These
cowboy movies, it was tough on people back in those days.
To which I respond.. Naw, those guys had air-conditioned
trailers, good food, medical attention, good hotels to spend
the night in after they shot the film for the day these guys
had a walk in the park.
Well, you can imagine I didn’t get much of a response out of
her, just some bad looks and comments under her breath that
I can’t hear.
But, you know it got me to thinking how deceived we are by
either the media or advertising in this country. Most of us
have grown up thinking pirates look like Captain Hook or
Long John Silver. I suppose the youngsters of today think
Johnny Depp is the true picture of a real pirate, but in
reality it just ain’t so. Pirates didn’t make folks walk the
plank. They plundered more grain, wheat and other stuff a
lot more often than gold and silver. Robert Louis Stevenson,
the author of Treasure Island had never even been on a ship
when he wrote his first book. Most of the stuff he and
others wrote were just made up in their heads and taken to
be the truth by the public. Being a pirate wasn’t a high old
adventure, it was a hard life.
Same thing about the wagon trains going West in the late
1800s. You and I have seen countless western movies where
the Virginia Mayo character rides in the wagon, wearing lots
of petticoats, long dresses and is always shown with her
hair styled just so along with lots of lipstick and makeup.
Yeah, right. The women wore sensible clothing, almost never
rode and certainly didn’t wear makeup or have a hair stylist
to help them look beautiful. That’s in the movies. Last week
when I was in Germany, I heard about a guy who wrote over 70
western novels about a character named ‘Old Shatterhand’.
The author wrote all of these fantastic best selling novels
before ever coming to the United States. The books
themselves are filled with errors, but still sell even today
and are wildly popular. As one person said ‘A lot of Germans
have never read the Bible, but they all have read about Old
Shatterhand’.
Last week, we saw some movie about Robin Hood, you guessed
it, everyone has rotten teeth, walking in ankle deep mud,
wearing clothes that look like they came out of flour sacks.
No color, everyone seems to be suffering from scurvy. Again,
movie stuff. The truth was that during the Middle Ages, most
people were in fairly good health since they were eating
fairly decent healthy food. They were about the same sizes
as we are today and they had color woven into fairly decent
clothing. It wasn’t until the 1600’s and the growth of the
cities that the health of those living in the cities began
to decline and people began to get smaller due to poor
nutrition. So much for the media. We are so easily fooled.
But, think about it. It isn’t just us. Look at the
commercials for dog and cat food. In one cat food commercial
I just saw, the food is being cooked and looks like it is
being served at some five star restaurant. Then it gets set
down on the floor and a little silver bell causes Fluffy to
rush into the room to dine on the gourmet presentation.
Consider this. If animals are color blind, then why do we
make their meals look like red meat or fresh fish? Why do we
pass out bags of tuna shaped or bone shaped dry food? Do we
think they can look at this and say to themselves — Hum,
this looks like a bone so it must be one. Or hey this piece
of tuna tastes kind of dry. What’s this about? No, I bet you
could dye your cat and dog food green or yellow and they
wouldn’t know the difference or even care. They just want
something to eat. The advertising people know that unless it
looks like something we humans would eat, then it won’t
sell.
I suppose the point of all of this is to say you really
can’t trust everything you see or hear to be the truth, but
then we all know that’s a fact. It’s a hard world out there,
isn’t it?
