Obama’s a target at O.K. Corral
MOOD OF AMERICA: In modern-day Tombstone, they’re quick to condemn Democrats and a president whose middle name is Hussein
TOMBSTONE, ARIZ. – At high noon today, just as it was in history, gunfire crackles over the saloons and stagecoaches of the Old West’s most authentically phoney village. Mortally wounded desperadoes stagger, topple, and croak, while their tin-badged terminators repair to Big Nose Kate’s for poker and rotgut until it’s time to slay for pay again.
In the old silver- and goldmining centre of Tombstone, down in Cochise County, 50 kilometres north of the Mexican border, the best-attended duels are staged daily at the O.K. Corral, a parking lot for palominos where, in 1881, Assistant Marshal Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and a tipsy and tubercular oral surgeon from Georgia named John Henry “Doc” Holliday teamed up to exterminate a teenage cowpuncher named Billy Clanton and two brothers named Mclaury. Even when the mines gave out, the infamy persisted; hence Tombstone’s enduring, endearing reputation as The Town Too Tough To Die.
These days, they’re only firing blanks, or so we pray. The town’s congresswoman, until she retired recently, was Gabrielle Giffords.
That brief and famous fusillade at the O.K. Corral made the unscathed, self-promoting Wyatt a celebrity in his own lifetime, engendered more than 1,000 films and television episodes, and became the signature shootout of an era that probably was a lot more placid for the most part than modern-day Phoenix. The melodramatic re-enactment that is staged in front of a grandstand behind a souvenir shop continues to attract hundreds of tourists to every performance at $10 a pop.
“Enjoy the show, or I’ll kill you,” one of the actors warns the audience, brandishing his six-shooter. Half the licence plates you see here in February seem to be from Saskatchewan.
The script for the current pantomime of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was writ- ten by a blue-eyed Swede from Watchung, N.J., by way of Kansas City who goes by the stage name Stephen Keith.
What brings me to Tombstone is to sink a mine shaft down into the Mood of America.
It has been 13 months since Giffords was gravely wounded in the brain – and six other people, including a nine-year-old girl, were killed – in a strip-mall ambush by a psychotic young Tucson triggerman. Giffords, a Democrat who truly seems to be too tough to die in her own right, has been compelled to abandon her seat in the House of Representatives, a special election is in the offing to replace her, and the Arizona primary that will help to decide the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States is just a few days away. And here is Keith/ Dr. Holliday, impeccable in a black suit, black hat, waxed moustache and baby-blue eyes, standing inside the O.K. Corral in 2012 and telling me that what America needs is more firearms, not fewer.
“The LACK of guns hurts people,” he says. “An armed society is a polite society. In the 1880s, Virgil Earp put up a sign in Tombstone that said ‘No guns in town,’ and everybody objected to it. Especially the Democrats!”
“I’m the only Doc Holliday who doesn’t think I’m the reincarnation of the real one,” Keith goes on. “I’m an actor, playing a role. These other guys BELIEVE this stuff.”
Asked where his political feelings lie in this election year, the writer/director/ thespian places himself “several miles to the right of Rush Limbaugh. There’s a line that I put in the script – ‘The silver mines go straight down to the Devil’ – well, it’s the truth. EVERYTHING here runs on hate.
“I don’t know what people were thinking when they elected Obama. Don’t get me started on how that Muslim-cartel-sponsored terrorist-supported guy got in the White House. His middle name is HUSSEIN, for heaven’s sake!”
Tucked in Doc Holliday’s waistband are a latter-day, ivory-handled Taurus Gaucho pistol from Brazil and a genuine antique Colt Lightning, manufactured in 1875 in Hartford, Conn., where, Keith notes, “you certainly can’t get a gun now.”
One of his colleagues is Katelyn Studenski of Massachusetts, a 21-year-old damsel in décolletage who plays the Earps’ niece, Hattie, in the one-act shoot-em-up. Asked about the sitting commanderin-chief in faraway Washington, Studenski allows that “I do understand he’s trying to do a lot of good but Congress won’t let him.”
It’s the only praise for the president I hear in Tombstone all day.
“I probably won’t vote, it’s lose-lose anyway,” Studenski shrugs. “I would only vote for Hillary Clinton. When her husband was president, she pretty much ran everything anyway.”
Make-believe gunplay is not the only tunnel to Tombstone’s shiny, bloody past – there are several tours daily down into the tapped-out Good Enough Mine, founded circa 1877. Standing outside the entry shaft, looking as shaggy as Gabby Hayes in a town where most of the tourists are old enough to know who Gabby Hayes was, is a man named Mike Benjamin who, like just about everyone here, came from someplace else.
In his case, he came from a federal prison in Minnesota: 18 months for grand theft auto.
“I’m going to be a victim now because I’m a felon and can’t have a gun,” Benjamin grouses through a beard that hasn’t been mowed in a decade. He says he moved to this town with his fiancée so that he could have the word “tombstone” on his marriage licence. As for his politics, he’s several miles to the right of Stephen Keith.
“The country, as far as I’m concerned, is going to hell fast,” he begins. “It’s just getting to be a miserable place to live. Rich politicians don’t have any idea how it is to struggle, because they’ve never had to.
“I’ve heard all my life that anybody from any walk of life can grow up to be president, but it’s just not true. You’ve got to be a millionaire – if you’re not rich, you don’t have a chance in this coun- try. You’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell, or in Tombstone, which is pretty much the same thing.”
Benjamin tells me that he went straight after he got out of prison: straight into the upholstery business, which supported him for 34 years before the bottom fell out.
“When Obama got into office,” he grumbles, “everybody started losing their jobs. Getting your couch reupholstered isn’t something you NEED, like food and gas. It’s not totally his fault, but he sure seems to want to keep it that way.
“What I’d like to see is a president that lives in a 12by-six-foot mobile home and drives an ’86 Chevy half-ton with bald tires. Let HIM be president!”
(Benjamin drives a ’93 Dodge Dakota with no paint left on it.)
“I’m thinking of going down to Mexico and staying long enough to become a citizen,” says the bearded one. “Then I’ll sneak back here and have all kinds of rights and free health care.”
We talk for a while about the O.K. Corral and the Western heroes of our childhoods, all of whom seemed to be twirling Colt Lightnings.
“I’m a big fan for carrying guns,” Mike Benjamin says. “I think everybody should carry one. If I tell you to give me your wallet, then instead of pulling out your wallet, you can pull out your gun and kill me.”
Suddenly feeling naked without a shootin’ iron, I head for a shop called Cochise Trading Post Guns & Ammo, where, on the stereo just as I walk in, Marty Robbins is singing a happy verse from El Paso: “I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle, I feel the bullet go deep in my chest.”
The proprietor is an escapee from Illinois named Byron Neubauer.
“How’s business?” I inquire.
“Dead,” Neubauer sighs. “I haven’t sold a gun in six months. But if I could sell to Canadians, I’d be doing really well right now.”
Like Stephen Keith and Mike Benjamin, the pistol pedlar sees the United States on a spiral to oblivion, with good and evil even more clearly defined than it was in the days of the Clantons and Earps, with Barack Obama riding shotgun, so to speak, in the devil’s posse.
“He’s got everything so messed up, it’s really a nightmare,” says Byron Neubauer. “All he wants to do is spend, spend, spend. He’s trying to make it like his country, where he lives: Kenya.
As for the unfortunate Gabby Giffords, Neubauer is of the opinion that “it was all her fault. She was against guns, everybody around her was against guns. If anybody in the audience had a gun that day, it would have ended right away and that little girl wouldn’t have got shot.”
But the coming primary and the looming general election offer little succour: “The Republicans,” Byron Neubauer says, “they’re all dummies, too. All they worry about is how bad the other guy is.”
“Are there any Democrats in Tombstone?” I ask the forlorn gunsmith.
“They’re all over the place,” he replies. “They ruin the world.”