The Duke in the Parellel Universe

John Wayne's 100th birthday was last weekend. The Duke was one of my heroes when I was a little kid. But he wasn't the biggest. He wasn't as big in my mind as Gene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb of the Baltimore Colts (no. 76) or Johnny Unitas. Actually, very few of Wayne's movies made it to my local theater in Waverly, NY. So, my main images of the West came from Bonanza, Matt Dillon, and Clint Eastwood in Rawhide--"My heart's calculating, my true love will be waiting, be waiting at the end of my ride." What a tune! But the "Sons of Katie Elder" was a big event for my brother and me and we all had John Wayne on our minds when we played cowboys and Indians.

However, John Wayne is still a top draw in what Crooked Timber calls the parellel universe of the right-wing. Conservatives have such an aversion to post-Sixties America that their heroes have to be at least forty years old. Then there's the problem of reality. Conservatives don't want to be associated with the New Deal, the GI Bill, or the national high way program, all of which they still see as socialism. They don't want to be associated with with McCarthyism (Ann Coulter being the exception), and conservatives don't want to be tarred with segregation either. Because the reality of the conservative "golden age" was so questionable, conservatives tend to like fictional heroes rather than actual people. Harvey Mansfield's Manliness treats Wayne's movie characters along with the Gary Cooper character in High Noon as the only adequate examples of manliness in post WWII America. Bill Murchison argues in a TownHall.com column today that Wayne's movie characters are examples of "dignity and valor and honor [and doing] the right thing for the right reasons" that are no longer heeded in contemporary culture.

But if the right is looking for conservative heroes, they should focus on the current Republican resistance to Bush administration abuses rather than fictional artifice. There's General Shinseki and his testimony about the need for hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq, Richard Clarke and his expose of Bush 9-11 malfeasance, the Tillman family and its effort to expose the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death, and the men and women in the CIA, State Department, and Pentagon who criticized Bush administration intelligence claims. More currently, federal prosecutors like David Iglesias have shown an enormous sense of "dignity and honor" by refusing to prosecute specious voter fraud claims.

All of these figures are Republicans, they're all conservatives, and they've all done "the right thing for the right reasons." If the right-wing wants to publicize these Republican heroes, they can call them the "new Dukes" of the Bush era. They don't even have to link me.