Long established notions will whip reality, every time.
Example 1: TV, this past Memorial Day weekend, was loaded with John Wayne movies, Wayne being the symbol of American stand-up-and-fight courage, especially in the most bloody and noble of U.S. military endeavors.
But when you tell people, especially lovers of John Wayne and all he ostensibly stood for and still stands for, that Wayne assiduously avoided military service during World War II, well, they either don’t believe it or don’t take it well.
At the outbreak of WW II, Wayne was 34, the father of four and his movie career was on the grow. He didn’t have to enlist. And he didn’t.
But many other “older” Hollywood leading men heard the call and answered it. Clark Gable was past 40 when he flew combat missions. Jimmy Stewart, who in four years rose from Pvt. Stewart to Col. Stewart, was 34 when he joined the Air Corps, gaining weight to meet the minimum standard.
But John Wayne, the fellow who starred in so many World War II action movies, never served.
Yet, TV programmers have seen to it that Wayne, more than any other American, is synonymous with Memorial Day, a day to honor those who did serve, especially those killed in the line of duty. It’s an odd set of nonsensical circumstances but, given the human condition, it makes complete sense.
If TV programmers were to have selected an actor whose name would by now be inextricably attached to Memorial Day, it should have been Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated combat soldier in WW II. Murphy wasn’t nearly the actor that Wayne was and, although Murphy appeared in 44 movies, most were of the B variety.
Regardless, had TV chosen to marry widespread notion with fact, every Memorial Day weekend Audie Murphy, not John Wayne, would be the fellow we think of – and salute – first.
Example 2: Where on TV would you least expect to view the most alarming programming about the proliferation of Muslim radicalism? And who would you least expect to anchor such a show? PBS and Bill Moyers might come to mind, correct?
And yet PBS’s May 20th edition of “Bill Moyers Journal” was among the most frightening shows on Islam’s reach westward TV has provided since 9/11.
Europe’s post-WW II openness, this installment explained, has served Islamists as an invite to exploit and pervert such freedom to establish large and growing communities that serve the opposite end – the creation and growth of highly intolerant Islamic societies throughout Europe.
As noted on the PBS show, the broad-based, well-intended permissiveness that the Netherlands has long demonstrated has helped establish Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, as a city now inhabited by over 1 million Muslims. And the fundamentalists among them have politically muscled up, so much so that Islamic or Sharia Law – much of it brutal and backwards – is encroaching upon Dutch law.
In Germany, the program further noted, a physically abused Muslim woman was denied a divorce when a regional court ruled that her husband was merely adhering to Islamic culture, thus he was permitted to beat his wife.
And such proliferating realities have, naturally, led to an equally radical backlash that resembles 1930s European Fascism.
Europe, Moyers’ Journal made clear, has been so eager to demonstrate its everyone-welcomed multiculturalism that it placated Muslims who would apply their freedom to establish extreme theocracies that deny freedom.
Again, the last place on TV you might expect to deliver such a fright is PBS, a network widely perceived to finger America and Americans as intolerant of others. Yet, Fox News Channel couldn’t have issued a more alarming report about how socio-political tolerance has benefited the spread of radical, intolerant religionists.
And the last person you might expect to issue such a warning, Bill Moyers, rang this bell. It was as if intolerance of those different from us isn’t always such a bad idea.