Tag: Wild West

Fast Draw at the Annie Oakley Event: What the world looks like out in God’s country

For me, the western arts is a religion of sorts, it’s something I think about every day, and I work with some aspect of it several times a day in just about everything I do. And for context, the white hat I wear so much came from my favorite hat shop in Jackson, Wyoming, on an extraordinary pilgrimage I made there with my entire family. I’ve traveled worldwide and seen many of the world’s best things up close and personal. And I’ve been to rodeos they have out West, specifically the one at Cody, Wyoming, which is fantastic and about as good as it gets. A rodeo experience out to Cody, Wyoming, is in itself worth a vacation just to do that. But I will say that the Annie Oakley Festival they have every year in Darke County, Ohio, in the town of Greenville, is one of the best displays of Americana on planet earth, and I never get tired of attending. I look forward to it every time they have it, and when they do, I usually am involved in some aspect or another in the shows they put on. This year I was in the bullwhip competitions, as I usually am. But additionally, I was able to be in the Ohio Fast Draw Association’s competition, a two-day event that I have always thought brought the Annie Oakley Festival into the realm of uniqueness that establishes it as a vacation destination all its own. For people looking to get in touch with America again, I would recommend everyone to mark the last weekend of July on their calendars and make the trip to the Annie Oakley Festival when it’s happening in Greenville and to put the noise of life aside for a few days and experience the festival in all its glory.

I’ve been participating in the Annie Oakley Festival for a few decades. During that entire time, I worked with my friend Gery Deer at the Western Showcase to put on Saturday bullwhip competitions that are always crowd pleasers. I started working with whips on my grandparents’ farms when I was very young, so they have always been a part of my life. When I learned that my great grandfather could crack a fly off the wall with a bullwhip, I decided that was something I was going to do, and over the years, it has become my own version of a martial art. In my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I take many of the concepts I have been thinking about over the years from the Annie Oakley Festival and apply them to the ways of the world that have influences from everywhere. I have thought of the Annie Oakley Festival as a kind of unique American philosophy that shows what all people, no matter where they come from, gravitate to when they have the freedom to be away from government and go to God’s country without a lot of United Nations influence. And from the showman side, I have watched the audiences and come to some very definitive understandings that are unique to the Annie Oakley Festival. The Buffalo Bill Wild West show has always been a definitive presentation of what America uniquely is. Without Annie Oakley, it would never have become the global phenomenon it was. And I find that Greenville festival every year to be the embodiment of that definition, more so than in places like Cody, Wyoming, which is the authentic real deal cowboy life, right in the middle of a desert in the traditional way people think; of the “West.” But it’s the swagger that came from the Buffalo Bill show that Annie Oakley specifically brought to the whole exhibition that I have always loved so much. It’s why that event is a yearly reset period for me, where I clear my thoughts and push the noise aside for a few days and just soak up the American flags and the smell of gunsmoke.

After the bullwhip competitions, I always used to go over and watch the fast draw guys. But I couldn’t make fast draw part of my life for a long time. Getting the equipment to participate was a bit expensive, but more than anything was the time. Many of the shoots last entire weekends and are all over the place. You can’t just show up at Annie Oakley once a year to commit to the sport and compete. It has only been over the last few years that I finally have had the time to commit to it, so it’s something pretty new for me. But it was always their shoot at the Annie Oakley Festival that I looked forward to watching. So, it was really enjoyable to be able to attend as a competitor, and I made the most of it. This was the first year I did both events, the Ohio Fast Draw Association shoot and the Western Arts Showcase, so it was a very busy weekend for me. So busy that I didn’t even have time to look at my phone and answer the many text messages that were adding up due to the news of the world. I was able to get caught up after the festival, but the time off was well worth it. I have provided several pictures and videos of the event to capture a bit of the atmosphere, which I never get tired of.

That’s what makes my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business such a unique book on business and life in America in general. The Annie Oakley Festival has always given me a unique opportunity to see America for what it is and get to know people as spectators wanting to get a piece of that old Buffalo Bill Wild West show that so clearly defined our young country to a world perplexed by it. That challenge is still very true and even hostile at times. But when you are there, you can clearly see what people want and how much of that noisy world they are willing to take. Practicing the combat arts, the fast draw, the bullwhips, and the cowboy-mounted shooting are all exhibitions of the kind of skills that make America, America. And there is no need for apologies regarding the Second Amendment there. No hint to it. People generally agree on how the world is, understand right and wrong, and treat each other well and respectfully. The world does not look so screwed up when you escape the coastal media influences of Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. It’s always good to see people for what they are. Many from the liberal coasts would be horrified by the stoic tenacity of the people from the flyover states, especially those who attend by the thousands the Annie Oakley Festival. But what’s clear when you attend something like that festival in Greenville, Ohio, is that there are a lot more of those people than there are from liberal politics. You just don’t hear from them on the nightly news. They are out working in the fields, and living life as the coastal types fly over, high above in comfortable jets going from one big city to another, maintaining their bubbles that allow liberalism to grow as a concept. That is until they stop by some place like Cody, Wyoming, and see what people really think of them. Or, they drive into the heart of Ohio, way out in God’s country, and see the many yard signs dedicated to Trump, and get a sense that Annie Oakley never really died, and neither did the Buffalo Bill Wild West show. It lives on in Darke County, Ohio, and recharges me yearly. I spend my days between Annie Oakley events thinking about it. It’s never far from my mind. And given the way the world is now, they would do well to learn their own lessons from the Annie Oakley Festival. It’s a vacation destination all its own and well worth the time to do so. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Nature of Corruption: Uncovering history at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West

The Nature of Corruption

I can’t say it enough, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, turned out to be a treasure trove of philosophy that was just what America needed at just the right moment, at least for me, so that I could explain it to other people.  It was interesting; my family was mad at me for the breakneck pace of a big trip we were all on together.  We had just spent the day before seeing all the big sites in Yellowstone.  Every day, we had been getting up early and doing more in a day than most people do in a week of vacation.  Not only were my two daughters with me and their spouses but all my grandchildren as well.  I was on a mission; I was uncovering rocks putting together the essence of what was happening to our country.  The election year of 2020 had presented us all with lots of unusual problems, and I was looking for answers in 2021.  In June of that year, my family was deep in the rugged buttes of Wyoming several miles from the East entrance to the park outside Cody, Wyoming, which convinced me they needed a break from all the adventuring.  So, we agreed on a compromise; we’d take a day off our adventure and go to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in town and take it easy to let everyone catch their breath.  It was their idea, actually, but I didn’t tell them that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was one of the places I had on my list that was always at the top, and I wanted to go there badly.  So quite unexpectedly, I found myself there with my entire immediate family, and it turned out to be one of the great highlights of my life.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of those wonderful days with my family that intersected with questions I had been asking all my life, and suddenly there were answers. 

My concern was in asking the nature of corruption; we had just seen the removal of President Trump by a rigged election and hostile Democrats hell-bent on socialism and communism.  They had seen how well Bernie Sanders, the socialist, polled among young people during the presidential election the year prior, so now they were pulling off the masks and showing themselves to be the socialist they always were.  They were behaving the way I always said were their true intentions, and for many Americans, they were shocked by it.  At that time, I was also working on my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which I had finished on the road that year and was in the editing process.  At the center of that book was an understanding of the nature of corruption.  My point was that some of the best years of American life that was least corrupt were the one where the modern socialists were declaring to be one of the most, the Victorian age, the end of the Gilded era, and the start of the Progressive.  For me, it was the other way around, so I was very interested in why the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was so popular among Americans for the closing decades of the 1800s and how Trump was an interesting call-back to that Make America Great Again sentiment that also was there with the Buffalo Bill Wild West show.

I have an interesting relationship with Buffalo Bill, each year in Ohio; I participate in the Annie Oakley Festival in Darke County during the last weekend of July. I have done that for most of my adult life.  It’s always been a throwback to the Buffalo Bill show which Annie Oakley was the trick shooting act.  When I was a kid, the Clint Eastwood film Bronco Billy touched me deeply, and I wanted to be a part of that life, so the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio, gave me that chance, which I have always seen as the essence of American life.  I used those experiences to paint my book’s unique point of view to what America was, especially from business life.  So a lot was culminating there at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West that the average visitor wouldn’t have experienced.  But the museum didn’t disappoint.  It was top class, one of the best of its kind in the world, and I brought back from there a real treasure of books and art that I would spend the rest of the year studying, which is the usual way I do things.  I visit places; then I learn all I can about those places long after I’ve gone.  In that way, my visits last a long time, but I get to know a place months and years after the initial visit.  And it was in this exploration that I ran across the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward and discovered precisely what I had been looking for, the link to many of our modern problems.  That book had been trendy during the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and it held the answer to the long question of why that show had been so popular with people, even in this modern day.  It even explained why Trump was such a good president and why so many people on the socialist left wanted to see him utterly destroyed. 

Bellemy’s biggest mistake in his book Looking Backward was that he assumed that an administrative state of the central government could regulate corruption out of existence.  This idea of a socialist utopia was very attractive to some people, and they became progressives that would shape the Democrat party we see today early in the 1900s. Ironically, many Americans, without realizing it, understood that the life of Buffalo Bill and his show had touched on the essence of America, and they wanted to see more of it before it vanished as progressives had been promising.  There was honor and invention in the Wild West that Buffalo Bill showed in his displays.  America was remarkably uncorrupted for a few years of western expansion until corruption took over on the heels of Progressives and the work of Karl Marx sought to sabotage it right out of the gate, which is a battle that is still being waged to this day.  As it turned out, and it’s evident at the Buffalo Bill gun museum on the Center of the West campus, gun ownership in America had punched a window into the long history of corruption in the world. Buffalo Bill represented the best to have come from that philosophic period.  This bit of history was so remarkable that Plato and Aristotle would have never conceived of such a thing. Still, there it was in the American west, the defeat of corruption before the world’s governments could taint it with their looting presence.  And the left never figured it out. It’s an easy answer “Looking Backward” at how childlike Bellamy was in his assumptions within his book.  The socialist utopia that Karl Marx wanted and the Bellamyites who followed him for years after that book instead made corruption worse through the administrative state.  We were all a lot better off when the world was, as Buffalo Bill showed it.  And people understood that when they went to see his show. 

The nature of corruption comes from any organization of people who are put in power over other people. The other people have no means to check the power inflicted upon them.  The magic of America that no other society in the world had figured out is that with Americans having gun ownership, they could control the influence of corruption as it grows within any centralized authority. That centralized authority might be our corporations or our local, state, and federal governments.  Corruption was always going to happen, but the ownership of guns kept it checked in healthy ways that worked best before the works of Karl Marx infected American academic circles with a completely foreign concept from Europe that fed corruption rather than controlling it.  And that was something new for me to think about.  I think it’s normal to have thoughts about something where you know it’s right or wrong, but we often don’t understand why.  Well, at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, they had recorded “why,” and it was just the right thing I had been looking for.  It’s not enough to say that something doesn’t work for emotional reasons.  But in the context of history, we have preserved facts that we can study and apply to our modern-day.  And within that study, we have our answer on the nature of corruption and what we can do to control it.  It’s in the minds of all societies to have corruption.  For the liberal, they think they can educate it out of people.  But in the process, they make much more of it.  Yet, in the proven history of western expansion, we did control corruption for a healthy period, and the world was much better for it.  History proves it so.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

There is Nothing Worse than Saying Something Cannot be Done: Managing unknowns for victory

Sometimes the Answers are Where Nobody Looks

For perspective, I feel like I say it 1000 times in a week; limits are meant to be overcome, not yielded to.  When I hear someone say, I can’t do this because of this, or I can’t do that, I immediately hear laziness in the terminology. It’s a lazy approach to life because skills are often needed to be developed to achieve a task.  And when people tell you that something can’t be done, it’s because they are too lazy to do it, plain and simple.  I understand limits, but as I talk about constantly in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, perceptions of what is achievable today will be shattered tomorrow with lots of practice.  That is certainly the case with various fast draw competitions that go on all over the country that are less known to most of the world because they exist in pockets of Americana.  We seem to understand these kinds of things in sports, where rookies improve with experience, and that few people expect a newly drafted football player to go straight to the NFL and be a superstar.   It takes time and development to become great.  And that is true too in how we make all our livings.  When I hear someone tell me that it takes this much time to do this kind of thing, that is never a fixed value.  But is only a point of reference that should always be pushed for and achieved.  That is why I suggest that all business people stop thinking in controlled statistical ways and always look for innovation opportunities to explore what can be done, not what lazy people tell you can be.

Bullwhip Speed and Accuracy

Every year that I do the Annie Oakley Wild West Show in Darke County during the last weekend of July each year, I go through this process.  It’s always one of the fun weekends that I give myself to keep the world in focus.  I love Darke County, Ohio.  It reminds me of many towns out west and brings the heart of America close, so it’s easy to see.  And this year was no different.  We have the bullwhip competitions that I always participate in, where many of these ideas about business have matured over the years and eventually evolved into the themes of this book.  Now that I am one of the elderly participants, the competitions have become a period of self-reflection for me rather than a nervous do-or-die thing with legacy performers from years past.  As I also talk about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, young people need more than anything a reputation to launch them into life.  Well, I have my reputation well intact, and nobody can ever take that from me, even if the thing we are doing is relatively tiny in the scheme of things.  The bullwhip competitions of Annie Oakley for me were always a big deal because the people who do them are unique.  The activity is out of the box, and you develop a genuine respect for the people who share that space with you.  And the competition pushes you always to get better.  And once you push yourself to get better and have success, you realize that the same holds with just about everything in life, including decisions that cost millions of dollars either way if success or failure is utilized.  That may be the life I’m in now, but over the years, my grounding in these cowboy arts always kept things authentic to me and gave me perspectives that nobody else was considering, even though they probably should have. 

The two videos I’ve included in this article are from two bullwhip competitions from this latest 2021 Annie Oakley show.  I always do pretty well in those, but the value in winning has diminished a lot over time.  What matters most to me, what has become an obsession of sorts, is managing all the competition variables in these kinds of things.   In both competitions, the goal is to cut as many cups off the target stands at the fastest rate that you can.  One competition, the Speed Switch, requires you to do so with both hands.  The other, Speed and Accuracy, is all one hand and in sequence.  If you miss a cup, it’s a 5-second penalty.  You get two attempts at each cup.  You have to stand six feet from the target and not cross the line with your feet.  The time starts on your first crack.  Those are the rules.  That is the way participants interact with the competition.  Like in all things in life, that is how we plan to achieve success, cutting as many targets as possible in the fastest time you can.  What fascinates me is all the variables that come up in pressured events that can wreck those plans.  The people who usually win at these things, whether they are in bullwhip competitions or big business deals, can manage those variables. 

Bullwhip Speed Switch

Many talented people are good at the exhibitions in the bullwhip world, but not so good at the competitions.  Without the pressure of time, where they can show off the skills that they’ve practiced for hundreds of hours, they are magnificent world record holders, and it looks great for an audience.  But when they apply the same methods to a timed competition, things go bad and don’t look so good.  It has always fascinated me how the difference between the two is so applicable to life in general.  People who study and practice a lot in life can put on a great show.  But when the pressure is on, they usually choke.  That choke is what people tell me thousands of times a week and expect me to accept because that has become fashionable in the world, to accept failure. Instead, my thing is to get comfortable with pressure and danger and learn to manage the variables.  Not to yield to them.

I have done those contests for many decades now every year at the Annie Oakley event, and not a single one has ever been the same.  Sometimes the popper blasts off the end of my whip.  Sometimes the whip gets caught on the target stand, as happened this year.  Sometimes we perform on grass, sometimes on smoothed concrete where the whip slowly slides all over the place. Sometimes the wind kicks up and throws off your aim.  Sometimes, a speedy guy will have luck catching most of the targets on their first run, forcing you to go faster than you are comfortable with.  All those variables are what make the good from the bad.  It’s not the skill; everyone who competes has talent.  But it’s in how you manage the variables that matter most.  

Its all in fun, but is it……………………..?

Ultimately, that is one of the big takeaways from The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I’ve been a professional in the industry for more than three decades, and I work with people who also have a lot of experience.  Everyone has lots of experience; they go to college, get trained and try to do the best they can.  My point is that little things like these extra little competitions I do, such as bullwhip competitions force you to adapt to all the things they don’t teach you in an orthodox society.  How can you use your skills to accommodate all the things that happen that you don’t control?  Can you still win then?  Well, of course, you can.  But what makes me madder than a hornet that some kid has stuck a stick into its nest is when someone tells me something can’t be done because they have not learned themselves how to manage variables in their life.  That they accept that anything outside of their skill level is a mystery that they automatically yield to.  To me, that is just the kind of thing they should all be training for, in having the skill to do the job, but in honing those skills so that they can adapt to the variables that come up along the way.  That they can successfully manage the situation when it’s never optimal and still succeed. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How to Find a Leader: Joe Biden is not one

It is one of the most misunderstood concepts of our society.  I am going through the editorial process with a publisher on a book on this topic called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Still, we need to address the difference between a leader and a politician for our case here today.  Because obviously, most people don’t know the difference.  Every day in the news, somebody talks about Joe Biden as if he’s our “leader,” even Tucker Carlson on Fox News.  There is a treacherous psychological mind trick going on here that is costing us a lot of national bandwidth that we need to straighten out because we are different in America than other places globally, and we need to understand why.  We don’t elect leaders into office in the United States.  We don’t make an effort to be led by titles.  Remember, unlike what everyone tells us, we are not a Democracy; we are a Republic.  And we elect people to represent our views in America.  Not to lead us, leadership is scarce, and when we find them, we like them.  But we can’t limit our scope to always waiting for some leader to emerge before leaving the campfire and exploring the nearest cave the way leader-driven cultures tend to do.  We built our country to assume that leadership would be hard to find and was very rare, so leadership wasn’t needed in the political class.  We just needed representatives to carry out the interests of the people who elected them, which is a vast difference from what we are told. 

As I talk about in my upcoming book, leadership is forged like gold from the massive pressures of the universe.  Not everyone has the stomach or the heart to be a leader.  Typically we don’t see leaders emerging in our political circles because the conditions for making a leader do not exist there.  We see them come about in military life to some extent, we see them in sports, but most of our leadership in America comes about in the business world.  The percentage of authentic leadership is noticeably low; it’s a fraction of the total percentage of an overall population.  For example, Tom Brady is a prominent leader in sports.  He makes his coaching staff better with his leadership and teammates no matter what team he’s on.  Tom Brady manages always to find success.  You can see that type of leadership in CEOs, such as Steve Jobs.  Modern-day Elon Musk has excellent leadership.  It’s not the money he has which exhibits it, but it’s in his long string of successes and how he can communicate complicated vision to many people.  Of course, when we think of leadership, we think of General Patton.  I think of Claire Lee Chennault, who created the great Flying Tigers.  But these are all names unique to the history and within our populations.  They are far from commonplace. 

The health of any culture should always be measured by the number of leaders it produces.  But for that to occur, you have to understand what a leader is, and by calling politicians leaders by their titles, or worthless CEOs who expect to lead by title, then we are kidding ourselves toward the objectives of success, in a healthy culture that proportionally, America is the best globally. We have our Tom Brady types coming out of leisure activities and our Elon Musks in science and industry.  Other countries don’t have those people.  It’s not because the skills aren’t in the population.  But those cultures do not have a means of emerging them from obscurity into change state contributors, just as Indians of the Wild West spent much of their lives walking over gold but having no means to bring it out of the ground. And even if they did get to it, what would they have done with it?  They had no economy to make money.  They had no concept of money, so they never extracted gold for sociological use.  There needs to be a means to bring about the treasures of existence, and if that culture does not develop those means, you will never get to the prize. That is what leadership is; it’s a treasure of human endeavor that can advance a society when it is found and utilized.  But it is not created by silly titles, which is the prevailing belief by those too lazy and ill-equipped to develop a culture that produces leadership.

If we recognized that simple leadership trait, we would eliminate much of the corruption we see in politics currently and in the past and future.  Because we have by default given out leadership designations to people by title and not merit, we have prevented authentic leadership from emerging and improving our lives and circumstances.  Back to Tom Brady, think of all the professional football players we have seen over the years.  But not until Tom Brady came along was the whole leadership package developed into a guy who had taken his football teams to so many Super Bowls and won when the surrounding players were all different, and even the teams were different.  Tom Brady is proof that it’s not teams that win big games; it’s one individual who is a true leader.  Socialist and Communist countries always fail because they have no interest in finding leadership.  They have built their entire societies around collective consensus instead of leadership.  That is undoubtedly the case of our institutions of learning and our government of today in general.  They think leadership comes out of group behavior when it is forged from the pressure of success and failure—through much pain and turmoil and a refusal to take the loss as an answer to living. 

By calling any political person a leader, we are cheapening the word for its true meaning and use.  It is worse than all that it is a general punt by a declining society to be so quick to call worthless people leaders because the culture desires to shift away responsibility for leadership to people with titles instead of hashing out the problems themselves.  They might fail in the task if they did try, but by not trying and giving the responsibility over to a titled person who does not have leadership, but is like Mitch McConnell, a politician in a high office, then a failure shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Mitch McConnell will never be a leader of anybody.  Joe Biden will never be a leader, nor is Vice President Commie Harris.  Skin color can’t make a person a leader.  Bootlicking doesn’t make a leader.  Diversity training won’t make a leader, so globalism will ultimately fail because they seek to suppress leaders in favor of a system that makes politicians by title into positions of authority without earning the right through the pressures of living and becoming the best, thus creating leadership. 

Not understanding leadership has led to many of the problems we see today and destroys the lives of those unable to see leadership for the value it brings.  But make no mistake, just because someone wins an election, it does not make them a leader.  Just because someone gets a promotion, it does not make them magically a leader.  Not even a Super Bowl can do it; in the case of Tom Brady, he has shown that you must win many Super Bowls under many different conditions to show the power of leadership.  But without these tests and high expectations, you get sorry performance and a culture destined for failure.  And that is the danger of calling worthless politicians leaders when they are only haphazard politicians who represent us in politics at best.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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What Comes Around Goes Around on the Wild, Wild Frontiers of Thought and Culture

It’s always a good day for me to attend the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio where I rejoin old friends and meet some new ones at that annual event always set during the last weekend of July. In many ways I am happiest during that period because the world is as I’d like it to be and I get to dress the way I’d like for the event. This year was a little different however because its one of those transition periods for me. I’m in the middle of writing my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and have been working on several themes that were born right there in Greenville over the last several decades. As a lover of Ohio history and of frontier life in general I find great solace in the small towns up and down Rt 127, from Hamilton, Ohio all the way up Celina on the Grand Lake St. Mary. Lebanon, and Eaton come to mind as well, and of course Greenville itself nestled there in God’s country with the smell of corn dogs and ice-cold Coke offered from the various venders. But more than anything I enjoy competing with those old and new friends and pushing myself in ways that I don’t get to do in regular life, and the results are always rewarding, such as in this very close example shown below of our Bullwhip Fast Draw competition during the finals.

Yes, it’s fast. I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw for quite a long time now and have a pretty good feel for how fast is fast. The events shown in our Bullwhip Fast Draw are around .600 of a second down to about .450, almost as fast as the pistol shooters who were also there at the event. I spent quite a lot of time with them as well. Yet it amazes me how fast the Bullwhip Fast Draw competition has become, and how fast we have become in conducting all the various steps literally in the blink of an eye. For a lot of people, the blink of an eye is about .015 of a second. So, we are moving very fast these days in performing a task that really should be nearly impossible. But you never really know until you start pushing yourself with competition which is one of the big themes in my new book.

I am an optimist, really an unshakable one. I’ve seen more than my share of tragedy and heartbreak, but my optimism has always been intact no matter what’s going on. Over the years this Annie Oakley event has been that reset period for me that no matter what has been occurring, it gave me an opportunity to be around people who aren’t losers and activists of malice and just enjoy good people in a good flag waving country. Many years ago, I broke away from the entertainment aspects of my relationship with the western arts and went to apply my skills to real life problems, that were very controversial. It was quite a thing to do before Donald Trump was president, but now isn’t considered so radical, because the country is snapping back into shape, thankfully. The evidence is everywhere. This year at our Western Showcase event a really good Lone Ranger impersonator stopped by and did a show which I enjoyed quite a lot. As I listened to the Lone Ranger creed from him, I couldn’t help but think of myself and some of the decisions I had made along the way leading up to that moment.

In 2004 I released the book The Symposium of Justice which featured a bullwhip cracking vigilante that was at war with the corruption of his hometown. But in the years thereafter I found that many of my themes were quite real and that as an author, I couldn’t just write about them, I wanted to be the real-life character of my stories. So, I turned my skills to the real-life problems of my community and many reading here know the rest of the story. Up until Donald Trump emerged from the Tea Party to become President of the United States, I felt I needed to be the real-life characters I had written about. But that has changed due to the sudden shifting of the winds. The western arts no longer feel like a dying thing as it used to, but something that is reemerging and becoming new again. That makes me very happy. Not only does the world need it, but it confirms many of the things about people that I have long suspected and those are the clear contents of my new book that will likely come out next year.

It has been sad that so many people who still believe in things like the Lone Ranger’s Creed have stayed out of the fight that has needed to be fought. I couldn’t just sit around and think about it. I wanted to do something about it and I am proud that I have. But hearing the Lone Ranger impersonator go through the creed this year in front of our audience was for me very refreshing. Some of my favorite quotes are “That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.” And “in being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.” Or, “That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather it and light it himself. Those are all good quotes and who could argue them? Well, Democrats for one, and many of today’s youth who get their morality from Grand Theft Auto rather than the Masked Man as they used to.

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Another good day in my favorite clothes. #life #family

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on

That is why I love the Annie Oakley event so much. It is a break from the disappointments of today’s culture and the youth being born from it, from the primitive cravings of body piercings, tattoos and shaky morality. Of loose sexual standards and a proclivity toward drugs and intoxication. From lazy losers who want socialism over capitalism and champions of expanding government who will issue them mailbox paychecks for just sitting around and letting mother government drop food in their mouths without doing anything to deserve it. For one day a year I get a break from all that and I cherish it tremendously. If I could have every day like the days I get in the middle of God’s country every year in Darke County I would take it eagerly. Unfortunately, that is not our reality, but it should be. Most of the people who go and participate in those events there don’t have the same kind of reflections that I do. They just go and enjoy the festivities without giving it much thought. But not me, I see the potential and reflect on what we used to do well and how we could do it again. And perhaps a new day is emerging. Whatever comes I at least feel good about what I’ve done to make the world better, which I will always do. But I get the feeling that the world is getting more favorable to those grand old traditions and that the thugs and losers of life aren’t winning any more, they are being swept away into the garbage heaps of history, where they belong and that makes me the happiest of all. For the first time in many years I think that tomorrow will be better than yesterday, and that is very encouraging.

Rich Hoffman

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