Josey Wales
"I always heard there were three kinds of suns in Kansas; Sunshine, sunflowers, and sons-of-bitches."
One of the first articles I wrote for this site was in honor of the Ultimate Badass and the Consummate Man, a dude so insanely manly that he sweats raw testosterone and can kill most people without actually flexing a single muscle in his body - Clint Fucking Eastwood. However, as many of you know, the early articles on this website were short and shitty, and the two paragraphs I horked up into HTML didn't do this man the justice that he so rightly deserved. I don't necessarily believe this article will either, but I will still endeavor to give you a more complete picture of how epically fucking badass Clint Eastwood is, and how he made an entire multi-million dollar career out of drinking whisky right out of the bottle, giving people an icy-cold, unflinching, intimidating stare, and plugging dirtbags in the fucking face with a barrel full of large-caliber revolver ammunition.
Just as God is God and is also a bunch of other entities at the same time who are both God and not God at the same time depending on who He decides to morph into at any particular moment in the space-time continuum, the Mystery of Clint Eastwood is much the same. Attempting to describe this paragon of asskicking in a single article might create such a gravitational force of insane badassitude that the entire internet might collapse upon itself and catapult the planet back into a new Dark Age, so instead I will break this modern-day pillar of face-smashing crotchstompery down into three separate articles encompassing the Holy Trinity of Eastwood, a metaphysical suckerpunch to the kidneys with a spiked gauntlet that revolves around three of the top ten most badass movie characters ever invented in the history of the universe - "Dirty" Harry Callahan, The Man With No Name, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. I'll begin with my personal favorite, because this is my website and I do whatever I want.
Josey Wales was just a regular old dude, minding his own business on a Missouri farm in the middle of Butt-Fuck Egypt until one day his family got fucked the shit up by a group of punk-ass Yankee cavalrymen known as the Kansas Redlegs. The Redlegs were a bunch of fucking assholes who got a boner out of torching shit for no reason at all, but when they showed up out of nowhere and brutally morphed the Wales homestead into a giant pile of charred ash, smashed Josey in the face with a shovel, kicked his kid down a well and carried off his wife, they apparently failed to realize that they were screwing with the wrong motherfucker. Little did they know that Josey Wales was a fucking hardass only capable of feeling two emotions - Apathy and Anger - and he was about to go Frank Castle on their asses, as well as the asses of several individuals who had no association with the Kansas Redlegs but who just so happened to be standing in the way of his mad, unstoppable quest for vengeance.
Josey immediately joined up with a group of Confederate Missouri guerillas led by a motherfucking madman known as "Bloody Bill" Anderson. Now Bloody Bill is a guy who will eventually get an article on this site all to himself, but in order to give you some kind of idea as to what sort of outfit Josey was riding around, with here's a fun fact: Bloody Bill once looted the Union-sympathizing town of Centralia, burned the supply depot to the ground and stole all the whiskey he could get his hands on. When a Union train rolled into town to investigate, he stopped the train, robbed everybody, gunned down twenty-three Union officers in cold blood, scalped their dead bodies and then hung the scalps from the saddle of his horse. This guy was not the sort of man that you fucked with for any reason ever, and the Missouri guerillas were like combining Genghis Khanand Jason Vorhees and giving them an assload of guns and beards.
"Dyin' ain't much of a livin', boy."
After riding around smoking Yankees and wreaking havoc all over the place for a couple years, the American Civil War of Northern Aggression Between the States eventually ended. When an offer of amnesty was extended to Rebel soldiers, most of Wales' guerrillas surrendered to the Kansas Redlegs, handed over their weapons, and were promptly gunned down where they stood. Josey, who in true badass fashion refused to surrender to anyone for any reason, saw this go down and obviously got super giga-pissed off. He rode into the Union camp, grabbed a Gatling gun and layed waste to an entire company of Redlegs. Then he promptly rode off to safety, heading for the border of Mexico so he could escape retribution for taking out like eight hundred U.S. soldiers in the span of ninety seconds.
During his insane journey, wanted by the government and hunted by pretty much everyone capable of lifting a rifle, the Outlaw Josey Wales rode across the American West taking on comancheros, bandits, bounty hunters, Indians, and everything else with a pulse, taking on hundreds of guys - sometimes ten or twelve at a time - and blasting them all into another zip code with his matching set of 1847 Walker Colt Revolvers. He always carried at least four pistols on him at a time, and he didn't hesitate to use them on anybody who fucking pissed him off. Since he was a true badass who only spoke in threats, insults, and withering sarcasm, he only warning you would get it that he would spit a giant disgusting stream of tobacco juice onto the ground - that's how you knew it was on. One more word out of your mouth, and Josey was going to quick-draw his pistol, put a round of forty-four caliber ammunition right between your fucking eyes, and go back to drinking whisky and spitting on dogs.
But it wasn't not all about busting faces with Josey Wales. He also knew when to be chill with people as well. Throughout his adventures he pulled together people from all different walks of life - Jayhawkers, American Indians, old ladies, cowboys, hookers and hot babes were all united by the ultimate badassitude of Clint Motherfucking Eastwood, joining his crew even though he spent most of the movie telling them to get bent. He brought an entire caravan of people (along with a few cases of whiskey) to Mexico where everybody could hang out, work on a farm, drink margaritas and spend their evening playing the banjo and getting shitfaced, and God help anyone that got in the way of the new life he'd built for himself and his friends. When the violent natives living near his new home threatened to start beating the fuck out of his friends, Josey didn't even blink. He just rode right up to the chief while he was surrounded by thousands of his toughest braves and gave him two options - be cool, or get shot in the fucking face until you die from it. Ten Bears decided to be cool, and from then on the two groups co-existed in peace. When the fucking Redlegs rolled into town trying to jack everything up and piss on Josey's parade for a second time, he busted caps in anything that moved and impaled their leader with his own saber. The man didn't take shit from anyone, and still stands as the ultimate badass role-model.