Come Back, Shane

My brother was named after a cowboy.

That detail says a lot about my father, his generation, and the way America once looked from the outside: big, confident, morally certain, the man in the white hat who did ugly things for noble reasons. My dad loved Shane (Raices Profundas), and I grew up with that image in the background—America as the wounded but righteous gunslinger riding off into the sunset.

Lately, it feels less like a Western and more like a carnival. The set has collapsed, the wiring is visible, and the ringmaster isn’t even pretending anymore. That collision—between childhood myth, my father’s quiet admiration, and the present political spectacle—became the seed for an article I just published in CounterPunch and in Spanish in my bi-weekly column in the Hoy.

I wrote it as a personal meditation on empires, illusions, and what it feels like to watch a story you believed in reveal itself as stagecraft. It’s called “Come Back, Shane.” Or maybe more direct in Spanish, “The End“.

👉 Read the full English version here:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/23/come-back-shane/

👉 And the Spanish version (slightly shorter for print) here: https://archive.ph/Dmae2

If you ever believed in the cowboy—and now aren’t so sure—you might recognize the feeling.