Marshall Matt Dillon and Gunsmoke, My Favourite Positive Propaganda Re-Runs

A Simpler Time, a Simpler Way To Perceive the World and My Question of Why I Perceive Myself as Innocent

So I made a comment in Notes about another substacker’s philosophical idea and I thought it warrants a longer commentary. I wanted to discuss the idea of the morally right thing to do, and the morally right thing to be. One of the reasons I have been thinking about this subject lately is that I have learned by downloading an app to my TV called “Pluto” I am able to watch tons of old TV shows, albeit with commercials. The one show I keep coming back to is “Gunsmoke.” This iconic show began as a radio program in 1952 and was extremely popular. People in Edmonton may remember the AM station 630 CHED playing old radio shows after dark. I was pleased to find a few years back that I could get some Gunsmoke content on YouTube, which was pretty cool as well. I actually didn’t know the show went so far back as to have started with 1/2 hour episodes in black and white. All in all the show went on until I was about 4 years old in 1975, and the lead actor was James Arness, who was a giant of a man, and despite that it seemed he was always outdrawn, the bad guys often missed, but he never did.

The significance of Gunsmoke is that in almost all of their episodes, one learns a lesson about life. If you steal a person’s means of living, like his horse, you will be hanged for it. If you kill someone, you are getting off easy if you spend the rest of your life in jail because that too was a hanging offence. Marshall Matt Dillon, the giant James Arness, always seems to come up with the best lines, like:

“I want that gun Marshall.” (Bad guy in black hat)

“Bad enough to die for it?”

It is interesting to watch this show, I can’t get enough of it and I was delighted to hear that over 600 episodes were made. I went through a huge reconstruction of my morality when I was 18. That was the time that I first had severe psychosis and I was paranoid and delusional at times. I feared that the influence of my sister’s boyfriend who was a communist had caused my horrific experience inside a mental hospital on a locked ward. I would watch movies and read books about “Good Guys.” Some of the movies and books were war movies or books, cop shows, prison shows. Anything where a person can follow a simple moral compass, and it is very easy to understand who is right and who is wrong. One thing I have noticed that I find interesting is how the ‘good guys’ in shows like Gunsmoke, smoke and drink, something that in the church I attended for 8 years, was almost unthinkable. While I attended, I did smoke and was severely insulted, chastised, and even ridiculed for, but any drinking I did I caarefully hid from them. I was kind of pleased to later attend other churches that felt differently. For example, I once went to a Catholic service and learned that they not only allow drinking, and even the odd time of excessive drinking, but they actually drink real alcoholic wine in church.

One of the reasons I have this moral guidance away from alcohol is that I attended 12-step meetings for a long time. In the program I was in, it was accepted to be a smoker, but drinking seemed to be the greatest evil in the world. It was similar in other groups where one vice was strictly resisted, and other vices that other 12-step groups didn’t approve of were freely allowed. For example, I went to a 12-step group for gambling a few times and someone who held a leadership position in the group saw nothing wrong with having a beer after the meeting. Of course he had never had a problem with drinking, and I never saw it as becoming one with him, but I did have a certain amount of stigma regarding drinking.

What I wanted to chiefly address in this blog is how I viewed my own moral innocence in life. I was the youngest of three children in my family, and I was always being protected and encouraged. I worked hard in school, I excelled in sports and Air Cadets. I didn’t steal, or swear. But there were so many little things aside from that I eventually ended up doing that most people would see as being something only a morally bankrupt person does. For a long time I kept my self-view of innocence, even though at the age of 14 I picked up some bad habits. I started drinking booze, I started smoking cigars and cigarettes. This was acceptable in a European family. My dad had done these things at my age and still did, and he saw no reason why I should not be allowed to do the same. Around some people I went to school with (I didn’t attend church at this time), I was going off the rails. Joining cadets didn’t fully help any of this. One thing I recall from my early days was getting into a lot of fights. I justified my violent behaviour by setting boundaries when I fought. I would wrestle, I wouldn’t harm the other person. I would win the fight and then walk away. As I got older, this became more and more difficult. I recall being in a fight in grade nine when I wrestled the other guy down (in front of a huge audience) held him down and after people said they wanted to split us up and start the fight over, I just got up and walked away. I was punched many times, but I was no stranger to abuse. My brother, dad, and even some of my fellow Air Cadets had hit me harder on many occasions. Then when I went to climb the fence to get away from my assailant, one of his friends pushed me over it and I landed on my back. I keep on wondering what my parents were going through seeing me experience these things. This wasn’t the worst of it.

What is hard for me to understand is, there was literally something very wrong with me that few people felt compassion about and generally didn’t allow me any slack for. I likely was suffering from bipolar disorder and would do odd things. My hygiene wasn’t the best. I had a cruel streak. Often I would get very animated, agitated, and even violent when I had been drinking. I hated alcohol for what it did to my dad and the fights we had while he was drunk, but I didn’t see how it was harming me and harming my reputation.

It was an odd thing going through school with my condition. I was suffering from crippling depression despite outward appearances to the contrary. I think all of these symptoms and signs added up to me being the subject of an incredibly cruel prank. I had been friends with a couple of guys who were gun nuts. I like shooting and we would often go to a range and let loose for a while. Then a couple of things happened, one was that I dated one of the gun nuts’ sister, and I also had a falling out with the whole group. Near the end of a long and lonely summer when my depression seemed at its worst, one of the people in the group, who lived next door to the head gun nut called me up and wanted to meet me. My brother warned me that him and his best friend had thought of dating her but backed off when they got to know her. Somehow I felt that this was a huge compliment, and I was so desperately lonely and sad that I agreed to meet her at what was a strange place to meet anyone after nightfall.

Basically, the young woman was upset with me because of my foul mouth (character flaw number 25) and with the help of the gun nuts, set things up so I would admit that I liked her and then she punched me in the jaw as hard as she could. I took the blow and tried to reason with her, but all of a sudden I heard all kinds of laughter erupting. It was the gun nuts. I saw no humour in what they did and walked away. I was left feeling guilty in some ways, humiliated in others. Suffice to say this incident only made my dreary life more difficult.

Here I was, a 16 year-old with no friends in the world. I had a job delivering pizza but it was nothing like the way others treated the job. I knew one guy who delivered pizza and his friends stayed in the car with him and they were all drinking and having a grand old time. I simply careened around the streets of Edmonton and wished I could get in touch with my one closest friend who had run away from home a few months prior to that.

When I look back now, what I think is that I was making a lot of bad choices in life. I like to think I have gotten better, and though I may not be innocent, I see myself as a moral person. But still I have temptations. Because of years of abject poverty, if I see money I immediately plan how to steal it, even though I don’t think I would ever do such a thing and I have plenty of my own money from years of savings and hard work. I have another problem with myself, I feel horrible sometimes that I am collecting disability benefits. Any psychiatrist I see would agree that my illness is certainly severe enough for me to need to be on long-term disability, but still I feel bad about it. Despite my diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and anxiety, I can function. I can write blogs. I can give presentations for the schizophrenia society. In the US, I would be considered a bum and a parasite, as well as in many other countries.

So, to go back to Gunsmoke for a moment, when I feel morally lost or want to "program myself with 1950s/60s propaganda” I love to watch old shows where things are stated in much more black and white terms. Some people are bad, some people can’t handle their booze. Some people steal, rob banks or trains. All of them end up on the wrong side of Marshall Matt Dillon’s six-gun.

But in my own thoughts, I wrote this blog to explore the concept of who I am. Maybe I can be defined in simple terms like in the old TV show I used to love so much as a child. In crises, like a fire, everyone bands together. If a child falls down a well, everyone digs. In our modern society, all of these tasks, including policing, has become specialized and compartmentalized, which I feel in a way makes our society less human. When street people think of police, it is always “Us against them.” For one of their personal group to call police on another is worthy of getting a knife in the back. And then there is how the police, at least where I live, seem to be disconnected with the people they are intended to serve. Many times in interactions with police I have been insulted, belittled, told why they can’t do anything to help me including treating me like a human being. I long for the days when if someone robbed a bank, all able-bodied men (sorry ladies) who had a gun would meet up, form a posse, be sworn in as deputies, and head off in search of the evildoers. Gunsmoke takes me back to a simpler time and makes me want to tip my hat and say “Howdy” to everyone I come near. Maybe that is the source of my self-perceived innocence. Who knows? I would love any comments you my readers can allow me.