Page 49 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

But the audience is here to hate them; the reason people have come is to see

them and to hate them. Despite Buffalo Bill’s introductory patter, and though
he praises their bravery, and provides some derisory, if well-meaning
commentary about their customs, the audience doesn’t give a damn. It’s not
long since General Sherman—who today sits astride four or five tons of
bronze on the most prestigious drive in Central Park—declared that the Sioux
should all be exterminated: men, women and children. Hadn’t he vowed to
remain in the West until all the Indians, absolutely all of them—and these are

his own words—had been killed or deported? And wasn’t it also he who
decided to wipe out the herds of bison, which were the principal resource of
the Indian tribes, in order to ensure the speedy progress of the railroad? And
wasn’t it as a hunter of bison that Buffalo Bill himself, hired by a railroad
company, first became known and acquired his name?

You have only to look at a photograph of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the
emperor of the railroad, to understand all this. You have only to study his
mouth, the intractable purse of his lips, the cynical presumption. You have
only to stare into his eyes to glimpse the desiccated little shrub inside. And
you only have to contemplate the terrible portrait of General Sherman
bequeathed to us by Mathew Brady—the one where he’s in uniform, his arms
folded, the eyes hard and his face ravaged by a kind of leprosy—to see the

other side of the fable. Hatred.

We’re the audience. It’s us watching the Wild West Show. In fact we’ve

always been watching it. We should be suspicious of our intelligence,
suspicious of our refinement, and we should be suspicious too of our
unscathed lives and the grand spectacle of our emotions. The maestro is there,
inside us, standing right next to us. Visible and invisible. With his ideas that
are as true they are false, his accommodating rhetoric.

And the spectacle starts again. The cavalrymen spin ferociously round in
the arena. The dust turns your eyes red. A soldier tumbles to the ground, dead,
then gets up and dusts off his jacket—the show continues. The cavalry
surrounds the Indians. The bleachers are packed out with twenty thousand
people, more perhaps. Suddenly, a cavalryman leans over, and performs a few
acrobatics on his circus horse. Bang! The Indians open fire; the noise is
deafening and the air is too thick to breathe. They launch into fierce hand-to-

hand combat, knives slash throats, men fall under the horses’ hooves. A
ranger advances under a hail of bullets. The audience looks on, mesmerized.