Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics Read Online Free PDF
Author: Glenn Greenwald
today’s right-wing war cheerleaders:
According to Pilar Wayne, her husband “would become a ‘superpatriot’ for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home” during WWII. Like Wayne, the current crop of GOP chicken hawks are great actors, overcompensating for their previous patriotic failings (draft dodging, etc.) by sounding the jingoistic battle cry for a new generation of working-class sons and daughters to go to war.
Wayne himself frequently and expressly claimed to be the very epitome of the virile fighting male, making swaggering, chest-beating pronouncements like the following at various stages of his life:
“God-damn, I’m the stuff men are made of!”
“Courage is being scared to death—and saddling up anyway.”
“I am an old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness, flag-waving patriot.”
In one interview, Wayne explained that he single-handedly innovated the concept of the Real Cowboy:
I made up my mind that I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability. I felt many of the Western stars of the twenties and thirties were too goddamn perfect. They never drank or smoked. They never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl. They never had a fight. A heavy might throw a chair at them, and they just looked surprised and didn’t fight in this spirit. They were too goddamn sweet and pure to be dirty fighters. Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back.
If someone throws a chair at you, hell, you pick up a chair and belt him right back. I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to. You could say I made the Western hero a roughneck.
In the 1969 Time profile, Wayne similarly boasted: “When I came in, the western man never lost his white hat and always rode the white horse and waited for the man to get up again in the fight. Following my Dad’s advice, if a guy hit me with a vase, I’d hit him with a chair. That’s the way we played it. I changed the saintly Boy Scout of the original cowboy hero into a more normal kind of fella.”
So the actor who in reality hid from the opportunity—and the duty—to “belt right back” when his country was attacked by the Japanese and threatened by the Nazis spent the rest of his life loudly claiming to be the Real Man, the one who Fights Back.
Worse still, after World War II, Wayne repeatedly and viciously attacked various films for being allegedly anti-American or insufficiently reverent of America. In one interview, he complained: “ High Noon was the most un-American thing I have ever seen in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ol’ Coop [Gary Cooper] putting the United States Marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it. I’ll never regret having run [screenwriter and accused Communist] Carl Foreman out of this country.”
Wayne’s boast that he ran Foreman “out of this country” referenced the fact that, in the 1950s, Wayne became a fervent and paranoid anti-Communist McCarthyite. He actively assisted the House Un-American Activities Committee in its effort to ferret out suspected Communist sympathizers in Hollywood. He made a practice of accusing Hollywood figures of being Communists based on the flimsiest of evidence, proclaiming in one interview:
The only guy that ever fooled me was the director Edward Dmytryk. I made a picture with him called Back to Bataan.
He started talking about the masses, and as soon as he started using that word—which is from their book, not ours—I knew he was a Commie.
In 1960, Frank Sinatra—at the request of his political ally, then-senator and presidential candidate John Kennedy—hired a Hollywood writer, Albert Maltz, one of the “Hollywood Ten” who had been blacklisted during the height of the anti-Communist hysteria. Wayne led the charge in attacking Sinatra: “I
According to Pilar Wayne, her husband “would become a ‘superpatriot’ for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home” during WWII. Like Wayne, the current crop of GOP chicken hawks are great actors, overcompensating for their previous patriotic failings (draft dodging, etc.) by sounding the jingoistic battle cry for a new generation of working-class sons and daughters to go to war.
Wayne himself frequently and expressly claimed to be the very epitome of the virile fighting male, making swaggering, chest-beating pronouncements like the following at various stages of his life:
“God-damn, I’m the stuff men are made of!”
“Courage is being scared to death—and saddling up anyway.”
“I am an old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness, flag-waving patriot.”
In one interview, Wayne explained that he single-handedly innovated the concept of the Real Cowboy:
I made up my mind that I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability. I felt many of the Western stars of the twenties and thirties were too goddamn perfect. They never drank or smoked. They never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl. They never had a fight. A heavy might throw a chair at them, and they just looked surprised and didn’t fight in this spirit. They were too goddamn sweet and pure to be dirty fighters. Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back.
If someone throws a chair at you, hell, you pick up a chair and belt him right back. I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to. You could say I made the Western hero a roughneck.
In the 1969 Time profile, Wayne similarly boasted: “When I came in, the western man never lost his white hat and always rode the white horse and waited for the man to get up again in the fight. Following my Dad’s advice, if a guy hit me with a vase, I’d hit him with a chair. That’s the way we played it. I changed the saintly Boy Scout of the original cowboy hero into a more normal kind of fella.”
So the actor who in reality hid from the opportunity—and the duty—to “belt right back” when his country was attacked by the Japanese and threatened by the Nazis spent the rest of his life loudly claiming to be the Real Man, the one who Fights Back.
Worse still, after World War II, Wayne repeatedly and viciously attacked various films for being allegedly anti-American or insufficiently reverent of America. In one interview, he complained: “ High Noon was the most un-American thing I have ever seen in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ol’ Coop [Gary Cooper] putting the United States Marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it. I’ll never regret having run [screenwriter and accused Communist] Carl Foreman out of this country.”
Wayne’s boast that he ran Foreman “out of this country” referenced the fact that, in the 1950s, Wayne became a fervent and paranoid anti-Communist McCarthyite. He actively assisted the House Un-American Activities Committee in its effort to ferret out suspected Communist sympathizers in Hollywood. He made a practice of accusing Hollywood figures of being Communists based on the flimsiest of evidence, proclaiming in one interview:
The only guy that ever fooled me was the director Edward Dmytryk. I made a picture with him called Back to Bataan.
He started talking about the masses, and as soon as he started using that word—which is from their book, not ours—I knew he was a Commie.
In 1960, Frank Sinatra—at the request of his political ally, then-senator and presidential candidate John Kennedy—hired a Hollywood writer, Albert Maltz, one of the “Hollywood Ten” who had been blacklisted during the height of the anti-Communist hysteria. Wayne led the charge in attacking Sinatra: “I
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