Dude Ranch Nation

[substitute]

• Young angry guys in big powerful pickup trucks that are jacked way up and shod with knobby tires, everything meticulously clean, shiny differential even, with "Cowboy Up!" stickers, en route from shopping mall to shopping mall, riding the range that never was.
  
  
• Middle-aged pear-shaped dads in $50,000 luxury SUV's with military accessories, powerful engines, and smooth soft leather seats, able to ford swift rivers or charge up muddy embankments, rolling up to the valet parking at the movie theatre.
  
  
• Ecotourists decked out in perfect canvas hats, multipocketed shirts and shorts, wealth-preserving money belts, Gore-Tex boots over yak wool socks, and $1000 in tropical medicine gear and Sharper Image navigation instruments, tromping happily over the shrinking rainforest.
  
  
• Gun enthusiasts filling the magazines and working the bolts on their Special Operations Certified Combat Commando Stealth Rifles and Special Edition S.W.A.T. Concealed Carry High Power Pistols, sighting them coolly out the window and dreaming of singlehandedly defeating armies of terrorists who will never arrive.

If you have the gear you can be anything as long as you do nothing.

Real cowboys rode their asses raw, got killed and injured on the job a lot, were cruel to animals all day, drank themselves to death, smelled bad, were poor. Life is better in Dude Ranch Nation.