Page 69 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

ONCE THE WILD WEST SHOW had fulfilled its civilizing mission and had
profitably replaced the Indians of Chateaubriand’s day in people’s minds—
because what people wanted was both the privileges of the elect and the
intoxication of the crowd, the mix of old and new embodied by Buffalo Bill—

and once this mix had become both odious and indispensable, each new
generation suddenly thought it could read the signs of an irreparable loss in its
own nostalgia. And behind the walls of his small brick house, between the old
mahogany furniture and his print of Naples, Buffalo Bill himself had sensed
an indefinable debasement of reality.
As he trotted towards Madison Square on one of his visits to New York,
past the magnificent foundations of Fifth Avenue, smiling or frowning as he

glanced in the shop windows, enjoying himself among the first devotees of
shopping, but also revolted by their invincible appetite, it suddenly became
brutally apparent to Buffalo Bill that nostalgia wasn’t just a vain resistance
against the onslaught of novelty, but that it was now itself a form of
knowledge. Civilization was this impossible blend of novelty and regret. And
it was doubtless for this reason, and for no other, that Buffalo Bill Cody—who

had inaugurated the new form that was mass entertainment—disappeared in
turn into its grand oblivion.

Buffalo Bill, who had presented his staging of the entire world before Queen
Victoria, who had even succeeded in captivating the austere William
Gladstone; Buffalo Bill, who had had hundreds of horses gallop along moving
pavements beneath the Eiffel Tower, and whose portrait had been pasted on
every billboard on the planet; Buffalo Bill, who had even created a town that
bore his birth name, Cody, and for whose benefit the Indians had sold their

knick-knacks all the way from the Wild West to Russia; Buffalo Bill, who had
raised his vast painted canvases before the world, and performed the drama of
civilization to full houses, applauded by millions of spectators, and launched a
veritable Americanomania, as his tasselled jackets and beaded braids sold like
hot cakes; Buffalo Bill, who was the entrepreneur responsible for spectacles

where the Indians never really died, but after rolling on the ground, stood up
again when the shooting stopped, and quickly dusted down their jackets
before launching themselves off afresh; Buffalo Bill, who had been seen with
the same Indians taking gondola rides beneath the Rialto Bridge, and for