Word: westernism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...before he should have because he hated being an invalid. In more recent years, they saw him posed proudly with one or another of his grandchildren (he married three times and had seven children). They saw that even though one could no longer live the life of a mythic Western hero, one could sometimes approximate his simplifying virtues. "I stay away from nuances," he was heard to say. From excesses of psychology too. "Couches are good for one thing only," he was wont to grouse. Reflection, introspection -these activities interfered with the truly important things in life. Like work...
During down time on his movie sets, for example, he was an inveterate chess player. At home he read Western history and gathered one of the world's finest collections of Hopi Indian kachina dolls. If his right-wing beliefs emblemized a rugged individualism, he also had a reputation among movie people as a fiercely loyal colleague quick to aid old comrades and as an affectionate if hard-kidding coworker...
This sense of community and camaraderie was the flip side of Western individualism. Most people risked pioneering not to get rich quick or to build vast empires but to find modest lives that might be more congenial than the ones they had left in the East or in Europe. In his best films Wayne, for all the machismo he displayed, only rarely played a loner-a scout or gun fighter. More often he appeared as a soldier, lawman or rancher, a man acting in concert with others to create order where formerly there had been emptiness or anarchy...
...came through most clearly when people would tell him, "Everything isn't black and white," and he would inevitably respond, "Well, I say, 'Why the hell not?' " There was a refreshing innocence, a kind of bravery in that attitude, especially as the power of the Western myth dimmed. His heroes were not like Hemingway's. They did not have grace under pressure; they had instead a stubbornness -foolish, willful and glorious-when they were caught between the rock and the hard place. We could not forget Wayne if we tried. Those images...
...against this backdrop of Oil at Any Price that Jimmy Carter and the leaders of Western Europe, Canada and Japan will sit down next week in Tokyo for two days of talks on energy and the imperiled world economy. Exactly 48 hours earlier in Geneva, the 13-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will also gather-and take a step that will surely make the energy squeeze worse: another increase in price. Meanwhile, demands are rising both in the Congress and from the U.S. public that Washington launch a war-effort type of national program of cooperation by Government...