Political Observer on Jessica Winter Professional Political Moralist/Scold!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Dec 13, 2024

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More than forty years ago, Richard E. Meyer, a scholar of American folklore, noted the essential difference between the outlaw—which Meyer defined as “a distinctively, though not exclusively, American folktype”—and the mere criminal. He wrote that “the American outlaw-hero is a ‘man of the people’; he is closely identified with the common people, and, as such, is generally seen to stand in opposition to certain established oppressive economic, civil and legal systems peculiar to the American historical experience.” (The italics are Meyer’s.) The outlaw-hero’s persona is that of a “good man gone bad,” not unlike the oncology patient Walter White, of “Breaking Bad,” who started cooking meth because his insurance didn’t cover his cancer treatments. To remain in good standing as an outlaw-hero, a man’s crimes must “be directed only toward those visible symbols which stand outside of and are thought of as oppressive toward the folk group,” Meyer writes. In exchange for both his audacity and his discretion, “the outlaw-hero is helped, supported and admired by his people.”

In the Reconstruction-era South, the outlaw-heroes Jesse James and Sam Bass “robbed banks and trains, symbols of the forces which kept the common man in economic and social bondage,” Meyer wrote. The bank robber and murderer Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd, whose crimes spanned Ohio, Oklahoma, and Missouri during the Great Depression, idolized James as a Wild West spin on Robin Hood. Floyd took in possible tall tales “about how Jesse and his boys shared their bounty with widows and orphans,” Michael Wallis writes in “Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd.” “Adoring fans said that when Jesse plundered a train, he examined the palms of the passengers and took valuables only from the ‘soft-handed ones.’ ”

Floyd likewise shared his loot with those in need; according to several accounts, Wallis writes, “when Charley robbed banks, he sometimes ripped up mortgages in shreds before the banker had an opportunity to get the papers recorded.” This magnanimous gesture, though it burnished Floyd’s legend, would have also considerably slowed his escape from the scene of his crime. He hid in plain sight: attending weddings and funerals, crashing with family and friends, and getting treated as a dreamboat celebrity wherever he went.

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Mangione allegedly took a human life, which is despicable. This act did not justify itself. But this act also gave people permission to go far enough—to acknowledge their righteous hatred of our depraved health-care system, and even to conjure something funny or silly or joyous out of that hate. The folk hero is a folk hero precisely because he does what we would never dare. Most of us have felt something like hate in our lives; most of us would never dream of harming anyone. Hatred corrodes the soul, but the smallest sip of it, now and then, can be intoxicating. It can remind us that we are still alive.

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Editor: What exactly does Jessica Winter know about the 30% denial rate of UnitedHealth? Instead Richard E. Meyer, a scholar of American folklore is what she offers, the reader. An American Studies Major could offer the same, without the scolding superior tone, about the ‘Outlaws in our History’. Jessica Winter offers this drivel: ‘Hatred corrodes the soul’ : I can almost see Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, twirling his robes, as he moves to the blackboard, in that gainey black & white of yesteryear!

Political Observer.