At the Rene Block Gallery in New York in 1974, an unlikely pair of performers — West German artist Joseph Beuys and a wild coyote named “America” — enacted a public performance that Beuys called “I Like America and America Likes Me.” Surviving video shows Beuys, covered head-to-toe by a shapeless felt blanket, proffering the hooked end of a cane and tossing his gloves to “America.” The coyote, for its part, seems pretty much all in, unafraid, confident, a happy player.
Beuys’s intent was a symbolic healing of the U.S. of its Vietnam War blues. But whether intentionally or not, “I like America and America Likes Me” reset on the late 20th century East Coast a very old and mostly western American artistic tradition featuring the coyote as a kind of avatar for Americans. With wild coyotes colonizing out of their original western homeland and across all of North America in that decade, Beuys’s art was an early signifier that the ancient god of the West had now come to the East. One of the continent’s oldest deities was once again assuming the role of exemplar of human nature in North America.
So if Old Man America, the continent’s ancient avatar Coyote, has now finally arrived in the East, who — we might wonder — best channels him in our 21st century present?
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Coyote stories are the original literary canon of the American experience, extending back 10,000 years into the continental past and producing a sprawling body of hundreds of stories featuring a semi-deity, Coyote Man, as a stand-in for human beings. The purpose of the stories is to hold up for scrutiny what we surely ought to call — if we are, after all, evolutionists — human nature, and Coyote is a true artiste at the task. Unlike a religious figure such as Jesus, who holds himself forth as a model of perfection his followers are supposed to strive to emulate, Coyote has a darker, funnier, and more outrageous take on the human condition. Coyote — or Old Man America, as I call him in my book — is a natural and supernatural genius, capable of remarkable feats on behalf of humankind. But he is also a lover of life’s pleasures, a sensualist who is full of lust and desire; a narcissist of stunning vanity; a sucker for every kind of spectacle; and, of course, a trickster whose smokescreens ought to be easily penetrable but somehow rarely are.
There have been two intriguing and usually very funny modern uses of Coyote in this classic avatar way. One was the world’s most famous celebrity coyote, the self-proclaimed “Super Genius” Wile E., whose 20th century antics on Saturday morning television taught us all not just about single-minded obsessions but about the perils of the marketplace (in one of the
New Yorker’s funniest stories ever, the writer
Ian Frazier had Wile E. bring a products liability lawsuit against the “Acme Corporation” for all those jet-propelled roller skates and Burmese tiger traps that never worked). The other was poet
Gary Snyder’s “Coyote Man,” a reconstituted version of the Indian Coyote deity who in the poetry of San Francisco Beats like himself and Robinson Jeffers functioned for a while as a kind of social and political anti-hero critic of the 20th century American cultural scene.
So if Old Man America, the continent’s ancient avatar Coyote, has now finally arrived in the East, who — we might wonder — best channels him in our 21st century present?
The answer seems obvious and inescapable, at least to me. Donald Trump has probably never heard of ancient America’s oldest god, the avatar deity Coyote, but Trump’s is the sort of personality that must have inspired the character of Coyote in the first place, an exaggerated human whose narcissism, buffoonery, and remarkable talents are all outsized and endlessly on public display for his shocked audiences. With Trump now angling for the Republican nomination for president of the United States and election to what is probably the most important public office on the planet, it occurs to me that maybe reading Americans ought to be revisiting our large trove of Coyote stories and maybe drawing a few insights from the adventures of our most outrageous of continental characters.
In one of the stories I tell in my book,
Coyote America, Coyote is planning for the seduction of a beautiful young woman — let’s call her “America” — whom he has decided, despite all obstacles, that he simply must possess. Using trickery and native cunning and an obvious grasp of the weaknesses of human nature, over a span of several nights Coyote produces one remarkable new treasure after another over which she exclaims with innocent delight. Each, of course, is intended to gradually break down her resistance so that Coyote can hold over more promises, then bargain for the main prize.
And in the end? Well, you know what happens in the end.
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Dan Flores is the A. B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana and the author of ten books on aspects of western U.S. history. Flores lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.