Maybe Condi Can Explain It To Him
by Glynn Wilson
Do you ever wake up in the morning with a start from a dream and find yourself calling the president a dumbass?
Oh, I suppose not. That’s my curse.
I only wish I could get into the press room with George W. Bush and try to question some sense into him. I wish his handlers would get him to read this column, because it contains a lesson in the difference between myth and reality and how Americans should treat the people of other countries.
As I wound down Sunday night, flipping around the cable TV channels to find something worth stopping on as I often do, I ran across a movie loosely based on a true story called “Hidalgo.”
It is a 2004 film based on the life and tales of the famous American horseman Frank Hopkins and his amazing Spanish-American mustang Hidalgo.
While working for Wild Bill Cody’s traveling show in 1890 in the last days of American cowboys and Indians, a wealthy Arab sheikh invites Hopkins and his horse to enter the “Ocean of Fire” horse race, a 3,000 mile survival ordeal across the Arabian desert.
Up until that year, the race was restricted to the finest Arabian horses ever bred, the purest and noblest lines owned by the greatest royal families. But the sheikh was a fan of tales from the American West, and Hopkins was billed as the greatest rider the West had ever known and his horse the greatest horse that ever lived to run.
So the Sheikh wants to puts his claim to the test, pitting the American cowboy and his mustang against the world’s greatest Arabian horses and Bedouin riders, some of whom are determined to prevent a foreigner – and especially an “impure” horse and rider – from finishing the race. Hopkins is presented as half Caucasian and half Native American, born of a marriage between a European father and a Native American mother. His Indian name is “Blue Child” or “Far Rider.”
In spite of the seemingly overwhelming obstacles, Hollywood predictably has Hopkins win the race by a nose in the end. But the sheikh’s nephew the prince, who Hopkins saves from quicksand during the race, lives to come in second on the top Arabian horse. The horse of a British woman, who the Arabs in the film call “the Christian woman,” comes in third, in spite of all her plots to have Hidalgo killed. Some Christian.
I would like to imagine George W. Bush watching this movie in the White House screening room along with Secretary of State Condi Rice, who explains its meaning to him.
“Don’t you see, Mr. President, how this cowboy showed class and humility after he won the race?”
Hopkins befriends the sheikh and his daughter throughout the race and makes a gift of his Colt pistol after it’s over. A hundred years of peace ensues between the two countries as a result, even though the myth of the pure bred horse and rider are blown.
The victory by Hopkins and Hidalgo shows that free will matters more than breeding.
To show he’s truly a class act, the directors have Hopkins travel home to America after the race and use the $100,000 in prize money to buy hundreds of mustangs the U.S. Government planned to shoot. He releases them into the wild and sets Hidalgo free along with them.
Now isn’t there a lesson in this movie about how America should deal with the rest of the world and nature? Isn’t that why they used to love us?
For more information about the film, consult the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. And watch for it on a cable channel near you.