here's a man who could appreciate good tabloid journalism

Sometimes the most banal material can be the most provocative and insightful. I understand Cooper's yearning for great American dramas to report on, but I feel that if you play with the hand you're dealt, it'll serve you much better than to complain about what you wish you had.

Cooper would no doubt be content with today's America and it's stories of suffering and redemption. He could produce VH1's "Behind the Music." The problem with his lust for this kind of material is that it is not what represented the people of his time. People are mostly boring, but also essentially quirky, and anyone who has watched pedestrians or people shopping will realize how weird they are. And they all have stories, especially people of his time where entertainment was primarily oral. For Cooper not recognize the potential of the "ordinary American" is unfortunate. His gripe may be valid had he been a journalist, but as a fiction writer, some amount of imagination is required. Maybe he lacks the observational skills and ability to infer things about his peers, creating a need for ready-made dramas.

Maybe I am taking too much of a post-modernist stance where I feel that anything can be, or become, material; and that the type of story structure that Cooper prefers is too traditional and now feels somewhat antiquated.

But still for him to complain that there is little to be found in America to write about is ludicrous. The emerging cities and thousand of miles of untouched land, the hostility between the native Americans and white settlers, the varied types of people, their ideas, prejudices, and way of living, there must have been something among these things that called out to Cooper. Maybe he just wasn't prepared to find a muse in the mundane.