Quote of the Day

The Lone Ranger himself contains not a single internal contradiction. He can change reality, but it can't change him. He travels, smashes, shoots, leaps, gallops, shouts The excess of movement hides the fact that he never learns how the process works. All the hero's agitation ultimately aspires to the world's repose, to it's stabilization. The return of the reader's security coincides with the final frame, in which the chorus identifies the character, echoing their famous last words. Another identical episode is waiting: the fracture of order, the hero's timely arrival, fluctuating fortunes, solutions, return to repose, a new quest.  Goodness, success, and fame are accumulated in every adventure, but they never add up to anything, because a person who's never been sick can never get better. The Lone Ranger rides so fast that it's hard to accept the fact that he's always in the same place, marking time. For this reason, you can read any set of episodes in any order you like. What the hero in fact desires is for the place where he's intervened to become like him: immutable and consummate.

-- Ariel Dorfman, The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds (2009), p. 86

(Yes, we're in the middle of our unit on the Lone Ranger in my class on the history of American culture.)