Q: Is there anyone alive today who you think resembles (not literally) Buffalo Bill?

A: I think the answer is no, and yes. Cody was a warrior who became an entertainer by reenacting a version of his own exploits and scripting them in a popular story of heroic achievement. In that sense there is nobody like him. Since his death, there have been few if any who could convey that sense of authenticity and action as well as Cody did. But even if there had been some, as I conclude in the book, the public’s diminished faith in social progress after World War I made it much harder for a single individual to claim to live a life of continual self improvement and advancement. What went missing was not just the man, but the story he acted out.

But then, in another sense, today there are many people like Buffalo Bill. In his day, he was unusual for envisioning his life as an ongoing story to be lived for the amusement of an audience. This idea became less strange in the twentieth century. Most movie stars try to project their on-screen personas back into their off-screen lives as a means of conveying their authenticity, of being believable to audiences.

But even more, in today’s world of the TV camera, hand-held video, and now digital internet cameras, the idea of life-as-performance has come to typify at least some aspects of everyday existence for a great many people. Newscasters and other television commentators play themselves every day. Reality shows invite us to believe we are watching real people engage real challenges (although they are nothing of the sort). Beyond that, the information revolution brought us new kinds of performance, in which people put cameras in their houses and allow viewers to watch them in their private homes. Of course, what is still missing from these examples is a heroic story of the sort Cody performed. These days, people play themselves, but I don’t think we would call their ongoing “stories” heroic, or even progressive.

I suspect most of us try to keep our public and private personas separate. But the idea of having a public persona that takes over your entire life is no longer so strange as it was in Cody’s day. In that sense, there’s a little Buffalo Bill in all of us.

~ Louis S. Warren