Tore Olson

I promise you that the American rates of gun ownership are much higher today than they were back then.

So, you know, it's,

Yeah.

And, you know, that's why it doesn't fit into the mythological version, because Easterners were looking to the West and wanting an escape.

They wanted a safety valve away from their capitalist troubles in the you know, on the coast, on the eastern coast.

So therefore, they, you know, suck that reality out of the retelling of it.

They remove and sort of scrub away the ways that industrial capitalism was also transforming the West in just the same sorts of ways.

Yeah.

I mean, think about how many politicians have used that Western iconography of the cowboy who supercharged their campaigns all the way from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.

You know, this is like a very predictable move to play in the political range.

Yeah.

And now you can play a game about it.

Right.

That's that's the idea of Red Dead.

That's right.

Yeah.

Except I really do think that the Red Dead Redemption games are actually smarter depictions of the West than, you know, the classic John Wayne films of the 1950s and 60s, because they really first off, there's no good guys.

I mean, everyone is pretty bad in these games.

There is no black and white morality tale in the same way that, you know, the John Wayne films depicted.

And native peoples have much more of a complex and central role in the games as opposed to, you know, the sort of mythology of those of those classic Westerns where native peoples are really seen as less than human or just, you know, sort of props on the side before, you know, U.S.