This is not an important issue such as destroying monuments to Confederates who take up arms against the United States, removing Confederate stars and bars from state flags, or attacking racist names from universities, but, yes: It’s time to get John Name Wayne at Orange County airport.

That is the view of the Democratic Party in Orange County, which is issued a resolution for that effect on June 26.

“The name of the airport must reflect our values, and white supremacy is not one of them,” party chairman Ada Briceño said after the vote. “If the name honor doesn’t reflect our ideals and values ​​anymore, why not change it?”

The move to take Wayne’s name from the airport they have decorated since 1979 last erupted in February 2019. It happened after the rediscovery of an interview given by an action movie star to Playboy in May 1971. I reported later that the interview was full of Wayne’s humiliation of people of the skin black, Native Americans, gay people, and people he labeled leftist, socialist, and communist.

The move to change the name of the airport has been inactive for more than a year. It has been revived with the Black Lives Matter movement and national reconsideration where figures from American history that we choose to respect in bronze and granite. For some reason, some Republicans stand firm against this reconsideration.

President Trump has threatened to veto This year’s defense allocation bill is valued at $ 740 billion if it includes an amendment, sponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Which mandates the re-establishment of a military base named after the Confederate General.

Trump woke himself up on Monday posted a tweet-plaint that “Do Nothing Democrats want to release the name of John Wayne from the airport,” calling it “extraordinary stupidity.”

That Republic of Orange County spoke to leave Wayne’s name at the airport, without succeeding in making many cases for it.

“We are not talking about statues to defeat General Confederates who should not have been erected in the first place, we are talking about monuments for ideals that make our nation unique,” the party said.

Strangely, it linked the movement to change the airport’s name to a “totalitarian ideology” which ranged from “guillotines from the French revolution to Bolshevik gulags, to Nazi concentration camps, to the Cultural Revolution in China, to human burning and beheading. ISIS.”

Regarding why the name of the actor must be at the airport, the party explained, “John Wayne has long stood as a symbol of rude individualism and generous dedication to his community. On screen, he is a brave and brave hero who opposes tyranny and cruelty. He points out the idea that actions speak louder than words. “

This is partly true – he does play “brave and brave heroes” on screen – and some deny themselves. Wayne points out that the act of speaking louder than words by not, in fact, acts like a hero in real life when circumstances demand it.

That is World War II. Wayne was 34 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and because of his age and position as a family breadwinner, was released from conscription.

As Biographers Wayne Randy Roberts and James S. Olson reportHowever, so do fellow Hollywood figures such as Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gene Autry, Tyrone Power and Clark Gable. They all registered, as did baseball stars Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

Wayne, however, continues to look for reasons not to register – the need to finish the next picture, for example – getting insults from his friend and mentor, director John Ford, who has signed up to form a field photography unit.

“Never before or after,” Roberts and Olson observed, “there will be a gap between what [Wayne] projected on the screen and his personal actions become extraordinary. “

That brings us to two events at the heart of the naming controversy – Playboy interview and naming itself.

Interviews show Wayne to be a non-reconstructed conservative of the type that exemplifies Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s.

He questioned whether black Americans were ready to play a leadership role in the political life of the country: “I believe in white supremacy until black people are educated to the point of responsibility,” he said. “I do not believe in giving authority and leadership and judgment positions to irresponsible people.”

He rejected affirmative action: “The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether black people are sufficiently scholastic equipped. But some black people have tried to force this problem and enter college when they have not passed the exam and do not have the necessary background. “

He delivered a standard white supremacy version of white relations with Native Americans: “I don’t think we are wrong in taking this great country from them, if that’s what you ask for. What we call stealing this country from them is only a matter of survival. There are many people who need new land, and Indians are selfishly trying to defend it for themselves. “

And he downplays the film “Midnight Cowboy” as “a story about two fags.”

Wayne’s defenders, including his family, have tried to minimize these words as a reflection of an old man in a time that is very different from today. But that will not happen. Wayne was 63 when the interview was published, far from the avoidance stage.

His views were no longer in the mainstream of culture in 1971: The civil rights revolution had been going on for years; Ps. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered three years earlier, the Voting Rights Act had been passed in 1965, and Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Ala., occurred in 1955 – 16 years earlier.

Wayne did not express the tenor of time – he did react for progress won by black Americans.

Regarding the naming of the airport, it was not a response that was considered in depth to public noise but a last minute political agreement. The majority of the Orange County Board of Trustees want to expand the airport runway, but they are blocked by Trustee Thomas Riley, whose constituents in Newport Beach will bear the brunt of the resulting noise pollution.

Riley agreed to the majority after issuing a promise to name the airport after Wayne, who had lived in Newport for about a decade and had died earlier in 1979. He had become Riley’s neighbor, although it was unclear whether they knew each other.

Wayne did not play an important role in Newport’s cultural or political life, but then, as now, his name is considered an example of border roughness that seems to fit with a high self-image in some corner of a prosperous area.

Three years after the name change, the airport installed a statue of “The Duke” as high as 9 feet in the main terminal. Newport Beach, however, hates airports that are named after those who are late and still do so; his complaints about aircraft noise due to the strange lethal action experienced by the aircraft against the public during takeoff.

Orange County today clearly does not resemble Orange County of yore. Instead of the rocked Republican stronghold, the six congressional seats are held by Democrats. No longer a caricature of the rich white lily County, that is 40% are non-Hispanic whites, 34% are Hispanic, 21.7% Asian and 2.1% Black.

John Wayne never did enough to guarantee putting his name at the airport. Today, it belongs there less than before.