BY JONATHAN LETHEM | in a live recording of a 1968 performance, the radical folk singer Phil Ochs introduces a song by saying: "I was always a John Wayne fan when I was younger." The audience laughs, thinking he's joking, but Ochs persists: "One of the dilemmas we have is that many of America's greatest artists are very right wing and reactionary, and not very intelligent. But they're truly great in their own mediums. I think that John Wayne is one of the greatest men ever to step in front of a camera. This song is dedicated to John Wayne." As he begins strumming chords through the giggles of the crowd he mumbles: "Nobody takes me seriously." Thinking about his politics is a way out of really looking at John Wayne. His brute Republicanism gives us an excuse for flinching from the awful contradictions he represents, without even stopping to name them. It's a forgivable instinct. What other American icon comes so overloaded with reflections of our national disasters of racism, sexual repression, violence and authority? Who else thrusts the difficult question of what it means to be a man in America so forcefully in our faces, daring us to meet his gaze? Thank heaven he's also a laughable political ignoramus, a warmongering hypocrite who never served in the armed forces. Thank heaven he's associated with the western, an easily dismissible film genre. All this gives us the chance to avert our eyes, to giggle or scoff. And we do. But Wayne won't go away. As Garry Wills points out so brilliantly in the prologue to his "John Wayne's America," published in March, John Wayne haunts the American public imagination -- his movies screen constantly, inspiring military conscripts and young film directors alike, and his persona echoes through lesser figures like Clint Eastwood and Ronald Reagan. Both Newt Gingrich and a generation of rap musicians imitate his swaggering walk. In July, Doubleday will publish "John Wayne: A Novel," a highly touted first novel by Dan Barden, who grew up in Southern California with the real live John Wayne as his father's close friend. For my part, I've spent the last three years working on a novel that features a thinly disguised John Wayne as the villainous central figure in a 13-year-old girl's coming-of-age story. Next page: Uneasy territory - - -> |
