The American tradition: A gallery of rogues

by John Greenway

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0884053792
• ISBN13: 9780884053798
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Mason/Charter
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.

Customer Reviews

John Greenway - a rogue in the gallery

John Greenway's 1977 book is partly autobiographical, partly educational, partly historical and wholly entertaining. Fascinating insights from an insightful man, dated but still relevant and entertaining. "The American tradition: A gallery of rogues" was a pointed jab at political correctness back when p.c. really did hold sway over the academic world. Since then the p.c. monopoly has been broken (but not buried) and, if anything, the new p.c. is to be anti-p.c. Modern readers need to keep this in mind. Greenway's "gonzo conservative" style was really an attempt to irritate the dittoheads of the era when hippies had turned in their love beads for university sinecures. Greenway was a gonzo conservative back before Rush Limbaugh made it an industry. Even those who are not to right of Genghis Khan, will enjoy the trip if they keep that in mind. Greenway's rogues gallery includes the "First Americans", Academia, Women's Lib (or 'Women's Lip' as he calls it), Cops and General Patton. Quite a list. Greenway spent years doing anthropological work among Australian aborigines. His best book is probably his 1972 'Down Among The Wild Men' that documents that period of his career. He spent many more years doing folklore and musicology research in America. So he is well armed when he shoots his arrows at the myth of the peaceful Indian. He looks at the then popular (late 1970s) Dee Brown book "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" and blasts it for it's one sided, ahistorical, plagiarised and sentimental treatment. Greenway made himself unpopular with articles highlighting the savagery and brutality of much of native American culture. It should of course be remembered that if anything he probably preferred 'wild' humans to the civilised variety. So his puncturing the balloon of the native as pacifist is not quite the insult those fancied the Indians as possessing a high civilisation imagine. Academia is probably his weakest section, and offers no grand insights other than the observation that most academics are lazy and incompetent. We all knew that anyway. You could skip it. To Greenway, the police are the polar opposite. Greenway, himself a police reservist in Boulder, relates his fondness for "The New Centurions" by Joseph Wambaugh, and provides a check list of common movie and TV errors long enough to make his readers unwelcome guests whenever "Law and Order" is on. His chapter on women's lib may seem superficial, but it is actually deep. Greenway is really a closet feminist, despite his loud protestation of his male chauvinist pig status. He scorned the superficialities of seventies feminism, the bra burning, the playing with language (s/he, ms. etc), the [...], but his main point is to compare the noisy fems of academia to the Kentucky coal mining union organiser and communist Aunt Molly Jackson. Greenway knew and admired Molly from his folk music work, the song "Pistol Packing Mama" was written about her. Along with General Patton, considers her one

Like Hunter Thompson

Greenway uses gonzo narrative to lambaste white guilt toward blacks, "feathered Indians," criminals, "rebellious women" and "easy ignorance in education." (P. 206) Unlike Thompson, he uses scholarship & research to do it. Very funny & replete with ironies about the 'Seventies & our most sacred national myths. There are blind spots: He never entertains the idea that cultural changes might be adaptive rather than maladaptive. Was the Empire worse than the Roman Republic, or just something different? He gets romantic about General George Patton, who treated G.I.'s like peasants because he never got over being a patrician. And he's a bit hard on signers of the Declaration of Independence for not joining Washington at Valley Forge; weren't they seniors, after all? But you can count on Greenway to make every issue one of dominance vs. submission. What remains in the mind are his admonitions that (1) one should know one's enemy, and (2) one should defeat him without humilating him. Also, that two cannot compete in the same place at the same time, whether alpha males or nations. But even this is simplistic. Dominant cultures first try to absorb indigenous populations, then enslave them, then displace them, and annihilate them only when the cultural gap is so large that they can't be used. Wonderful style; expansive vocabulary ("yark," "bogdle," "calenture"); and a mind that remembered everything he read.

An Opponent of Tears, Flapdoodle, and Other Such PC Nonsense

It is no accident that Professor Greenway boxed in college, was an army hand-to-hand combat instructor, and the first reservist on the Boulder Police to be called when a riot was expected. Here was a fighter, though he usually used his intellect and sarcasm, who could flatten any opponent. (He was also a professor of anthropology and English, a master carpenter, chess player, and musician.) Jacket copy is almost always worthless, yet here we read a critic who states that he "would hate to be as sure of anything as Mr. Greenway is of everything." And truer statements are hard to find. Greenway writes on five subjects: American Indians (decrying revisionism and hagiography), the academy and its students ("the dumbest mob of trousered apes ever whelped"), modern feminism (using Al Capp's "women's lip" formulation), the police (in favor), and George Patton (very much in favor). I remember first reading Greenway in National Review and thinking, You CAN'T say that! Well, if such a reaction comes from, well, a reactionary, then treat yourself to this: the humorous and telling observations of a man who knew as much as Erasmus and punched as hard as Dempsey.