluva powerful lobby.

We are armorers to the world, often arming and funding all sides of endless and endlessly profitable shooting wars.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

It's God's will.

Barbara Riif Davis LVRJ View 11-2-2017

WRITING BEAUTIFULLY. In his (ahem) slightly fictionalized autobiography "I Want to Quit Winners," Harolds Club founder Harold Smith, Sr., wrote of being so wary of robbery back in the Reno of the 1930s that he carried a gun at work.

One of his alumni has just published a memoir of the old days. Barbara Riiff Davis has written "Craps and the Showgirl." (LeRue Press 2017)

It's available at Grassroots Books on Gentry Way, east of Reno Toyota.

Start with the pictures.

Ms. Davis in her international showgirl days was movie star material.

Hereabouts, she was also famous as the spouse of longtime Elks Club manager Rick Burgess.

Proving that she is not afraid to associate with those of questionable reputation, she has reprinted (with permission) my column about the implosion of Harolds Club. (Tribune 12-26-1999)

You can find more at her website, ShowGirlPublishing.com where she writes "The book is a true story about a little crippled girl who grew up to be a showgirl.

"Not just that, it is full of rare adventures — all true that I think you will enjoy. I am writing two other books and I hope to hear from lots of folks soon."

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)

ONLINE EXTRAS —>
We Don't Need No Education Part LXXX—>
The poisoning of old Pizen Switch proliferates
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 11-1-2017 Sparks Tribune
We Don't Need No Education Part LXXIX—>
Mississippi West don't need no education
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-25-2017 Sparks Tribune / Updated 10-29, 10-30 and 10-31-2017 GMT
We Don't Need No Education Part LXXVIII—>
You've got to be taught to learn to hate
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-18-2017 Sparks Tribune / Updated 10-19 and 10-29-2017 GMT
Window of opportunity: 48 hours for human rights
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-11-2017 Sparks Tribune
Las Vegas 2017: Fire is the devil's only friend
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-4-2017 Sparks Tribune
Rewriting the Civil War and the Mexican War
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-27-2017 Sparks Tribune / Updated 9-28-2017
Freedom loving racists shoot to rewrite history
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-20-2017 Sparks Tribune
Rewriting History
Reno News & Review Editorial: Remove Klansman's sculpture at UNR / 9-14-2017
Virginia City Nevada celebrates Slave Labor Day
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Special online Labor Day edition 9-2-2017

ANTE INTO THE GAME: Support the new season of Barbwire.TV by putting your money where my mouth is. A thousand thanks to those who keep sending show suggestions.

  Stay tuned.

  I encourage you to donate to the cause at Barbwire.TV/ The medium that shapes public opinion needs at least one refuge where it is not filtered through the distorted green eye shades of prissy corporate accountants for whom profit is the only priority; where self-censorship is the journalist's normal work environment and where all sins of omission are tacitly encouraged and forgiven with the wave of a balance sheet.

  This is important. We've got a lot of work to do.

END OF TIMES SURVIVAL KIT. Defend yourself with humorous or humorless but always-peerless predictions for 2017by subscribing to the Barbwire Confidential News Service. Hush Hush!

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Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)