“The clothes of pride… Is that all you want?”

“All I want is to enter my house justified.”

So slips the give between the two aged lawmen hired to escort a bundle of bullion down the mountain in Sam Peckinpah’s exceptionally epic Ride the High Country. It’s a droll exchange (Sam dug drollery), and it’s heavy, weighted by both the Good Book and the better angels of our nature.

But the give is not so taken with itself that you don’t immediately get where the two hard-bitten characters are coming from — one (Randolph Scott) wants the gold; the other (Joel McCrea) has duty and honor to uphold.

Of course, things aren’t so black-and-white, even in such a colorful Western. In fact, they’re more like black and blue — the black and blue of American Exceptionalism, which might be stretched to state that we’ve got the divine right to rise up and above and then kick the shit outta whomever we want — including ourselves, ’cause it’ll all wring out in the end.

Reading Greil Marcus’ The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (Picador, $15), one gets the impression he believes we’ve all found our own inner Scotts, but it’s the McCreas who’ve paved the ways that are gonna save our souls.

Both Scott and McCrea spent a lifetime portraying the battling hymns of our republic, and neither revealed our country’s scars nor its soul more so than when they rode the High Country.

So too Marcus with Shape, a book that only could be spined by someone with decades of myths beneath his belt. Marcus — first a reviewer at Rolling Stone, an early at Creem, a columnist at Interview and Salon (among many others) and an author of such bold look-backs as Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces and The Dustbin of History — has ridden the myths of riffs, stories, pix and flicks and found them to be the very roots of our scarred souls.

In Shape, his main McCreas are John Winthrop (city upon a hill), MLK (have that dream), Lincoln (beyond Gettysburg), Philip Roth (especially American Pastoral), David Lynch (on a Lost Highway up to Twin Peaks) and — get this — David Thomas, founding member of early alternative rock act Pere Ubu (not to mention the Pedestrians), but it’s the high-low continuum linking all of the above that truly shades our tomorrows.

Like the staunch stoics in Peckinpah’s Ride, Marcus sometimes has to get lowdown to rise up and above the fray — and he kicks ass every step of the way.

We caught the cat on the eve of hyping the paperback edition of Shape and he was cool enough to stoop to either/or. Here’s his play:

Strokes or Hives?

You can die of Strokes.

Polyphonic Spree or Akron/Family?

Polyphonic Spree. Their version of “Lithium” is more psychotic than Nirvana’s, and that was way over the edge.

Buzzcocks or Undertones?

Buzzcocks — the Howard Devoto Buzzcocks, as cool and steady a band as ever ducked into an alley.

Band of Horses or Band of Gypsies?

Crazy Horse.

Eggers or Coupland?

Cop Land.

Hemingway or Fitzgerald?

Fitzgerald. And as the years pass, I keep thinking it’s more Tender Is the Night than Gatsby.

Wyler or Sturges?

Sturges. There’s never been anyone like him. Even the movies he didn’t direct but only wrote come to life in an instant — at least if Barbara Stanwyck is in them.

Peckinpah or Fuller?

Fuller never really reached me, and The Big Red One is disgraceful. The Wild Bunch is still breathtaking — even if you know exactly what’s going to happen, you can hardly believe it when it does.

Memphis or Nashville?

Memphis. They’re both ugly, but one has heart and soul around every corner and the other just has a phony smile. And phony smiles are hard to find in the South.

Akron or Austin?

Never been to Akron.

Scotch or soda?

Gin.