Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

Where have all the cowboys gone? I look out my window and see no cowboys. Right in my yard there's a big, fat cow, though. It's eating my grass and shitting all over the place. When I yell at it, it just looks at me with its dumb cow eyes and goes back to shitting and eating. I let the dogs out but it just ignored them. What the hell am I going to do about this cow? There are no cowboys listed in the yellow pages. On the internet, I only find exotic dancers or clowns.

There are no cowboys on my television, either. The NFL has no cowboys for me to watch. I can't find a western to save my life. The closest person I've found is Tom Selleck and he's not even playing a cowboy, he just has a mustache.

When our fathers were growing up, you saw cowboys everywhere. They were on television. They showed up on Halloween. They rustled cattle and rode the trail. Yippee-ki-yay, right? People wore cowboy pajamas. Everyone had a pair of boots that they put on once a year. People wore six-shooters, too, with sandlewood grips. Roy Rodgers was a singing cowboy. Will Rodgers was a humorist and a real cowboy as well. Like I said, there were cowboys everywhere.

Somehow, between then and now, all of the cowboys have gone extinct. Scientists say we are currently experiencing a mass extinction of animal life. People go ape-shit over panda bears, but what about the American cowboy? What about that unique symbol of American independence and individualism? Donald Trump isn't a cowboy. Steve Jobs wasn't a vaquero. Mark Wahlberg has no fucking idea what a buckaroo is.

That cow still stands in my yard. I tell it that I'm about to go grab my shotgun and send it to cow hell. Have you ever stared a cow straight in the eyes? They have eyes like glass marbles. They are opaque, clouded with the glaze of idiocy. We have made cows the way they are, you know. We domesticated them. We took their independence away and now they can do nothing but shit, eat, and wait to be taken care of. We took a piece of their soul and carved it up and cooked it and served it on a plate. They've never heard of American exceptionalism. They don't know of manifest destiny. They haven't met the spirit that conquered the west.

Does anybody have Paula Cole's phone number? Maybe she knows where the cowboys have gone.