Are You Cowboy Enough?

Towns, like salespeople, must promote themselves and their products in a particular way so as to find buyers or to convince unwitting passersby that they themselves should be buyers lest they live hereafter unfulfilled lives.

Oakdale, like so many products (or towns), has its own brand, and this brand is circulated, inserted, announced, presented and reiterated in so many ways over time - in more lasting and ephemeral ways - and this explains the prevalence of the "Cowboy Capital of the World" image that fuels its sense of self.

A brief reference to an aspect of Oakdale's short history is relevant here. Before being the Cowboy Capital and having to vie for the title with a city from another state, the city carried the moniker "The City of Almonds" because, understandably given that the city was surrounded and practically besieged by acres and acres of immense and orderly orchards (as described here), the town should carry a name that fit itself.

At some point, however, the city appeared to decide to absolve itself of any dedication to its real and main commodity and instead develop a different kind of marketing, self-promotional mechanism that may have fit more into external inclinations towards a stereotypical sense of a 'western town.' Although I need substantiate this suspicion more, it is in response to external desires and a need to improve commerce that drove and continues to drive Oakdale to present itself as fitting within a particular discourse of "the West" that emphasizes its affiliation with the lineage of lone, isolated cow-wrangling rough-and-tumble figures. Sure, there is a cattle industry here as well [more figures on its predominance], but it is worth noting that a sense of what makes a town sell becomes its image and even crowds out any more substantive appreciation for what and how it actually is.

Many places are like this: SF draws on certain communities, symbols and images in order to draw tourists and others, and New York and any modern city tied into global flows of capital desire to participate in consumption and commerce (to some extent); but this desire has, in many places, distorted the key formative and identity-determining aspects of a place into participating in tried and already-dominant hegemonic values that interfere with a different kind of development of self.

In fact, it has been telling itself that it is the Cowboy Capital of the World for so long, it has forgotten its own origins, has become caught up in the spectacle, the signs themselves, and forgets what produces them.

Meanwhile, few really consider the offensive implications of basing a town on any such symbol.

Such is the Image that attempts to make a place of this place without place.