Word: duking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Eulogies for the Duke...
...final proof that, as had long been suspected, Wayne's pronouncements had been beamed in from UFOs. When Wayne went to that big Chuck Wagon in the Sky, he went with a Congressional decoration tacked to his left pap honoring "the actor, the man, the American." The Duke, as he was known; a fine name for a dog, a big dog, a Labrador maybe, or the kind of dog they eat in places like Vietnam...
...word titles-McClintock, Branigan, McQ, Chisum, Stagecoach- so that his legions of addled fans could remember them. And his movies were all Black and White; Panavision never brought the colorings of moral ambiguity to these flicks. You were a baddie or you were a goodie; those who opposed the Duke were deranged sadists who frequently...
...laugh, at least now it is. Calling John Wayne a great American says things about this country that are kind of hard to deal with. But who called him a great American? Omar Torrijos, the head of the Panamanian cocaine mafia, or Elizabeth Taylor, who testified on the Duke's behalf before Congress, looking as if she had eaten all the sweetmeats that doctors...
...DUKE reached his epiphany, as it were, on his deathbed, when he converted to Catholicism. That's not American, that's Italian. That image sticks with you: Wayne gone puling in supplication to God, a pathetic last-ditch stab at atoning for a lifetime of atrocities before his bulldozer goes over the cliff. But it was too late for John Wayne. When he died he met 50,000 American ghosts, and quite a host of Vietnamese. They had a lynching party for John Wayne in Heaven last week. They ripped out his guts and they ripped out his spleen...