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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1473718
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1473718
The freedom loving fascist cult will decide for us, under the guidance of the freedom caucus, which freedoms the rest of us are allowed to enjoy.
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But, but, John Wayne was a good guy! Wasn’t he?
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He musta been, I mean after all - they named an airport after him! 
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Thanks for the suggested readings! Re: the white nationalists – there’s a great, oft-repeated line in Connie Willis’s latest, “The Road to Roswell” that seems to apply: “You watch too many movies.”
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The dookie was even worse than that complete asshole Bob Hope. Sorry, I’m in a mood today.
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The title of this article gave me yet another sick, sinking feeling. It took me about 3 paragraphs before I realized the story I was reading wasn’t the one I thought I was reading, that I was reading a good one, full of hope and progress. I’m not sure if the author intended to throw that twist at the reader, but it made the ending so much more satisfying once I’d pulled myself out of the misery with which I started reading.
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Sorry MOL, but it’s none of your business what I let my kids read. It’s fine with me that you want your children to have a very narrow, and uneducated, view of life. That will just make it easier for my kids to see that your kids stay in the marsh grass beside the gene pool.
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I’d begun to loathe his flag-waving bullshit until I watched “The Searchers.” That threw me. I still don’t know what to think about Wayne. The jingoistic flag-waving fool who played a character that exposed all his earlier two-dimensional cowboy characters as part of the problem? Yeah, I may never figure it out.
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Those of us like me who are old enough to remember the Vietnam War will agree with you. Wayne was much worse than Hope because he made an entire damn movie to promote the war.
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See that’s the part of “parenting” that MFL wants to co-opt.
I used to work at Borders as the Special Orders Clerk. But that job included ordering books for in-store book fairs and off-site book fairs.
Some schools had specific lists, some only had a ban list, which at the time was usually this series:
and this one:
And yes I can remember on off sites some parents objecting to certain titles, but I would just put in a box under the table, and when the crabby parent left I put it out back on display. But if it was a school administer then I’d take it back to the store.
All this book gatekeeping seems to have gone from parents monitoring what their child reads, to monitoring what any child is allowed to read.
And don’t get me started on my city’s library. I’m in my sixth decade and I’m still peeved that my library wouldn’t carry Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books because they weren’t “good literature”.
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He made up for that in “The Green Berets.”
I began to see conservatives poor grasp of reality when they started calling him a “war hero.”
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And an airport after Bob Hope, too!
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Presentism!
/sn
He certainly was. I read John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman which many say is the definitive biography of the guy and the number of people whose lives he ruined with his participation in the whole Communist/ blacklist era was disgusting. His infamous 1971 Playboy interview lets everyone know who he really was. One article of many that wrote about it once it re-emerged.
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Boy did he. It is considered by many as the worst war film ever made with the crowning achievement being the infamous sun setting in the east scene where Wayne tells the child mascot Ham Chung that “he’s what this war is all about.”
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Sorry meant to say worst Vietnam war movie ever made.
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Two points. First, while Texas is a hot bed of right wing hatred, i didn’t know Austin was. If memory serves it is a blue dot in a sea of red.
Second, Paramount+ has a new series centering on a historic character named Bass Reeves. For those of you who don’t know it, Bass Reeves was a Deputy US Marshall whose adventures inspired generations of movie makers. Sadly Reeves was black so Hollywood screen writers had to replace him with John Wayne or other suitable white actors. At long last his story is being told from the perspective of a black former slave who was a devoted family man and a decent human being dedicated to enforcing the law in Indian Territory (pre Oklanhoma.) A man who had to face all the bigotry you can imagine. https://www.history.com/news/bass-reeves-real-lone-ranger-a-black-man
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The rest of Texas calls Austin the People’s Republic.
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Our grandson loved “Walter the Farting Dog.” So did the rest of the family. These nasty white conservatives have no business telling anyone else what to read. And they have no sense of humor.
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