Stand Your Ground, Be a Man. By Stanley Fish.

Stand Your Ground, Be a Man. By Stanley Fish. New York Times, July 22, 2013.

Fish:

The Florida Stand Your Ground law is often characterized as an expansion of the venerable “castle doctrine” — because a man’s home is his castle, he is justified in repelling intruders with force if necessary — but, as many have observed, it may be more accurate to see it as the return to the contemporary American landscape of the “shoot first” ethic of the old west, at least as it has been portrayed in dozens of movies.

 

The opposite of standing your ground is to retreat, and in many states the rule still is that if you are confronted outside your home and violent conflict seems imminent you have a duty to retreat (provided that an avenue of retreat is available) before resorting to deadly force. Stand Your Ground laws remove that duty; your home is now any place you happen to be as long as you are there lawfully. Wherever you are, you have the right to be there and no one has the right to push you around.

 

In fact, “stand your ground” is more than a declaration of a right; it is an injunction — stand your ground, be a man. Retreating in order to avoid violence is not the commendable act of a prudent man, but the act of a coward, of someone who runs away. It is this aspect of the Stand Your Ground laws — their implicit affirmation of a code of manliness — that links them to the novelistic and filmic representations of the old west.

 

Recall two iconic moments in the tradition. Early in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel “The Virginian,” the hero is playing cards and one of the other players, Trampas by name, says to him, “Your bet, you son of a ____.” The response is immediate — “The Virginian’s pistol came out” — and the act is followed by words: “When you call me that, smile.” That is, if you smile, I’ll know you don’t mean it, and if I know that I’ll put my gun away. An observer explains to the narrator what’s going on. “He has handed Trampas the choice to back down or draw his steel,” or in other words to back down or stand his ground.

 

Trampas backs down and is thereby the loser in the encounter. A loss more final is suffered by “Stonewall Torrey,” a character in George Stevens’s “Shane” (1953) played by Elisha Cook Jr. Torrey is making his way to a saloon on a muddy street. Looming above him on the wooden porch is Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), a professional gunfighter who menacingly follows — we might say stalks — the nervous homesteader (“Where do you think you’re going?”) while serially insulting his Southern heritage. Provoked, Torrey lashes out verbally: “You’re a low-down lyin’ Yankee! ” “Prove it,” says Wilson, and when Torrey, in obedience to the code of the west, draws, he kills him. Later, Shane takes over Torrey’s role and when Wilson says “prove it,” Shane does, with fatal results. Standing your ground is a good idea if you’re the fastest.

 

In “Shane,” as in many westerns, the plot pits the forces of civilization, represented by the agricultural activities of the homesteaders, against the forces of, well, force, represented by the rancher Ryker, who is a law unto himself. The conflict is emblematized, both physically and metonymically, by the gun on one hand and women on the other. Marian, the wife of Joe Starrett (played, respectively, by Jean Arthur and Van Heflin) exclaims that “we’d all be better off if there wasn’t a single gun in this valley.” Of course if there were no guns, there could be no shootings, no showdowns and no opportunity to stand your ground. Manhood would have to be demonstrated in other ways, by tilling the ground, raising a family, running a general store.

 

Just what it is that constitutes manhood is debated endlessly in the genre that (at least rhetorically) wants to be on the side of civilization and peace, but can’t quite ever make it, even in its revisionist period, a period that seems to begin at the beginning. Again and again, women like Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly) in “High Noon” ask their men to back away, retreat, give ground rather than stand their ground; and again and again men respond by saying, “This is a hard land” or “If we run now we’ll be running forever” or “Someone has to stand up to them.”

 

As civilization advances, and the law book replaces the gun, these rationales for violence sound increasingly hollow, and more and more westerns are self-consciously elegiac — “High Noon,” “The Gunfighter,” “Ride the High Country,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “Lonely Are the Brave,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Monte Walsh,” “The Big Country,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” — caressing the lonely figures at their center even as they say farewell to the values they embody. Outright satirical comedies like “Cat Ballou” (1965) and “Blazing Saddles” (1974) announce loudly and without nuance what the genre as a whole had already implicitly proclaimed: the reign of what Bosley Crowther (in a review of “Shane”) called “legal killers under the frontier code” was over.

 

Stand Your Ground laws bring it all back. That is what President Obama meant when he said on Friday that such laws seem “designed in such a way that they encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations … that we saw in the Florida case rather than defuse potential altercations.” Do Stand Your Ground laws, he asked, really contribute to “the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?” The answer is that not everyone wants to see them. There are some who imagine themselves as the modern-day Wyatt Earp or Will Kane or Shane — bravely seeking out malefactors, confronting them in the main street, and shooting them down to the applause and gratitude of less heroic citizens. Stand Your Ground laws are for them.


Stand Your Ground laws, as Fish describes them, are an acknowledgement of Jacksonian manhood and its continuing importance in American life.