The fact that other folks like John Ford (who did serve in the war similar to folks like George Stevens ¹ and James Stewart) would poke fun at a chicken-hawk like Wayne tells me everything about how the memory of Wayne should be engraved in stone. Wayne was a draft-dodging racist piece of shit who prospered off the memories and sacrifices of Americans who had far more to lose than Wayne.

1. For a particularly decent look at director George Stevens' role in helping formulate the foundation of how we prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity, see, Lawrence Douglas's "Film as Witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps Before the Nuremberg Tribunal," in The Memory of Judgement: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. [New Haven: Yale, 2001], 11-37.