the (Moral Center) Searchers edition

NF, One L
Issue EIGHT

1. Noted gay icon John Wayne would have been 118 today.

2. Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison, although friends on set often referred to him as “Old Cameltoe”.

3. Why do we post arbitrary numerics online and without context, as if they held some larger meaning or clandestine knowledge? “Hammurabi of Babylonia would have been 2,477 years old today. Man, it really makes you think!”

4. John Wayne, at one time the global epitome of masculinity, turns out to have had some sexy gams on him, and if those Marions were waxed, dude could have been a rhinestone Jimmy Choo model.

5. While I definitely do not believe in or support cherry-picking the comments of (mainly) men from earlier generations/centuries outside of the context of their time and holding them to contemporary standards for any reason other than historical accuracy and general awareness, here’s a verbatim John Wayne quote that sort of defies time-travel or relative contextualization: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people. I don’t feel guilty about the fact that five or ten generations ago these people were slaves.”

6. But, to be fair, he was great in “The Searchers”.

7. John Wayne famously dodged the draft. Or at least secretly and assiduously avoided serving in WWII. Although not as obviously fraudulent as your father paying a doctor that rented an apartment from him to claim you had bone spurs while playing on the Wharton tennis team, Wayne was indeed given 3-A status for “family duties”, even though he was drunk on set 99% of the time and unrecognizable to his children, burning through three marriages in the interim. A lot of men exactly his age and with the same familial status chose to serve anyway (oh, like Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, and Jimmy Stewart), but most American men who served did not also play war heroes in dozens of films and be feted by high society for decades because of it while hanging around the cabana in bootie shorts as artillery rained down upon Poland.

8. Just after Memorial Day, it is perhaps worth remembering that John Wayne was not the patriot he is still remembered as, nor a paragon of virtue, nor a cowboy, nor full of Grit, True or otherwise. He was a self-serving grifter with a lifetime of odious opinions under his Sans-a-Belt, whose personal and professional artifice was staggering in its enormity, and who reminds me a ton of someone, can’t quite put my finger on who.

9. In 1973, Wayne released a hit spoken-word record of a poem he wrote called “America: Why I Love Her.” On an aesthetic/craft level it is abysmal even by Rod McKuen standards, but the main dilemma is having to decide which is worse: the fact that he claimed to have written such mind-numbing pap, or the truth that he paid someone to ghost it for him.

10. This is not really about John Wayne as a person. We’re all deeply flawed and confused and entitled and crammed to the gills with delusions and self-rationalizations, flaws that most of us do not have to live down, or even try to make sense of, while profoundly famous. John Wayne was a guy who made a lot of mistakes and a blatant fraud, but he had friends and family and even though there’s no such thing as evil, he wasn’t evil, just misguided and self-indulgent and probably pretty dumb. Capitalism, this system we so revere, has almost nothing to do with economics and everything to do with applying leverage. The economic underpinning of the system CELEBRATES the application of ruthless leverage without penalty, and to some degree we all take advantage of it, because more than any thin religion, leveraging your circumstances to your own advantage is the true American Theology. And that’s exactly what John Wayne did. So, let's name another airport after him.
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11. What this list, by number eleven, turns out to be about, is the myriad ways in which America never learns its lesson, or really anything at all, still mired in the stifling rule, cultural or political, of naked frauds and Grifters, none the wiser.