How was it that as a boy of four or five I came to wear a Davy Crockett coonskin cap or a Wyatt Earp outfit complete with a red and gold vest, striped pants and boots? I suppose it was at least precociously post-modern of me to be carrying a candy-filled plastic walking stick instead of a gun.

One answer, of course, is 1950s television. Another is the profound importance of our cultural narratives to the way we think and act, to the personae we take on, to the choices we make.

The authoritarian right has created a false image of frontier-style individualism, out of sync with the broad-mindedness of our country’s real frontiersmen. Can Disney’s Davy Crockett save us?