You’re a cowboy like me
Perched in the dark
Telling all the rich folks anything they wanna hear.
The “cowboys” in Taylor Swift’s popular country-folk song are cons who fall in love while attempting to con rich potential partners at expensive resorts. These are not your cowhands from the open range, but colloquial references to irresponsible and risky behavior.
“True, cowboys are less shaped and constrained by society, a freedom of thought and action we value highly,” notes Richard Collins in Cowboy Is a Verb.
“To the westerner the word has a strongly positive ring. This includes solitude away from the pathologies of the city, a time and place to think deeply and enjoy the watershed in its strength and beauty, to clear the cluttered mind and remember why we chose this life with its trade-off of the social safety net for independence and the big outside.”