Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • August 17, 2011 self saving a baby from the Arizona desert. In the cavalry trilogy, he was the maverick cavalry leader who treated Indians with respect. In “The Searchers,” he played an Indian-hating psycho. During the filming of that movie, he used his private airplane and pilot to save an Indian girl’s life. The Navajo tribe adopted him. In “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” Wayne played Sergeant John Stryker, a double-tough U.S. Marine Corps squad leader who is also a divorced father and a hopeless binge alcoholic. Stryker molds his men into effective fighters even though half of them hate him. He leaves his best friend out overnight crying for help because it just might be an ambush. At the end, Sergeant Stryker and his platoon are escorts for the mission to raise the flag over Iwo Jima. The battle was one of the bravest and bloodiest in Marine Corps history, but the second flag-raising (the one in the famous photograph and depicted by the statue in Washington) has come under question. Lee Marvin, a 19-year-old combat Marine, had been ambushed and shot the year before on Saipan. Four Japanese soldiers with bolt-action rifles wiped out most of his platoon. Marvin got hit saving a buddy and woke up on a hospital ship, amazed to still be alive. Marvin said the flag-raising was a fake, yet he remained immensely popular at Marine Corps events. Ira Hayes, a combat veteran of Bougainville before he fought in Iwo Jima and helped raise the flag, was so embarrassed by the publicity he got for showing off when so many of his friends had died in combat, developed a drinking problem. He died an alcoholic at 32. Wayne remained the recruiter’s version of what a U.S. Marine should look like. Kids fell for it. Wayne, unlike Marvin and Hayes, was never a U.S. Marine, or any other kind of serviceman. He resisted being drafted as sole supporter of his family. He never pretended to be gay or made up any fake football injuries, two staples of draft-dodging elsewhere. Remember that Wayne had been an A student in college and knew that logistically, a Japanese victory was impossible. He realized, according to those biographers who view him honestly, without either awe or hatred, that it was more important to his family and his own future to make money pretending to shoot people than it was to try that stuff in real life. I once worked with a U.S. Marine who had served in combat on Bougainville and on Okinawa and later served in combat in Korea and in Vietnam. He found Wayne utterly laughable and boycotted his movies. While Wayne was never a serious threat to the Japanese – he made a somewhat sympathetic movie called “The Barbarian and the Geisha” a few years after the war -- he was a serious anti-communist. During the making of “Back to Bataan,” in 1945, he was approached by Colonel George S. Clarke, commander of the 57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, U.S. Army, an authentic war hero who had escaped from the Philippines. Colonel Clarke told Wayne that screenwriter Ben Barzman and director Edward Dmyrtyk were mocking Colonel Clarke’s Catholic faith, which had sustained him through the war. The screenwriter and the director were also advocating the ultimate result of World War II as a communist victory, which wasn’t what Colonel Clarke had risked his life for, though this was covert staple of Comintern propaganda. Wayne was a lapsed Presbyterian, but he respected war heroes, even if he had no burning desire to become one. He stepped forward and told the screenwriter and the director to get off Colonel Clarke’s case and stop bashing his religion and his genuine patriotism. In retribution – knowing Wayne was macho enough to do most of his own stunts – Barzman and Dmyrtyk added some of the roughest stunts they could think of into the movie. The stunts including flying into the air with a strapped flight harness like Peter Pan after a mortar hit that, in real life, would have shredded the victim with fragments, and hiding underwater in a studio-made rice paddy that was bitterly cold. Wayne did the stunts, and remained an anti-communist. In “The Green Berets,” he took it over the top. Some of my buddies served there and they found that a very silly movie right up to the sun setting into the South China Sea, which is east of Vietnam. While Ho Chi Minh was far less of a threat to the United States than Hirohito had been, the former was a known communist. It wasn’t until Vietnam went to war with Red China, after the Americans left, that the absurdity became palpable. The service personnel who served in that war have every right to be proud. The politicians who got us involved have every reason to be ashamed. How can Wayne help America today? He can help us if we remember that when things don’t look so good, we should keep making money if we can, keep supporting our kids even when we have multiple sets of them. Wayne was a scoundrel husband but a great father, and kids, unlike show biz women, are helpless and need support. We should not hate people of other races or nationalities, and we should calculate real threats before we sign our lives away. Wayne can also help us because sometimes you have to reconstruct your image. Being the last bully in the empty schoolyard doesn’t make sense. The Russians are finished, the French were finished in 1940, and the British, Germans, and Japanese in 1945. China, I think, has no plans for a military invasion of the United States. The Iraqis and Afghans will probably go back to squabbling over oil money as soon as we leave. Maintaining the kind of world presence we needed when the Soviet Union and Red China were still allies is an economically lethal anachronism. Follow Wayne: Stay stateside, make money, and take care of your kids and the people who work for you. We still have the natural resources for a national resurgence and revitalization if we make it and spend it right here at home. Now that Standard & Poor’s decided our standard is poor and gave us a lower credit rating than France, now that the people we thought we saved by fighting World War II are laughing at us, and now that we face the fact that we will no longer be a white man’s country by the middle of the century…only John Wayne can save us. I’m not talking about any of the parts Wayne played in the movies, much as I still enjoy them today. I’m talking about Marion Morrison, the real John Wayne, who turned himself in a poster guy for all the things American men thought they wanted to be until they tried it and found out that getting shot doesn’t go away and free enterprise can snap back in your face with a little help from a government that trips over its feet trying to work both sides of the street. The real Wayne was the man who – sometimes with real talent, even with real courage, and always with shrewd intelligence – invented the man viewers saw on the screen from the 1930s through the 1970s. Humphrey Bogart may capture the urban nostalgia market, but everything west of Paterson is still John Wayne’s America. Wayne understood that he had to undergo a change in image, even in personality, if he was going to get anywhere. When he was in college, “Duke” Morrison was a football player for UCLA, but he wasn’t very good. He was just a good-looking football player. He got good grades, worked on the school newspaper, and took part in competitive debates until he ran out of money and had to shelve his plans to be a lawyer. While he was hanging around moving props at a movie set, he encountered John Ford (born John Feeney, not Seamus O’Fearna, as Ford sometimes told people). Ford challenged Morrison to a football showdown. Ford tried to block Morrison, and Morrison knocked Ford on his duff. Morison spent the next few years moving props. Both men loved to drink and play cards. After one marathon, Ford told Morrison what he was doing wrong. “Marion Morrison. That’s a sissy name,” Ford said. He explained that his brother, Wallace Feeney, had preceded him to Hollywood and changed his name to “Wallace Ford” because Irishmen were invariably cast in comic roles. “If you want to get anywhere in Hollywood, you have to get a real man’s name.” “How about John? That’s a real man’s name,” Morrison said. “Good!” Ford said. “But Morrison – that’s still sort of sissy. Why don’t you name yourself after some general from history?” “I always kind of liked Mad Anthony Wayne,” he said. A star was born. The new John Wayne played villains almost as often as he played heroes, sometimes subordinate to suave nonAmerican actors like Joseph Schildkraut or Ray Milland. His breakthrough film was “Stagecoach,” where he played a gun-toting outcast who was part villain and part hero. From that day on, Wayne’s best roles were tough guys with flaws they were man enough to face. In “The Three Godfathers” he was an inept bank robber who redeemed him- What America needs is the real John Wayne Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: We would like to ask the Mahwah Town Council to rescind the ordinances that changed the zoning of the Crossroads property to retail. This will provide time to make a decision and avoid the mounting turmoil and division between the town’s politicians and citizens. We do not want to see continued division and damage to either side. There are not many facts to base a solid judgment at this time and we feel it is the right thing to wait to let everyone gather that information and make an informed decision. As to the information we know now, we are very concerned about the zoning change and the birth of yet another mall. We share further concern how and why the town acted in light of the public outcry the night the vote took place. This is an opportunity to demonstrate that the council’s role is not to be omnipotent, but represent and lead in a manner the citizens can embrace and rather than rebel against. We love our town, our family has been here for three generations, and Mahwah is a treasure we do not want to sell out. This is not a business deal, it is our home. Once a retail mecca is here, it won’t go away. After any mall is built, the developers go away and leave the town with the mess to manage and maintain. Even if we leave taxes, traffic, and environment out of this momentarily, until we can gather those facts, we do not want a mall. Why can’t we create a town center – like Ridgewood or Westwood? A mall is simply an immense cash register for big generic chain stores, and it sucks the business from the A call for town preservation independent small businesses. We would love to see our town create the character of owner run businesses, setting Mahwah free from the “mall epidemic” that inevitably terminates town life. Thousands of Mahwah citizens are counting on the few council members to hear the overwhelming cry and rezone this property back to the way it had been originally classified and give us time to decide together. This is a huge issue that can change the culture of our town and home forever. Each opinion only counts for one vote, but we want our votes heard. Let’s see how others feel and give them their vote, too. Fred and Susan Stedtler Mahwah Dear Editor: Our town signs say, “Welcome to Mahwah: Our Community Parkland,” not our community retail. John Roth, our council president, has indicated there have been numerous hours of meetings and no one spoke out. Now that the townspeople have found out about the mall, we have spoken and he doesn’t want to hear us. What is so sad in Mahwah is that our government representation would listen to a developer over its people. Since learning about the mall, hundreds have met at meetings, two lawsuits developed, and thousands signed a petition to (bring it to a) vote. Why is this happening? John Roth and (continued on page 17) Wants responsive government