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By Gary Cutrer
March 2010

It used to be that America’s values, our moral anchors—the ideas and concepts about life and living that we consider correct and good—came from tradition, from what our parents taught us, from our school teachers and from our religious life. Some of our values came from books and some from movies. Some came from role models, whether they were historical or political figures, heroes in books or movies, or our family members we looked up to.

These days, for a whole lot of Americans, values come from the popular culture and only from the popular culture. Even if a young person is grounded in family and religion, is well educated and well read, there is some amount of influence on the way they see things and what they consider moral and correct and good that comes from the constant barrage of messages from TV, movies, newspapers and magazines and sources on the Internet.

I say all this not to be preachy nor to condemn anyone for what they view, read or listen to, but to suggest that there is a power base in this country that is often overlooked as a power base. Whoever holds the most power in the popular culture, shapes the culture of the country. And because many, many young people are raised without much of a moral compass, the popular culture, mass media and entertainment, becomes their reference point for developing a set of values.

There’s not a conspiracy in entertainment and media to promote a certain political ideology or to present a list of concepts and standards they think we should embrace. There’s not a conspiracy, but there’s a trend—a long-term one. The trend for 45 years or more has been to more and more present a left-leaning political point of view, a strongly urban point of view, an anti-Christian point of view, a “business and corporations are not to be trusted” point of view, and an anti-military position.

There is a mindset, a prominent way of thinking. Not all players in the mass media and entertainment think this way. But for a big, big percentage of the power players in news media, publishing, and especially in the movie business, this is the conventional wisdom.

The powerful influence of the pop culture movers and shakers mainstreams things like reactionary or even radical environmentalism. Agriculture use of privately owned land often is presented as destructive or harmful to the environment. Trapping is mean and bad. Wearing fur is absolute evil. Shooting wolves or coyotes from a helicopter is cruel, even when the goal is to control the population and prevent predators from wiping out deer or elk, never mind livestock.

The pop culture mavens subtly and sometimes not so subtly promote their politics as well. Stereotypical conservatives or Republicans in a movie wear  three-piece suits, are intolerant of all points of view but their own and are mean to dogs and kittens.

Armed services members are portrayed as poor, uneducated recruits who are trained to kill, kill, kill and more often than not return home mentally unstable as a result of their experiences.

Movies and music tell young people that casual sex is good. Tattoos are great. Being a “gansta” is where it’s at. Pants should be so saggy it takes double stick tape to hold them to plumber’s crack level.

Do you notice product placement in movies? The influence of movies alone is so great, so strong, that Coca-Cola or Google will pay millions to show actors using their product in a big one—which is not bad. But it demonstrates the power movies have to influence opinion and action. When the movie “Urban Cowboy,” came out in 1980, everyone from the Wall Street tycoon to 9-to-5 Joe was sporting a fancy cowboy hat and boots and dancing the two-step. And that was only a couple years after they’d been disco dancing in their white leisure suits after seeing “Saturday Night Fever.”

I don’t want anyone to shut down Hollywood. I don’t want to censor the New York Times. I don’t want to preview and approve the lyrics to the latest hip-hop song—East coast or West coast.

The remedy to bad speech is more speech, not less. Those who care to influence America’s values and its culture—for the better—need to become players in pop culture. How to do that? I don’t know.

Time to invest in a movie project you believe in? To create a “new, improved” Hollywood? Those interested in changing the popular culture and thus influence values, must participate, and that means they must finance and produce compelling entertainment and informational content that conveys their message, their ideals.

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By Gary Cutrer
September 2009

While completing the September 2009 magazine I received a note from Ross McSwain saying that Elmer Kelton had passed. Though I barely knew him, I was, and remain, a fan.

In the 1980s I read every Lois L’Amour novel ever written, I think, and I thoroughly enjoyed them all. I’d never heard of Elmer Kelton at the time. Then, at a civil court hearing in Rankin, Texas, I met and befriended Paul Patterson of Crane. I had read Paul’s book, “Crazy Women in the Rafters,” about growing up on a ranch near Upland, original county seat of Upton County, and I complimented him on it.

He refused my praise and told me I ought to read a book or two by his former student, Elmer Kelton.

“Elmer who?” I asked.

Paul went on to tell me that he had been Elmer’s school teacher in Crane and that after serving in World War II and attending the University of Texas, Elmer had gone on to become one of the best agriculture writers there is and all along during his career had written a lot of novels—mostly Western novels. It was obvious Paul was proud of his student and admired his work.

I took Paul’s advice. The first Kelton novel I read was “The Wolf and the Buffalo,” a story about the interaction of the Comanches and the buffalo soldiers on the post-Civil War frontier. I expected a Western adventure yarn. I got that and much more.

Kelton gave heft and depth to his characters I’ve rarely seen in the work of other Western writers.

The plot was more than adventure. It was a time capsule view of life of the era, featuring elements of humor, love, betrayal, tragedy and, ultimately, survival.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Kelton for the Angelo State University student newspaper at his home about 1989. I walked in, nervous to meet a real celebrity. I was surprised at how ordinary his house on Oxford Street, near ASU, was.

Mr. Kelton didn’t act like a celebrity. He welcomed me warmly and we settled in for the interview. At the time he was busily writing “Slaughter,” a novel about the buffalo hunters of the late 1800s.  His tiny office in his modest home was spartan save for an old desk, a couple of chairs and lots of books—and a computer, a DOS model with a blue-screened word processor showing on the monitor, a few sentences evident. There it was, one of those magical books in progress, I thought.

Kelton was down to earth, helpful, and didn’t even complain when the staff photographer for the school newspaper barged in to take his photo.

I’ve since read scores of Kelton books and experienced West Texas through his eyes. I’ve ridden along with him through familiar places in his books and met characters who I swear I’ve met on ranches and in small towns around West Texas.

It’s not too late to get to know Elmer Kelton—through his writing. If you haven’t read one of his novels, you can get one at a bookstore or at your local library. I guess we’re remembered for what we do and who we are and what we leave behind. Elmer Kelton has left behind quite a legacy. He will be missed.

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By Gary Cutrer
July 2009

We get some unusual phone calls here in the magazine office. I think it has something to do with Google and keywords. The World Wide Web and Google are now everybody’s information service, their “4-1-1” if you will, and that’s where the keywords come in. People “Google” a word and search results contain a link to our website and they find our phone number on the website. Words like “ranch,” “meat goat,” “mesquite,” and “Dorper” bring in the calls.

I’ve gotten many calls from Mexico and Central American countries where the caller is wanting to buy goats or sheep. Usually they speak only Spanish but they try their best to communicate in English.

One day, Sarah, who used to work for us, came busting into my office. “Talk to this guy on the phone! I can’t understand a word he’s saying. He keeps repeating something like ‘Darba Cheeves, Darba Cheeves,’ over and over, and I don’t know what he wants!”

I took the call and asked him in Spanish what he was calling about. “Yo quiero comprar unos Dorpers,” he said, “I want to buy some Dorpers.” When I get those calls I explain that we are a magazine, una revista, and that we write about Dorper sheep and Boer goats, but we don’t sell them. Then I always give the caller some names out of our Breeder Directory to call.

Just the other day a TV producer from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s production arm called me looking for participants for a TV reality show they were doing. Maybe you’ve seen it. The U.S. version of the show is called “The World’s Strictest Parents.” As the producer explained it to me, two extemely spoiled and bratty British teens are made to live with a host family for a week and their experience doing so is recorded and edited into an episode. The BBC producer said she was looking for a potential host family in Oklahoma or Texas to give the kids a hard time, make them do chores and be the “World’s Strictist Parents.” I told her I’d pass the word along.

One day several years ago, about the time anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was camping and protesting alongside the road to President George W. Bush’s ranch near Crawford, Texas, a reporter who said he was with the Los Angeles Times called me. He wanted to know just what constituted a “real ranch” in Texas, and did President Bush have enough acres to be calling his spread a real honest to goodness ranch? The reporter had found our website by Googling the word “ranch” or “Texas ranch.” I guess he figured we were the ranch experts.
“Depends on what your definition of ‘ranch’ is,” I told him. “How many acres does the president have?” I asked.

“Bush only has 1,600 acres,” he replied.

“Well, near Waco, Texas, 1,600 acres would support quite a few animal units, so I guess you could call that a real livestock operation, all right,” I answered his question. “Yep, that qualifies as a ranch.”

The Times reporter seemed a little miffed at that. I guess he wanted me to say, “Heck, no! You call that a ranch?! Why, Bush wouldn’t know a ranch from a Kennebunkport country club.” That way the reporter could add to the hit piece he was writing and run it in the L.A. Times.

One day I got a call from a newspaper reporter from a big daily in Florida. He had noticed a lot of people in his area were raising goats and he wanted to know just what that was all about.  “Well,” I began the usual explanation, “There is growing interest in raising meat goats, breeds such  as the Boer goat, Spanish goats . . .”

“What!?” the reporter stopped me in mid explanation. “MEAT goats? You mean you EAT these goats?”
“Well . . . yes. That’s why we call them ‘meat goats,’” I said.

The reporter was quiet for a minute. “Isn’t that like eating a dog?” he asked.

I knew this call was going to last a while. Add a comment