There’s a movie out now titled “Cowboys and Aliens.” And that’s just wrong. Harrison Ford must have been hurting for work.
Now I don’t have any credentials to make me a movie critic. I also don’t have credentials that authenticate me as a food critic. But I know what I like.
I believe if there is to be order in the cosmos, some things need to be constant. Fire engines should be red and not green, watermelons should be red on the inside (not yellow) and it should be cowboys and Indians.
I realize that a lot of imagination and creativity have to go into movie making. But I also think that some things don’t mix, like cowboys and aliens. To me that’s as off track as portraying Washington, D.C., as Bethlehem. Finding three wise men and a virgin would certainly pose a science fiction scenario.
It’s difficult for me to perceive a bunch of guys sitting around a campfire singing “Tumbling Tumbleweed” when all of a sudden their herd of cattle is zapped up into a spaceship by a beam of light. And how can you expect cowboys armed with Colt .45s and Winchesters to take on creatures with laser guns and flying saucers? To me this is as strange as serving chitlins in a French restaurant.
I won’t watch this movie, but I have to assume that the cowboys will win, and that is as farfetched as writing a script where congressmen vote down a pay raise – truly a concept alien to our being.
Recently, I watched a program on the Discovery Channel where scientists explored the idea of defending the earth against extraterrestrial invaders. The conclusion was that if forces from another galaxy had the technology to come here, then we would have no chance at all. It would be like a windmill taking on a tornado. It would be like Sarah Palin appearing on Jeopardy.
Now there are some folks who believe we were visited by aliens hundreds or thousands of years ago. The Roswell, N.M., space alien story of 1945 is still being discussed and researched. That’s probably the most famous event that smells of extraterrestrials in recorded American history.
So let’s just say that if there is any truth about alien connections with these phenomenons, then the timing would not have excluded cowboys and aliens in a similar time frame. But the cowboys still wouldn’t have won.
Now someone is going to tell me that I’m not allowing for poetic license. Actually, I have no problem with poetic license. I embrace it myself from time to time. Heck, the other night I watched “The Sons of Katie Elder” for about the sixth time. At the end of the movie, John Wayne fired nine shots from his six-shot revolver without reloading. That’s poetic license, and we’ve always cut the cowboys some slack in that regard.
But if he had flipped a switch and started firing lasers, that would have turned me off big time.
Apparently it doesn’t take a lot to entertain us these days. “Deadliest Catch” is very popular on television. And in every episode you know that they’re going to catch crabs in rough seas with a couple of the shipmates cussing each other. And then we have “Ice Road Truckers” where truck drivers slide into snow banks, and they cuss each other. We have “Swamp People” who kill alligators for a living, and they cuss each other. And we have “The Jerry Springer Show” where people just cuss each other.
So now I’m wondering, do aliens cuss? And if they run out of laser juice, do they throw their guns at their opponents? Well, maybe I should watch this movie.

Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer and can be reached at 985-4545.