In a now almost forgotten book called The Immediate Experience, an equally forgotten critic named Robert Warshow, in a volume of perceptive essay topics ranging from the 1930’s to gangster as hero and the Western, argued that popular culture is designed so as to help us organize violence and thereby help us make violence acceptable. Warshow was writing in his most explicit essay—the one on the Western—about the gunfighter as the figure who organizes violence for us. But the gunfighter doesn’t really work anymore. […]

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