Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
It was because of my great interest in the West, and my belief that its development would be assisted by the interest I could awaken in others, that I decided to bring the West to the East through the medium of the Wild West Show.
I am always surprised when I watch the weather report on German television. First they show the map of Europe and then the camera moves to the right. Then comes Kiev, then Moscow and then everything stops. This seems to be the West's view of us - of a wild Russia that begins past Moscow, a place one prefers not to see. This is a big mistake. The West must pay closer attention.
Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began.
Once the Eastern Bloc collapsed, what I call 'historical spontaneity' prevailed and the countries that were subject to Soviet control naturally gravitated to the West. That's where they sought their security; I don't think there was a way to avoid that. If we tried to exclude them, we would have today not one Europe, we would have three Europes: one in the West, one in the middle and one in the East, and the middle would be insecure and a tempting target. The insecurity felt [today] by Eastern Europe would be replicated on a much larger and more consequential scale.
I've blogged since 2001 and was first attracted to the medium by its wild-west aesthetic, if simply telling the truth that corporate media wasn't telling could be so rebellious as to be defined as 'wild west.'
When I was younger, I wanted to be a cop. Then I watched 'The Wild Wild West,' and so I wanted to be in the Secret Service like James West. At some point I realized, 'That guy is not in the Secret Service. He's an actor.' That sounds like a good idea too.
East and West are coming together. Whether in peace or anarchy - they are coming together. There needn't be a clash between East and West, between Islam and Europe.
Historically, epics are set in Africa or Asia or the Wild West, but if you make an epic today it's hard to disassociate from the contemporary realities of those places.
I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three months' stay in England and Europe that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter under what clime it flourishes, and that if you approached people with trust and affection you would have ten-fold trust and thousand-fold affection returned to you.
Nothing has changed in our relationship with East West. We have no relationship with East West. We've been withholding our labour for almost seven years now.
But in the West it is very easy to dissolve the ego. So whenever a Western seeker reaches an understanding that ego is the problem he can easily dissolve it, more easily than any Eastern seeker. This is the paradox - in the West ego is taught, in the East egolessness is taught. But in the West it is easy to dissolve the ego, in the East it is very difficult.
I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.
Ameen Rihani, one of the earliest Arab Americans, devoted his life to bringing the East and the West together. We are not of the East or the West, he wrote. No boundaries exist in our breast: We are free.
Permanent bonds of culture began to be formed between the extreme East and the extreme West of Europe by intermarriage, by commerce, by the admission of the nobles of Byzantium within the orders of chivalry.
The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.
Where the West has intervened in African domestic affairs, such as it did in Libya 2011, the country became a cradle of extremism that exports weapons, jihadists, and ideology to the rest of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.