Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet On the Western Front).

 

He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

The last two paragraphs of All Quiet On The Western Front. 

I've never reviewed All Quiet on the Western Front, even though I'd long ago seen the prior two versions.  I just saw the newest, German made, production of the book, which in Germany was released under the novel's German title, Im Westen nichts Neues, which literally translates as "in the West nothing new".*

All Quiet On The Western Front has a reputation as being the greatest anti-war novel ever written.  I'm sorry to say that I haven't actually read it, which I'll have to do.  Indeed, the recent German made version of the novel sort of compels me to do so.

The novel was first adapted to film in 1930 in an American version, which is a great film in its own right.

It was later adopted to a television in 1979, in another version that is very well regarded.  In 2022 this German version was released and shown on Netflix.  My original intent was to review just that version, but you really can't.  You have to review all three.

The best of the three is frankly the first one, although it does suffer from being a film that, due to cinematography, and due to pacing, hasn't aged as well as it should have.  It's hard not to watch the 1930 version and not, at least at first, appreciate that you are watching an old film.  

Still, this version sets the story at well, and perhaps with more than a degree of unintended irony in that the film came before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1932, and therefore the early scene of enthusiastic school boys being eager for the war were ominous, retrospectively.  It's a gritty, good protrayal.

The 1979 television version is good as well, but frankly I just couldn't quite get around Richard Thomas in the role of the main protagonist, Paul Bäumer.  Lew Ayres was better in that role.  For that matter, Ernest Borgnine, who almost always turned in a good performance, did in the 1979 version as well, but he's just way too old for the German NCO Stanislaus Katczinsky he portrays.  For that matter, Louis Robert Wolheim really was as well, at age 50, but he carries the role off better, even though he was within a year of his own death at the time.

Anyhow, Thomas was so whiny, in a way, in The Waltons that I just can't get around that in this film, which really isn't his fault.  I just can't see him going from a green, naive recruit to a hardened combat veteran.

Which takes us to the new production.

This is the first German production of the film, and it shows it.  The production values in the film are absolutely excellent.  the material details are superb and. . . . the plot massively departs from the novel.

And for that reason, frankly, it suffers.  

This film really carries the post World War Two German guilt/excuse into a World War One work that was a novel.  It doesn't, therefore, really get Remarque's warning about militarism across, so much as it portrays average Germans as victims of the Great War and future victims of the Second World War.  The death of Katczinsky, which is a completely pointless combat death in the novel and first two films, is a weird murder by a French child in this version.  

And the ending of this movie departs massively from the novel and looses the point of it.  The protagonist dies on a quiet day, like thousands of soldiers did.  In the new German version he died in a  massive late war German assault at the end of the war.  That's completely different.  

For that matter, that's a major departure from actual history and it ties in, just a tad, to the Stabbed In the Back myth. The Germans had an ongoing revolution at home and the Frontsoldaten were collapsing. You couldn't have ordered them into an attack in late 1918 no matter how hard you tried.

So, the first version is the best.  I don't think I could get through the second again, and the third version is worth watching, once.

*This review was started in October, 2022.

I had always thought my grandfather on my mother's side died at age 58. . .

but it turns out, he died in 1958.

He was, therefore, about 67 years of age.

Still not ancient by current standards, but not 58 years of age, either.

That was, FWIW, the same year my parents married.

His wife, my grandmother, died at age 89, however, which is a little younger than I remembered.  It was in 1979, which is later than I remember, which means that my recollection didn't make mathematical sense, either.  I was in high school at the time, but I don't recall it that way.

That also means that she lived long enough to see one of her children die, which I knew, and two of them fall into severe illness accompanied by mental decline, which must have been hard in the extreme to endure.

Tuesday, January 8, 1974. Suppressing dissent and the news.

South Korean President Park Chung-hee  issued an emergency decree making it illegal "to deny, oppose, misrepresent, or defame" the president's decisions.  The same decree prohibited reporting on dissent  "through broadcasting, reporting or publishing, or by any other means."

He must have been concerned about "fake news".

Park started his adult life as an army officer in the Japanese puppet Manchukuo Imperial Army.  After serving a little over two years in that entity during World War Two, he returned to the Korean Military Academy and joined the South Korean Army.  He was a figure in the 1961 military coup in South Korea.  After large scale protests in 1979 he was assassinated by  Kim Jae-gyu, the director of the KCIA, and a close friend of his after a banquet at a safe house in Gungjeong-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul. Kim Jae-gyu would be hanged the following year for the action.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association approved allowing amateur athletes to play as professionals in a second sport.

Blog Mirror: Legal Origins of the Quebec Tavern (la Taverne)

 

Legal Origins of the Quebec Tavern (la Taverne)

Juneteenth. What the new Federal Holiday Commemorates

Today is a Federal Holiday.  And for the first time.

Emancipation Day celebration, Richmond Virginia, 1905.

The holiday is Juneteenth.

The creation of the holiday is certainly proof that the Federal Government can in fact act quickly.  The bills on this were very recently introduced and this just passed Congress earlier this week and was signed into law yesterday, giving Federal employees the day off today. On Monday, they weren't expecting a day off.

So what is it?

The day basically celebrates the end of slavery, but in a bit of an unusual way. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862.  Juneteenth, however, marks the calendar date of June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, after the end of the war, and issued proclamations voiding acts of the Texas legislature during the war and proclaiming the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation.  His General Order No. 3 was read aloud in the streets. Hence, June 19 became recognized, regionally, as the day that the Emancipation Proclamation reached the most distant outposts of the slave states, bringing slavery finally to an end.

Band for Texas Emancipation Day celebration, 1900.

Celebration of the day in Texas started almost immediately, being first observed just one year later, by the state's freed African American population.  Interestingly, the day was generally known as Emancipation Day.  However, the revival of segregation in the South in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century caused the day to suffer a decline, until it began to be revived in the 1950s.  Upon revival, the name Juneteenth began to apply to it.  It was made a state holiday in Texas in 1979.  The day received recognition in 47 of the states since then, with North and South Dakota and Hawaii being the only ones that had not up until now.

Talk of making it a Federal holiday has existed at least since the 1980s.  Generally there's been very broad support for the move, but it obviously has taken years to accomplish, if we regard 1979 as the onset.  It's interestingly been an example of states largely being out in front of the Federal Government on a holiday, and not surprisingly the various ways that states have recognized it have not been consistent.

Gen. Gordon, who brought news to African Americans in Texas that they'd been freed two years prior.

There's been next to no opposition to the holiday being created which is interesting, in part, as the current times have been very oddly polarized in all sorts of ways.  The measure had bipartisan support, although fourteen Republican members of Congress voted against it.  One interestingly voted against it as he thought the official name confusing, Juneteenth National Independence Day, which in fact it somewhat is.  That individual wanted to use the original name, Emancipation Day, which is a view I somewhat sympathize with.

It'll be interesting to see what the public reaction is given that this happened seemingly so quickly.  By and large people who are aware of it seem pleased, although Candace Owens, the African American conservative columnists and quasi gadfly, predictably wasn't.  It'll probably be next year until there's widespread national recognition of the day.

In very real ways, what it commemorates is the suffering of one of the most American of all American demographics, the African Americans, who have been in the country since its founding, but who still were the victims of legal discrimination all the way into the 1960s and whose economic plight remains marked.

April 7, 1971. Withdrawals and Accessions.

President Nixon announced on television that he was withdrawing a further 100,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam, with the withdrawals to take place at a rate slightly over 14,000 per month. There were currently 284,000 US troops in the country, down from approximately 500,000.

Nixon had been withdrawing troops for most of his Presidency, while at the same time occasionally intensifying the air operations.  It was a twin strategy of brining the troops home from an unpopular war while simultaneously punishing the North Vietnamese for their actions. The strategy was termed "Vietnamization" and was claimed to be based on the evolution of the war to the point where the south could take over the fighting on its own.

Indeed, North Vietnamese forces had been so depleted during the Tet Offensive of 1968 that they were in fact more ineffectual in the field against the U.S. Army and the U.S. supported ARVN, something that has lead some to claim that Nixon was withdrawing troops as the war was effectively won.  In retrospect, based upon what we now know of Nixon's thoughts, Nixon was looking for a way out of the war that afforded some sort of cover that the U.S. hadn't abandoned the south, even though that is exactly what he was effectively doing.  As a practical matter, however, by this point in the war, and partially due to the obvious withdrawal policy, the morale of U.S. forces in Vietnam was collapsing and there were serious concerns about the extent to which that was impacting the Army as a whole.

Most of the American forces in Vietnam were always support troops, although there were certainly many combat soldiers. While there were still combat forces in Vietnam in 1971, by this point the scale was heavily weighted towards support troops.

On the say day, the U.S. abandoned Khe Sanh for the second time.  It had been earlier reactivated that year in support of ARVN operations in Laos.  In that country, the Royal Laotian Army commenced a defensive counter strike against Laotian communist troops in Operation Xieng Dong which would result in a successful defense of the country's capitol against them.

Meliktu Jenbere was elected as the second Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church, a branch of Oriental Orthodoxy, and indeed its largest branch. 

Saint Mary's Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Denver Colorado

This is Saint Mary's Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in Denver Colorado. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is a non-Chalcedonian (Oriental Orthodox) church. This church is located in north eastern Denver.

He was the second Patriarch of the church, reflecting the fact that the church became autocephalous in 1948, at which time it was accorded that status by the Coptic Church.  He became the acting Patriarch in 1970 at the time of his predecessor's death.

He was imprisoned by the Marxist government of Ethiopia in 1974 which attempted to depose him while he was in prison, an act that the Coptic Church refused to recognize.  He was treated cruelly while a prisoner and executed by strangulation on August 14, 1979.  The Church in general was heavily persecuted during it's Communist era, which ran from 1974 until 1991, and the largest political party in the country today remains a reformed Communist party.

Baseball opened with a double header, the A's v. the White Sox, for the last time. 

Virginia ratifies the Equal Rights Amendment. Or actually it doesn't.

On January 15 Virginia passed legislation ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment.

National Woman's Party cartoon. The constitutional amendment referred to in this cartoon is the 19th Amendment extending suffrage to women.

Which pretty much means nothing, legally, given that the expiration date for the amendment expires in 1982.

The Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, was first drafted as a proposed amendment to the US Constitution, in its earliest form in 1921 by the National Woman's Party, a political party that had come up in the Suffrage era.  The text was revised by the head of the party, Alice Paul, in 1923 and again in 1943.  That text was basically used by Congress when Congress passed by Congress in 1972.  It reads:

Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party raising a glass of grape juice in celebration of the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women suffrage in 1920.  Paul lived a long life and died in 1977.

The original Congressional act had a fairly typical seven year time period in which for the states to ratify the amendment.  Wyoming passed the ratifying act on January 24, 1973, making it the third state in the union to ratify it.  It failed to gain a sufficient number of state ratifications, however, in that period so Congress, by that time heavily Democratic in the post Watergate era, extended the deadline to 1982.  By the end of that period the proposed amendment had only secured 35 out of the necessary states and the original act died.

That legislative death hasn't kept there from being state action since 1982, although the 1982 extension itself raised real Constitutional questions in the first place.  

Since 1982 three more states have passed ratifying acts, with Virginia being the latest, bringing the number of states now up to a pointless 38.  Four states, however, have rescinded their ratifications, bringing it down to a pointless 33, maybe.  Backers of the ERA claim that pre ratification rescissions are invalid, although they seem less bothered by post deadline ratifications.  In truth, there's no good reason to suppose that a state can't rescind its approval of a Constitutional amendment prior to it becoming law, in spite of claims that this is a legally deficient process.  Indeed, the four resicinding states all rescinded prior to 1979, with two of them doing so prior to 1975.  One state's rescision, Kentucky, was vetoed by the Lt. Governor of that state in the Governor's absence, which itself raises Constitutional questions as it hasn't been determined if a Governor can veto anything on a proposed Constitutional Amendment.

So what's all this mean?

Well it means that the ratification is invalid and mostly just a show of support for the old text.

And now what?

Well, the whole thing will go to the United States Supreme Court in a messy procedure in which the Court will be asked to sort out the Constitutional dog's breakfast this situation creates.  The questions are numerous, including whether or not a state can ignore the passage deadline (it can't), whether or not a state can rescind its ratification (it can, but probably only before the deadline as well), whether a Governor or person holding a state's chief executive role temporary can veto anything on a proposed Constitutional amendment (probably not) and whether Congress can validly extend the deadline in the first place.

That last matter might not seem to be an issue, but it is.  The time limits on the ratification of Constitutional Amendments exists for a reason and part of that reason is making the making an original action valid in time.  Extending out deadlines creates a situation in which the passing legislatures in the early ratification may no longer hold the same view later on.  Seven years is a fairly typical period for a Constitutional amendment.  Ten years could have been a valid period, but if you get out to twenty or more the process may be void on its face.

Moreover, in this case, extending the deadline did not receive the Constitutionally required 2/3s majority necessary to pass a proposed Constitutional Amendment, and so it was passed simply as a law.  The better legal position, therefore, is that the deadline actually expired in 1979.  This doesn't really matter here, however, as no states ratified the act between 1979 and 1982.

Or maybe it does, of the state's that passed the amendment prior to the original deadline passing, 24 of them referred to to the original deadline in their ratification.  That may mean that they voted to ratify by that date, and not approve an endlessly open ratification process.

None of which answers the question of whether the ERA, in 2020, should be passed into law at all.

In 1972 the proposal was a radical one in context, which is why it failed to ultimately pass.  The nation was reeling in a period of radicalism brought on by the late 1960s and all that era entailed.  The "Women's Lib" movement was at its height and interestingly later younger feminist have retreated from much of what that movement then sought.  But as radical as it was, much of what its backers then proposed would not have comported with later developments.

Indeed, even at the time its backers claimed that its impact would be nearly non existent in numerous ways.  It wouldn't require, for example, that women serve in combat in the military and it wouldn't require women to be conscripted, if there was conscription. Opponents of the ERA claimed that it would do both, and lead to "unisex" public bathrooms.  Since that time social engineers in the government have operated in support of their theories within the military and women do serve in combat roles in spite of a nearly universally held view within the services that its a bad idea and bathrooms have become a matter of odd American public debate.

The point is not to debate that, but to point out that if the ERA passed today, there'd be nothing for the text to do in the context of what it originally proposed to do. Subsequent legislation achieved the same goals.

Which doesn't mean that the text would be without impact.  It would be, in the form of litigation on what "on account of sex" means.

Originally it obviously meant on account of gender, and the definition of gender was the biological one that science supports, male and female.  The vast majority of the original proponents of the ERA, and the legislators who voted for it, would have had no other meaning even remotely in mind. But in the current era that's not how it would be taken at all.  Various groups would argue that "sex" meant gender as they self identify it, or maybe even the physical act of sex.  Indeed there's already been an argument by two feminist scholars that the original ERA no longer fits the bill and a new one should be drafted with uses a term with something like "gender in all its expressions", which is vaguely coded language that would enshrine the currently popular concept that gender is self identified rather than biologically identified as a Constitutional principal.

No matter what a person feels about those things, the lessons of 1919, and also of 1973, demonstrate why on most issues its better to let things actually get sorted out legislatively rather than amend the Constitution. The 18th Amendment which provided women the right to vote everywhere, can be pointed to as a success, as there were many states in which women still couldn't vote in, in 1919, and nobody would hold that opinion now except for an extremist.

Regions in North America that allowed women to vote in 1917.  By 1919 there's be more white on this map, including Mexico which had extended the franchise in its post revolution constitution by that time.

Prohibition, on the other hand, also from 1919 gives us an opposite example.

Lots of states had gone dry by 1919, all on their own.  When Prohibition came into law, however, in 1920 full scale opposition to it was already rolling and advanced.  The Constitutional Amendment seemingly served to fire a spirit of brazen resistance to it, and because of what was occurring at the time, it was wholly unnecessary.  Had Prohibition not become the law of the land, the trend was that it was becoming the law of most of the states and that it had really widespread support.  Making it a Constitutional Amendment all but killed that support very rapidly.

Roe v. Wade provides another example.  While no Constitutional Amendment was involved, the constituionalization of an issue badly has lead to a massive decline in respect for the Supreme Court as well as the odd idea that the Court itself is a national Oligarchic Panel.  If anything the removal of what was a legislative issue from the legislatures has lead to decades of bitter dispute and the retreat of one side, the left wing side, into the courts in a fashion that's inherently anti democratic and not very well respected among a large amount of the nation's population.

Which is not to say that the same thing would happen in regard to the ERA. Rather, what I'm saying is that the history on women's equality actually did play out the way Prohibition would probably have but for the Constitutional Amendment requiring it.  There's nearly no legal inequality between women and men now save for jobs that are absolutely gender defined.  Over the past 47 years these issues in terms of the law have been worked out themselves.  So passage of the ERA now would serve at most to do nothing at all, or at worst to be used for things it was never intended to be used for.

Critics may point out that there's still social inequality, although like many fin de siecle debates the degree to which this is true is very overstated.  But that brings up another point which is the Roe v. Wade one.  While there are very much issues that need to be addressed by way of the Constitution, it pays to be very careful about those as the constitutionalization of an issue serves to fire up a spirit of resistance which more conventional laws do not.  The resistance here would likely not be massive, but then the need for the ERA at this point isn't great either.

And now Iranian protests against its government

The Iranian people's level of trust for their own government is low and has been waning for a long time.

Which leads us to the blistering oddities of the current situation between the US and Iran.  And indeed, the odd ways in which that situation involves air disasters.

The relationship between the two nations went bad during the Islamic Revolution there when Iranian students, who morphed into the Revolutionary Guard, took the American Embassy in Tehran and held those there hostage.  President Carter attempted to secure the release of the hostages through diplomacy before ultimately deploying U.S. special forces in the form of the "Delta Force" in Operation Eagle Claw.

It failed.

Fuel calculations were botched and desert conditions intervened to lead to a USAF EC-130 running into a RH-53 helicopter sending both to the ground with loss of American life.  It was a complete debacle and showed the depths to which the American military had declined following the Vietnam War.  The US was shown to be impotent.

Following this, in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 occupants on board the plane.  The Vincennes had been harried by Iranian naval forces in a prolonged engagement that day and had actually crossed into Iranian waters in pursuit of them when the Iranian Airbus A300 was mistaken for an Iranian military aircraft and shot down.  Unusual for the US, the US never acknowledged that the error was a culpable one and the crew was not disciplined in any fashion.  In the Navy's view, the incident was a regrettable but not culpable event.  

Iran has always viewed it differently and has marked the anniversary of the event repeatedly.  It's one of the unifying events the Iranian people have with their government.

And now they've shot down their own airliner.

A lot has changed since 1979, let alone 1988.  Iranians are no longer that keen on the theocracy and the majority of them would abandon it.  Anecdotal evidence holds that a lot of Iranians have abandoned Islam itself with quite a few converting to Christianity very quietly.  The well educated Iranian population chaffs at the strict tenants of Shia Islam and its well educated female population can look back to the 1970s when they weren't veiled and Iran was even unique in conscripting women, which says something about the government's view of its female population at the time.  The Iranian government is going to change.

The recent American strike on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general should have served to really being a uniting force between the Iranian people and their theocracy, and it did briefly.  Now that seems to have already eroded.  Even before this incident occurred Iranian twitter accounts were starting to argue against their really being support for the government and some even declared the targeted general to be a terrorist.  Now the weakness of the country has really been exposed.  The American military has really moved on, the Iranian one has not, and now its culpable for killing its own citizens by accident.  And Iranians are back to protesting their government.  The government's capitol on the 1988 event may now have been spent.

Where this leads nobody knows, but nobody could have predicted this course of events in any fashion.

The Aerodrome: Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport...

The Aerodrome: Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport...:

Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport, Orange County, California

Let me start off by noting that I'm not really a John Wayne fan.

I'm not a John Wayne anti fan either.

As I've stated on one of our other blogs, I don't really get hero worship in regard to actors and actresses, or other entertainers.  I don't expect actors in particular to reflect the characters they portray in any fashion whatsoever.  Many, I'm sure, are the very antithesis of the characters they portray and as a general rule, actors and actresses (which I'll henceforth condense into "actors") are among the most screwed up demographic that exists.*  This doesn't apply to all of them, by any means, but as a demographic they're genuinely pushing the envelope on odd and I've sometimes wondered, indeed I'm convinced, that quite a few actors take up that occupation to compensate for not feeling real, and then go on to adopt the cause de jour to try to give meaning to lives that otherwise lack them.

Now, I'm not saying that any of that applies to John Wayne.  Wayne came up in the days of acting when a lot of early actors actually came into it through some other movie industry role.  In Wayne's case he was an actor in Hollywood from the start, following a (fairly rare at the time) college career in which he played football.

I frankly don't think that Wayne was the greatest actor in the world either, or although I also think that he was a better actor than his detractors would have it.  His greatest role was in the John Ford film The Searchers, in which he doesn't play to type at all.  His portrayals in the John Ford Cavalry Trilogy films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Cowboys are all also excellent.  His late film The Green Berets, in contrast, is horrifically bad and I don't even think Stagecoach, which is widely beloved and celebrated, is all that good.  So my views are mixed.

Just because Wayne played a military man in a host of films in which all the portrayals were heroic doesn't make him a military man.  When his time came, during World War Two, Wayne agonized over joining the service and didn't. His career was just taking off and he worried about serving wrecking that.  He made, in my view, the improper choice.**

I know that his defenders here will cite a football injury but I just don't believe it.  By the end of the Second World war American manpower was in such short supply that men were taken into the Army who were basically blind in one eye and had border line mental psychosis.  With Wayne's connections, even if he had an injury, he could have gotten in.

So with all of that, I just regard actor John Wayne as an actor.  He had some admirable qualities to be sure.  He was apparently personally courageous in confrontation and even waded into a group of Vietnam War protesters to quiet them when he was somewhere with Jimmy Stewart, whose son had just been killed in Vietnam.*** That took guts.

Anyhow, I think it's silly in the first place that Orange County renamed their airport after John Wayne in 1979.  I wouldn't have done that. 

Indeed, I think airports that are named after people, generally ought to be named after somebody of significance, and I don't place actors in that category.  It makes no more sense, in my view, for Orange County to have renamed their former military field after John Wayne (indeed, there's some ironies in that) than it would make for the Port of Port Arthur, Texas to rename that facility Janis Joplin Port.  Indeed, the latter example might make more sense as Janis Joplin was actually from Port Arthur.

Port Arthur, Texas.  Should it be renamed Port Janis Joplin?

Indeed, if there was a desire to name the airport after a movie industry figure with a real role in aviation, it would have been Howard Hughes Airport.****

But that's impossible to imagine.

Anyhow, I also think it's silly that the Los Angeles Times has started a debate over renaming it, which they recently did with this item by columnist Michale Hitzik:

Column: It’s time to take John Wayne’s name off the Orange County airport

Most people familiar with the life story of John Wayne are aware that the late movie star was a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger — after all, he was still making a movie glorifying America’s conduct of the Vietnam War (“The Green Berets,” 1968) well after the country had begun to get sick of the conflict.But the resurrection of a 1971 interview Wayne gave to Playboy magazine has underscored the sheer crudeness of the actor’s feelings about gay people, black people, Native Americans, young people and liberals.This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible or immoral to enjoy westerns and war movies starring John Wayne; that’s a personal choice. But it certainly undermines any justification for his name and image to adorn a civic facility.

Okay, anyone familiar with John Wayne is likely already familiar with his 1971 interview with the pedophilic, pornographic smut magazine Playboy.   1971 was about the high water mark of the detestable Hugh Hefner's objectification of women, although we certainly haven't recovered from that, and part of its cover for barely disguised misogynistic pedophilia was to run serious interviews with people.  Next to Wayne's perhaps the most famous one came out a few years later when then Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was so unwise as to allow himself to be interviewed by the rag.

Wayne's interview became famous, or perhaps more accurately infamous, due questions asked of him in the rag regarding race and other matters.  Wayne didn't hold back on his views on various things in the magazine at all.  The columnist repeated some of them in his article, in order to make his point.  And indeed, Wayne made comments about homosexuals (Hitzik uses the term "Gay people", which isn't how I think they'd probably prefer to be referred to in this context), blacks and Indians.

We might note here from the onset that it's always baffled me why anyone cares what actors think about anything at all, and for that matter, any category of entertainer. Actors act.  They aren't those real people.  Who cares what they really think on any societal issue? And if people feel that's an excuse for excusing Wayne's comments, which I'm not going to do, I'll note that this extends out to every single topic that people ask actors to comment on. Whatever it is, if you are for it or against it, there's some actor you can get to comment on it, but why?

Anyhow, as we're opining on this, we'll take a look at Wayne's comments as well, although not in the order that Hitzik did, which probably wouldn't do them justice in context, and which isn't what made them initially controversial, which in fact they initially were.  More on that in a moment.

Usually, you only hear about his comments on blacks, which were:

WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. 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. 

PLAYBOY: Are you equipped to judge which blacks are irresponsible and which of their leaders inexperienced? 

WAYNE: It’s not my judgment. The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven’t passed the tests and don’t have the requisite background. … But if they aren’t academically ready for that step, I don’t think they should be allowed in. Otherwise, the academic society is brought down to the lowest common denominator. … What good would it do to register anybody in a class of higher algebra or calculus if they haven’t learned to count? There has to be a standard. …I think the Hollywood studios are carrying their tokenism a little too far. There’s no doubt that 10 percent of the population is black, or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves; they certainly aren’t Caucasian. Anyway, I suppose there should be the same percentage of the colored race in films as in society. But it can’t always be that way. There isn’t necessarily going to be 10 percent of the grips or sound men who are black, because more than likely, 10 percent haven’t trained themselves for that type of work.

Wayne was out to lunch in his comments and most particularly in his "white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility". These came in 1971.  But they aren't unusual for the time.  Indeed, because they weren't unusual, blacks of the era reacted less than a person might suspect, much less, as they were used to such arguments being advanced.  Today the opposite is very much true, and no wonder.

They were clearly racist and a person who stated them held undoubtedly racist views.  No doubt about it. And the old line about educating them up until . . was as old as the sun.  Indeed, it dates back to slavery.  No doubt in 1971 the percentage of college educated blacks was lower than it is now, but the overall American population in general was less educated in 1971.  It wasn't until after World War Two that high school graduation became an absolute norm and college education became societaly common.  The comment was absurd.

It's usually pointed out that Wayne personally had good relationships with black actors of his era, but that's hardly a defense to this.  A person being personally nice to people he's biased against doesn't make him unbiased.  Wayne was living in the past with these arguments, which were never valid, but that's part of the point.  A lot of Americans of that era were and these views were surprisingly common.  That's not a defense, it's just a fact.  The politics of the early 1970s still reflected this.

Indeed, Wayne's interview is just two years prior to Lynrd Skinner releasing Sweet Home Alabama, which is a reaction to Neil Young's Southern Man.  Almost nobody considers this, but Sweet Home Alabama excuses the same sort of views, with the lyrics noting that they hadn't supported Wallace for Governor of Alabama but that a Southern Man didn't need Neil Young around.  That's very close to the same view, as what the Playboy interviewer was suggesting was the view that most Americans had but still had to argue, the time for waiting was over.

Put more bluntly, Sweet Home Alabama is also subtly racist.  Consider the lyrics:

Well I heard Mister Young sing about her

Well I heard old Neil put her down

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember

A southern man don't need him around anyhow

That's also a "we can take care of it" type of excuse, quite frankly.  But nobody gets too up and arms about the song and there's even been a movie in recent years that took its title from it.

Maybe they should.

Do these statements make Wayne a racist?  Yes, but in the very common society wide manner of the era.  That's not a defense to it, but it's also not a reason for the Los Angeles Times to reverse Orange County's 1979 decision.

It might have been a reason not to name the airport after Wayne in 1979, but a better reason not to name it after him is that he was an actor, and an actor with no connection to aviation.

Well, maybe the other things that Wayne said are.  Let's take a look at them, going next to his comments about Indians.

PLAYBOY: For years American Indians have played an important — if subordinate — role in your Westerns. Do you feel any empathy with them? 

WAYNE: I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. … 

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the government grant for a university and cultural center that these Indians [then encamped on Alcatraz Island] have demanded as “reparations”? 

WAYNE: What happened between their forefathers and our forefathers is so far back — right, wrong or indifferent — that I don’t see why we owe them anything. I don’t know why the government should give them something that it wouldn’t give me. 

PLAYBOY: Do you think they’ve had the same advantages and opportunities that you’ve had? 

WAYNE: I’m not gonna give you one of those I-was-a-poor-boy-and-I-pulled-myself-upby-my-bootstraps stories, but I’ve gone without a meal or two in my life, and I still don’t expect the government to turn over any of its territory to me. Hard times aren’t something I can blame my fellow citizens for. Years ago, I didn’t have all the opportunities, either. But you can’t whine and bellyache ‘cause somebody else got a good break and you didn’t, like these Indians are. We’ll all be on a reservation soon if the socialists keep subsidizing groups like them with our tax money.

Shocking?

Yes, for sure.

Be that as it may, I still find plenty of people who, if you really know them, hold a basically similar view, and it was only in the 1960s that any other sort of view became widely held.

Indeed, the first time I heard it suggested that European Americans "stole" Indian lands was in the 1970s, when I was a kid and overheard it as part of a silent third party between my father and a colleague. The colleague mentioned that off hand.  This comment really surprised me at the time and I later asked my father if a theft had really happened.

He answered no, but his view was really more nuanced than that in that he regarded the pre 20th Century clash of cultures as inevitable, which is different from giving it virtue.  Plenty of people gave it virtue.  In my grade school library at the time I recall there was a book on Custer I read, written I think in the 1950s, that was practically a hagiography.  That sort of view had been extremely common into the 1960s and while there were those who swam against that current the entire time, it wasn't really until people like Mari Sandoz began to publish that there was any sort of wider reconsideration. By the 1960s the reconsideration had become widespread and was part of the era, and Indian activist movements developed and were in the news.

Wayne was still an active actor in the 1970s, to be sure.  Perhaps his most famous movie, The Cowboys, was yet to come, being released the year after this interview in 1972.  The interview obviously didn't impact his popularity much, if at all.  But here its important to remember that he was really an actor from the 40s and 50s who was the exception to the rule as he managed to age into later roles in the 60s and 70s.  By the late 60s his movies themselves, with the exception of The Cowboys, seemed to look back and Wayne was on record as hating some later Westerns, such as The Wild Bunch.  1971's movie, Big Jake, which I like, very much has that sense to it, amplified by the fact that it is itself a fin de siecle movie.  Coming after Peckinpah's violent masterpiece, the latter film seems to be from a much earlier era.

It isn't surprising, therefore, that Wayne's views were completely anachronistic.  Playboy likely knew that, and so Wayne was set up to look like a fool. Playboy itself is now a creepy anachronism and its only a matter of time until the Me Too era blows up all over it.  Unfortunately the creep who created it is dead and won't be round to take the brunt of the inevitably coming blows.

So Wayne also talked about homosexuals in his interview, which the Los Angeles Times refers to as "Gay people".  The term "gay" actually has, or at least had, a distinct meaning within the homosexual community and traditionally not all homosexuals have identified with it even if they identify as homosexual.  In this instance, therefore, the columnist himself shows himself to be insensitive an uninformed.

Wayne: Movies were once made for the whole family. Now, with the kind of junk the studios are cranking out. … I’m quite sure that within two or three years, Americans will be completely fed up with these perverted films. 

PLAYBOY: What kind of films do you consider perverted? 

WAYNE: Oh, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy — that kind of thing. Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies?

I've never seen Midnight Cowboy and I don't intend to.  Wayne isn't alone in his view that it was "perverted" however and there are still those who regard the film as debased.  It was an X Rated film at the time and won an Academy Award, the first film (and maybe the only film) in that category to win one.  It came just after Hollywood abandoned the Hayes Production Code which resulted in an explosion of movies pushing the limits on depictions which indeed did result in a downward descent in what was portrayed on the screen which really hasn't ended.  1966's Best Picture went to The Sound of Music, 1967's to A Man For All Seasons, 1968's to In the Heat Of the Night, 1969 to Oliver!, and then 1970's to Midnight Cowboy.  No matter what you think of any one of those films, the 1970 award reflects some sort of shift in what was being portrayed in film.  For somebody who started making films in the 1930s, the shift would have been obvious and titanic.  Indeed, very early in the early history of film the direction was going the opposite way.

The real shocker in this comment is the use of the slur "fags".  That's an epitaph and in insulting one, and it was at the time.  Now use of that term would destroy an actors career.  Coming in 1971, however, it didn't.  That probably says something about the times.

1971 was two years after the Stonebridge Riots in New York, but it was also a time of massive social unrest.  Homosexuality may have come a bit more out in the open with the riots, but it certainly wasn't open.  Indeed, that would take at least another twenty years.  Wayne's views were probably the societal norm at the time, including a norm that was held by many others who people would regard as very liberal.  Indeed, the accusation that somebody was a homosexual was libel per se in the law and was commonly used as a smear against figures of the right and left by their enemies. 

The Los Angeles Times has been met with all of these criticisms but is sticking to its guns.  It's noted that the civil rights "revolution" had been going on for years at the time that these statements were made, which is true.  But that they were going on is different from claiming they'd been completed.  In reality they'd been gong on to some degree since the Civil War, and yet it's probable that a review of the LA Times from various years would find shocking examples of views that we'd find absolutely appalling today.  I'd be curious, for example, what its view as on Asian immigration to California?  The Times itself has acknowledged that its view on Japanese internment during World War Two was "shameful".

The Times is correct that his view was in the nature of "reacting" to the developments of the Civil Rights Era.  They were, and they were wrong.  Indeed, we might go further and hold them to be reactionary.  But they were apparently not shocking enough to keep the airport from being named for him when it was in 1979.  And they weren't so shocking to people to keep them away from The Cowboys the following year and a handful of final big films he made in the next eight years prior to his death.

In something like this, it's always popular to say "we've come a long ways", when often we really haven't.  The airport has its own problems and the naming of it after an actor in the first place is probably among the very least of them.  If anything, the naming demonstrates the vapidness of California, which takes itself very seriously on everything but which strikes many elsewhere as constantly goofy.  Celebrating an actor through the naming of an airport is just part of that.  Renaming it would likely turn into an equally odd act if not a downright circus.  Maybe if nothing else, this serves to focus on that.

If it were to be renamed, perhaps it might be time to actually consider that the figures of actors are poorly presented for anything serious.  The Times columnist suggests naming the field after guitar figure Leo Fender.  I don't know anything about Mr. Fender, but his guitars are great.  Having said that, that doesn't have anything to do with aviation.

Lots of other aviation figures who played a role in California do, however.  The Lockheeds, Donald Douglas, Glenn Martin. . .



and even Howard Hughes.

_________________________________________________________________________________



*Anyone who follows actors and actresses biographies at all can't help not only to be appalled, but also note how often their personal lives grossly depart from the people they portray.  Actresses playing nuns don't live chaste lives personally, cowboy actors who play rugged frontier individualist might very well be the polar opposite, and so on.



Occasionally the opposite is the case, but so occasionally its' often a surprise when you lean of it.



**This is noted in the LA Times op ed I'll refer to below, FWIW.



***This is omitted in the LA Times article, but it was genuinely courageous.  That courage shows how people are often very mixed in their actual characters. When it was time to serve his country, Wayne didn't. But when a friend was under a type of assault, he intervened when he didn't have to.



Wayne struggled with certain deep personal convictions his entire life, it should be noted.  Exposed to Catholicism through director John Ford, he flirted with becoming Catholic his entire life, and ultimately did, but in his final illness.  Nonetheless, he was a frequent attendee at Mass for decades prior to that.



****Hughes, of course, was not only an early movie producer, but a giant for many years in the aviation industry.



Wayne did appear in a number of aviation related films, although I hardly think that qualifies you to have an airport named after you, and that's not in fact why it was.  He lived as an actor in the community that is just outside this airport.  Ironically, complaints from the community about the airport are constant.



Those Wayne films include the following, which I think is an inclusive list, but very well may not be.



Central Airport. (1933).


His role in this film was uncredited.  He played a co-pilot.  Until making this list, I'd never even heard of this 1933 film.



Flying Tigers (1942).



This film is famous, but in the bad category in my view.  It's about the famous American Volunteer Group of mercenary pilots that flew P40s, with the American government's blessing, in support of the Chinese Nationalist prior to the American entry into World War Two (after Pearl Harbor the unit was converted into an American Army Air Corps unit).



I'm surprised that its cartoonish portrayal of the Chinese and Japanese didn't make the LA Times op ed.  It's a typical World War Two film and is one of several in which, contrary to the myth, John Wayne's character dies.



Flying Leathernecks (1951).



This is a famous film, but I've never seen it.  It concerns a Marine Corps squadron at Guadalcanal.



I've often been surprised that Wayne's roles portraying military heroes carried on after World War Two, in which he did not serve. But in fact, most of those roles actually came after the war, and they started during the war.



Island In The Sky (1953).


Island in the sky is about a DC-3 that crashes in the Canadian wilds.  It's an excellent movie.



The High and The Mighty (1954)


The High and the Mighty was a groundbreaking film in that it was the first of a type, the on board air disaster type.  It follows the crew and the passengers that are on a plane that's failing as they crew struggles to bring the plane in safely  It's the first of its kind, and is very well done.



Wayne's aging makes an appearance here as he's cast as an aging co pilot, side lined because of his age, whose experience wars against the younger pilots education in his craft.


The Wings Of Eagles (1957)


This film is the biography of Naval aviator Frank "Sprig" Wead, an early figure in naval aviation who was severely injured in an aircraft accident.  I've seen part, but not all, of this film.



Jet Pilot (1957)


Jet Pilot is a terrible film that can only be explained by the Hollywood studio system of the time, which also explains the shear volume of the films that anyone actor made as well. In 1957 Wayne made, for example, three films.



This film was made the year after his greatest film, The Searchers, and only his being a captive of the studio could explain his being in this Cold War dog about improbable spy craft and a romance with a female Russian pilot.



The Longest Day (1962).



In this great World War Two film based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, Wayne plays airborne office Lt. Col. Jim Vandervoot.



This isn't really an aviation picture, but I've included it here as Vandervoot was a real person, of course, and a paratrooper.  To that extent, the film involved aviation.



This is a great film, but Wayne is far too old in the film for the role he occupies in it.