As a defender of law and order, the Lone Ranger could serve as a model for our own times. He believed that reasoning with a troubled person was a better path to justice than violence. He shot silver bullets from his six shooters, but never with the intent to kill — only to wound and disarm. All that would be good enough, except for this: The Lone Ranger was the coolest cat in the West.
He rode a magnificent white stallion, Silver. Together they could ride like the wind. And he wore that mask. We never saw him without it. At a time when masks were associated with bad guys who robbed banks and stage coaches, his mask filled villains with dread and good-hearted citizens with hope.
Wearing that mask, Clayton Moore became one of the most recognizable characters on the planet. Until the end of his life, he wore it with honor. Every two weeks we pop into Publix for supplies. More and more, I find myself engaging with the workers there. Many are young and remind me of when I had my first decent job as a teenage bag boy at a supermarket on Long Island.
I smile at them from behind my mask, ask how they are doing and thank them for working so hard. They are working for themselves, no doubt, but also for us.
At the checkout, I greet two young women, Destiny and McKinley. We have lived with the pandemic long enough now to have acquired pandemic detritus. Pete, I see blue medical masks and discarded latex gloves on the sidewalk, in the gutter, even floating in the bay. Signs of our times. Man, I could really use some french fries.
Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? For most of my adult life, I weighed about pounds, but gained about a pound a year, 10 pounds per decade, till I maxed out at That weight freaked me out, not because of the way it made me feel, but because my waist measurement ballooned from a 36 to a For a while, I worked out a little more and ate a little less.
I lost weight, like a quarter of a pound a week, only to gain it back. Then something happened. The pandemic. When I climbed on the scale in Publix, it settled at My doctor asked me what I was doing to lose weight. I told her I drink one beer before dinner and eat 3 ounces of vanilla ice cream for dessert. In truth, working from home for four months has meant no big lunches or irresistible workplace snacks.
But who am I kidding? It's not clear yet how pivotal the masked man will be to future episodes, but we wouldn't be surprised if Elijah is somehow connected to the " twisty dark secret " that Lauren Cohan teased while chatting to Digital Spy and other media. Whether that's true or not, showrunner Angela Kang did tell us that "we will definitely start to learn a bit more about our masked character" moving forward, along with " a whole lot of new characters " in season Let's just hope that they're nicer than Pope and his gang.
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The Walking Dead - Season AMC amazon. Watch Now. Fear the Walking Dead - Season 6. The Walking Dead The Walking Dead: Negan Pop! In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, masks as components of the masque play partook of a crowning aesthetic and cultural achievement, and one with a strong English accent.
From the simplest processions and pageants honoring Elizabeth I on her summer progresses through the shires, to the elaborate productions of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones at the court of the Stuarts, masques were spectacles filled with allegory and allusion, with pantomime, singing, dancing, painting, and architecture to charm and delight the senses. The form faded after the Puritans spoiled the fun and closed the theaters in the s, but the masque prefaced the rise of opera, where masks have remained part of the dramatic furniture.
Dipping from high culture back to low, I, like many American boys and girls who grew up during those innocent salad days of television in the early post-war years, spent too much time watching a genre of show that had carried over from radio and the big screen to the small screen: the Western. To children, Westerns mimicked backyard games of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, played with few props beyond maybe a cap gun but with plenty of energy and imagination.
The games, in turn, mimicked the shows. His was a black mask that covered the eyes alone; it would have been a familiar enough trope to masque-going Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. The Lone Ranger chose to wear his mask to hide the fact that he had survived an ambush by a gang of outlaws themselves masked, no doubt , so that he could more surely bring them to justice.
Episode after episode, he pursued frontier justice relentlessly, even heroically, we thought. He courted danger and always came through. Yet he forswore personal credit. He was a man of morally guided action, not identity. His mask kept him a mystery to others—and it kept him humble.
Their message is clear, yet the messenger is hidden. The face is lost. More and more these days, in order to see a face, it is necessary to see through a mask, a talent I do not possess.
I confess further to not knowing how to behave behind my own mask, and suspect I am not alone in this quandary. Shall I smile, frown, scowl, or are all of these expressions, so unique to each individual, now unrealities, like the noise of the tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it?
Who cares? Historians decades hence will look back on the tumults of the past months and probably of some more months yet to come and weigh up the evidence. We were not supposed to know. It was what he did that made us want to be like him and kept us coming back for more. As a reader of our efforts, you have stood with us on the front lines in the battle for culture.
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