I remember, years ago when my kids were small, attending an elementary school orchestra concert. One of the orchestras – I think it was fifth or sixth grade – played “The William Tell Overture,” which gave me one of my first old-guy moments.

It occurred to me while I was listening that probably every adult in the gym that day had a single thought and it was different than that of probably every kid. “Hey,” the adults thought, “the Lone Ranger.” Probably more people have heard it and recognized it that way than heard it during the lifetime of the composer, Gioachino Rossini. But that was the adults; for the kids, it was a piece of music to perform, nothing more.

I haven’t seen the new Lone Ranger movie yet (and, given time pressures on other things, I’ll probably have to wait until it hits cable). It’s shaping up to be something of a bomb, so it may disappear pretty quickly. Had it been a hit, I’m guessing that we would have heard “The William Tell Overture” until we all were heartily sick of it, although it’s been noticeably absent in the promotional materials for the movie.

I’ve been in a western frame of mind the last few days. I watched “Wyatt Earp,” the Keven Costner movie that was filmed the same time as the vastly superior “Tombstone,” which basically dealt with the same subject matter. And not too long ago, Karon and I spent a couple of days watching westerns, including a pretty bad TV remake of “Stagecoach” and John Wayne’s last movie, “The Shootist,” which is one of his best.

Watching westerns fascinates me, because they revolve around myths central to the American character. The Greeks had their Olympian Gods, the English have their Arthurian legends, the Japanese have their samurai. Our central myths don’t involve swords and the supernatural; they involve cattle and hats and six-shooters.

But they are no less mythical, even if the historical timeline is shorter. The Old West happened in the lifetime of my grandparents (my Sicilian grandfather loved to watch westerns), but even when they were happening, during a couple of decades in the late 19th century, the mythologizing process had begun. In their own lifetimes, the “gunslingers” of the old west were fodder for cheap, sensationally violent novels that sold like hotcakes to the city dwellers back east. Movies and television just continued what was already happening.

But for whatever reason, the old west isn’t much of a subject for entertainment any more. Hollywood makes a western only occasionally every few years; most of those are based on old TV shows and are generally pretty bad. Likewise, cowboys aren’t much in evidence on TV. The last popular TV western, “Deadwood,” was decidedly adult fare, since the writers didn’t clean up the language used by cowboys, who were notoriously filthy-mouthed. And when’s the last time you saw little kids playing cowboys and Indians?

Every culture has to have its myths and we’ll always have ours. But it’s interesting to see the mythic old west disappearing from popular culture. I don’t know why it is – maybe because cowboys are decidedly low-tech in a high-tech age – but the only time you hear about the old west is in echoes of political debates like gun control.

A lot of pro-gun arguments have a decidedly old west flavor to them. The image of an armed homeowner protecting his family is right out of an old Randolph Scott movie. The “leave me alone” pleas of Libertarians recall the ethos of frontier settlers, who fled for the wide open spaces in hopes of making a life unencumbered by civilization’s rules.

Unfortunately, the picture of the old west we’ve always gotten from popular culture is pretty misleading. The middle-of-the-street gunfight, for instance – and old west gunfights in general – are a complete myth. Guys didn’t stand a few yards apart and quick-draw. They shot each other just like they do today, furtively and sneakily. And the old west settlers weren’t all rugged individualists. The western frontier was a wild and dangerous place and they could not have survived it without a keen sense of cooperation. Daily life in the old west wasn’t all that much different than it is for most people today.

But the things we believe about the old west, wrong though they are, are things that have shaped this country. It’s shaped us in some bad ways; the travesty of our treatment of Native Americans solidified our status as a warrior people, albeit the kind of warrior people who don’t give a lot of thought to the moral aspects of waging war. But there have been good ways as well. The drama of people decamping from their old life and heading off into the unknown looking for the main chance has shaped our view that America is the land of second chances. It’s made us the optimists we are.

As the west recedes more into history’s fog, and becomes even less of pop-culture thing – even stories that would have made good westerns are more likely told as space operas rather than horse operas – you have to wonder what we’ll lose. It’s entirely possible that we’ll lose something of a sense of who we are as a people, because some important context will be missing.

But maybe we’ll also get past some of the things about the myths that are damaging, like their moral blindness and their false lessons about self-defense and self-reliance. A people needs its myths to make sense of itself, but when those myths give us a false picture of what was they can lead us to make bad decisions about what is — what needs to be.