Would you rather have been a Beatle, or have walked on the moon?

Were they cowboys, or just hillbillies?

JiC, I assume you mean The Electric Horseman? not a Disney movie, but a pretty good "where have all the cowboys gone" movie, though politically suspect with its a proto-Reaganist, Marlboro-manny "what America and its Career Women need is some rugged cowboys" energy

yeah, that one, lol

xp to myself: To be fair to Bruce, his interest in cowboys/desire to be a cowboy goes all the way back to his pre-E. Street days when he wrote songs like "Cowboys of the Sea" (what it sounds like, they live underwater and herd the fishes and also rob banks, idk what he was on either.) And then there's "This Hard Land," his epic gay cowboy fantasy from the eighties, and "Black Cowboys" from the nineties, and most of Western Stars, and all in all, Bruce's cowboy dreams clearly go deep, it wasn't fair of me to imply he was some jumped-up, fly-by-night, johnny-come-lately cowboy wannabe.

wait, no, Black Cowboys was from Devils & Dust. Point still stands.

Also, the "little Texas" aspect of Freehold.

In Forest Hills, Queens, where I lived for a year in 2009-2010, there's a stable called GallopNYC where anyone may schedule 30 minutes to visit the horses regardless of ability to pay. Most of their horses are retired and tend toward a mild temperament in their old age, so they are prized as therapy animals. They have lovely names, like 'Popcorn'.
Ordinarily, the place is crowded, loud and chatoic, but during the pandemic it's been blissfully tranquil.

Since my last visit, I've imagined a colony of these gentle horses in a bucolic place where they are free and undisturbed, like a utopia, a world of only horses. That's what I try to think about when I go to bed at night.

I think my initial post made it fairly clear that I couldn't care less about actual cowboys, you know, it's the loss of all those cowboy dreams.

I Couldn’t Care Less About Actual Cowboys (It’s the Loss of All Those Cowboy Dreams)

It's the companion horses who maybe only existed in the imaginations of children, who were cruelly cast aside when they saw those spectacular images of the moon landing and changed plans.

Honestly, i think i'd be ok with them deciding to dream about going to the moon if they'd wanted to bring their horse.