Critics and John Wesley Hardin

Researching and writing about the unsettled frontier has become an obsession with me – which works out well since that’s what I do for a living. I check a variety of sources every week to see how the books I’ve written on that subject are doing. Most days I’m encouraged by the sales, but then there are the days where I look past those stats and glance at some of the reviews the work has received and feel like I’ve made a huge vocational error. Some people can be incredibly cruel and I don’t fully understand the reasoning behind it. It did get me thinking about criticism though. Why is it that every single activity in our lives is subject to a mean-spirited critique? Who wants to listen to some unqualified blowhard, having convinced themselves that their uninformed opinion is somehow relevant, yarble through an insufferably long-winded diatribe…Oops. Okay, I’m guilty here too, but having copped to that, I must say we truly are a nation of critics, sniping from La-z-Boys at a few active individuals struggling to effect political change, make a movie, write a book, tell a joke, design a better faucet-okay, that guy is a jerk. The faucets are fine, stop screwing with them, all right. The ones in airports are like science projects with the electronic eyes and motion sensors, water-saving springs – Faucet guy! Stop it! Look, we used to keep this need to criticize bottled up in the Arts Swamp where it caromed harmlessly off giant soup cans, blank verse, and untalented exhibitionists smearing themselves with chocolate. But now, it’s spilled over the media flood wall, and into every activity of our lives: Sports, pet training, home repair, snow removal-you name it, somewhere there’s a cable show dedicated to ripping it. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for solid, intelligent, constructive criticism. But when was the last time you read a review of something, a movie, play, book, that gave you a real feel of what the author was trying to say. For many critics, no matter what they write contains a personal shot at the writer, pet trainer, and yes, even the faucet guy. Now I don’t have any personal ax to grind here. I’m not the kind of person to name names – in fact, I have a hard time remembering the name of the insensitive blowhard that left a review on Amazon.com under the handle Jolie-de-livre. But uh…I feel so cleansed… The key thing to remember about critics is that they remain dependent on the innovator, the person doing the real work of creating. And because they just sit on the sidelines of life, never the hunter, they are doomed to be forgotten. But it’s not all their fault. I mean, we give them their chance when we rely too much on critics to make our choices for us. We think we need help, that somehow we don’t have all the facts. But you know something? We don’t need help! You like the Red Skelton painting? Buy the Red Skelton painting, all right? You know what you like better than they do. I’d be happy to send you the book in question and you can render your own opinion. Drop me a line and I’ll get a copy of Buffalo Gals to you as soon as possible. Use the contact section on this site to reach me. I’d be pleased to hear from you. Now, on to what really matters. On this day in the Old West in 1877, McNelly’s bulldog, John Barclay Armstrong, arrest John Wesley Hardin on a train in Pensacola. The outlaw, Jim Mann, was killed in the fray. Happy Monday.