JOHN WAYNE IN MULEGE

Midway between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, it is
believed by many cultures, that the cosmic membrane separating the
living from the dead, weakens and becomes less impermeable.

The dead may come into the realm of the living, the living into the
realm of the dead.

In the first moments of November 1, 2017, the first day of the dead, I
was soundly sleeping, on the bus from Ensenada to Mulege in Baja
California, Mexico. And then a window of the bus slowly, and yet,
inevitably shattered.

It had probably been hit with a rock that had been kicked up by a
passing truck. And yet, the window disintegrated in a weird, scary
way, accompanied by a sound that made my hair stand, all over my body.

We had to wait three hours in the moonlit Baja desert night for the
next bus to come. And while we waited the dead were, no doubt, with
us.

When I arrived in Mulege, I realized that something of Marion
Morrison; May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979, known to the world as John
Wayne, nicknamed Duke, had crossed the barrier, and was with me.

In Mulege there are the ruins of a hotel Wayne stayed at. I went to
the ruins of the Hotel Loma Linda, also known as the old Hotel Mulege.
There were surveyors, there was heavy equipment being moved to the
site. The demolition of the ruins and the conversion of the site into
a gravel pit had begun.

This is the surviving monument of what some call Baja's Golden Age.
The likes of John Wayne, Fred Astaire, Jayne Mansfield, Edgar Bergen,
Jacque Costeau, Oliva Newton John came to Mulege. The town had the
best sport fishing in the world.

The demolition, of these ruins, of this monument was about to happen
unremarked, unnoticed.

And yet, Wayne is more powerful dead than he was alive. He is a
polarizing symbol in this time of resurgent 'white nationalism'.

In the game of thrones, in the campaign that got Donald Trump elected,
a pilgrimage was made to the John Wayne Birthplace Museum in
Winterset, Iowa.

In January 2016, early in the campaign, Trump was introduced by
Wayne's daughter, Aissa Wayne, as they stood in front of Wayne's
larger-than-life statue. Aissa Wayne told the gathered reporters " if
John Wayne were still alive, he'd be endorsing Trump's campaign, too.

"The reason that I'm here to support Mr. Trump is because America
needs help," she said. "And we need a strong leader. And we need
someone like Mr. Trump with leadership qualities, somebody with
courage, someone that's strong like John Wayne."

Trump said he was a "longtime fan" of John Wayne.

And yet, son, Ethan Wayne, quickly refuted any family endorsement of
Trump and said he didn't think his father would endorse Trump, if he
were alive.

"John Wayne Enterprises and John Wayne Cancer Foundation wish to state
that Aissa Wayne acted independently of both organizations and the
Wayne family in her endorsement of Donald Trump," he said.

The presidency of Donald Trump, the role Trump is playing is an
unending, horrible parody of Wayne.

It is true that Wayne's political career started with his presidency
of the Motion Picture Alliance for American Ideals and the
blacklisting/the purging of Hollywood leftist who were mostly Jews.

There's also a 1971 Playboy interview.

Duke said, "With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment
along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can't all
of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the
leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the
blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in
giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to
irresponsible people."

And as for American Indians he said, "I don't feel we did wrong in
taking this great country away from them...."Our so-called stealing of
this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great
numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly
trying to keep it for themselves..."what happened 100 years ago in our
country can't be blamed on us today."

In his movies he was always killing American Indians, killing
Mexicans, killing Japanese.

And yet, in real life, Wayne, like Trump was a draft-dodging chicken-hawk.

Wayne was 31-years-old when Pearl Harbor happened.

As a result of his chronic infidelity, his torrid (even by Hollywood
standards) affair with Marlene Dietrich, his first marriage to
Josephine Saenz was crumbling.

And yet, he had three children.

His career was just beginning to take off. He was just beginning to
make money. Established stars such as Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and
Clark Gable, enlisted. Wayne saw the opportunity.

He specialty was war movies. He rationalized his draft-dodging,
claimed he could do more for the war effort by doing the movies that
were his specialty.

Wayne obtained 3-A status, "deferred for [family] dependency reasons."
He told friends he'd enlist after he made just one or two more movies.

Wayne made thirteen movies during the war. He became an established
Hollywood star. There is some evidence he made attempts to enlist.

And yet, it never happened.

In late 1943 and early 1944 he appeared at USO shows in the South
Pacific and Australia. Men who had served in hard combat were
contemptous of the man who spent the war on movie sets, wearing
make-up and firing blanks. He had fights with men who served.

In 1944, Wayne received a 2-A classification, "deferred in support of
[the] national … interest." A month later the Selective Service
decided to revoke previous deferments and reclassified him 1-A. But
Wayne's studio appealed and got his 2-A status reinstated until after
the war.

Wayne was tormented by his failure to serve in the military. Like
Trump, Wayne tried to wrap himself in an American flag, present
himself as an unflinching patriot. And yet, they both had the chance
to do more than just act the part, and in the end they did no more/do
no more than act the part.

And yet, unlike Trump, Wayne did have his authenticity. At his
cinematic best he evoke's D.H. Lawrence's description of James
Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo/Deerslayer/ Hawkeye/ Pathfinder, of
'The Leatherstocking Tales.

"And Natty, what sort of a white man is he?" asks Lawrence. "Why, he
is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as
he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a
killer...

"This is Natty, the white forerunner. A killer...

"He lets his consciousness penetrate in loneliness into the new
continent. His contacts are not human. He wrestles with the spirits of
the forest and the American wild, as a hermit wrestles with God and
Satan...

"...True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of
the integral soul. And this, for America, is Deerslayer. A man who
turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity
hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who
lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white.

"This is the very intrinsic — most American. He is at the core of all
the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static
isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be
happening."

There is something of this in Wayne when he is at his cinematic best,
and when he is at his cinematic best it was, most often, under the
direction of director John Ford.

The actor John Wayne was a creation of Ford.

Ford first noticed Wayne in 1928. He was herding a flock of geese on
the set of Mother Machree. He seemed innocent, he was a college
football player working as a property boy, an extra. Ford judged him
as being unready, said he needed some pain in his face to offset the
innocence. He was cast in his first lead role, in The Big Trail,
released in 1930. He changed his name to John Wayne.

The Big Trail bombed, big league. For the next decade Wayne made
mediocre or downright bad movies.

Then Ford saw Wayne fishing off of a pier in Long Beach. He made Wayne
a part of his inner circle, his drinking club.

Wayne, with actors Henry Fonda, Ward Bond accompanied Ford in
drunken, whoring, fishing trips on Ford's motor yacht, the Araner.

That's how Wayne first came to the Sea of Cortez/Gulf of California.
That's how he first came to Mulege.

Ford was appointed a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Naval
Reserve in September 1934. And used the Araner and the drinking,
whoring, fishing trips as cover for espionage missions.

In December, 1934, Ford, Wayne, Fonda, and Bond cruised to Mazatlan,
purportedly to go marlin fishing. On December 31, they drunkenly
cruised the bars, and whorehouses wearing clothes splatted with fish
blood, with a mariachi band that was paid to follow them They were
arrested and thrown into jail twice. And then told to get out of town.

Between 1935 to 1939 Ford spied on the Japanese shrimp fishing fleet
in the Sea of Cortez. He reported that the crews of Japanese shrimp
boats off the Mexican coast were spying and constituting “a real
menace” to national defense. Ford reported there were Imperial Navy
officers aboard the trawlers and that the Japanese were familiar with
every cove and inlet of the Gulf of California, a potential invasion
route into Arizona.

Ford was commended for his “unselfish and patriotic work,” by the U.S.
Navy in 1940.

Some say Wayne knew of and assisted Ford's espionage work. Some say he
did serve his country by being part of these drinking, whoring, sport
fishing trips. And yet, there is no evidence Ford told any of his
drinking buddys of his spying missions

And yet, perhaps in these voyages of the Araner there were mythic
things happening to Wayne. Perhaps in these voyages he began, "the
onward adventure of the integral soul...Became "...a man who turns his
back on white society..."

Wayne was married three times. All his wives were Latinas. Wayne
seemed to prefer being in Hispanic culture
over American Anglo-Saxon Culture.

It was after one of these voyages of the Araner in 1938, that Ford
offered Wayne the lead in Stagecoach. Stagecoach launched Wayne's
career as a Hollywood star.

At it's best the Ford, Wayne collaboration brought mythic themes into cinema.

Ford's films with Wayne as the leading man portrayed the history of
the United State's as a mythic thing. He made Wayne the
personification of the national myth, of the white, American male.

Wayne brought a reluctant power to these roles. Ford came to believe
that Wayne's portrayal of this reluctant power was the personification
of America's mythic greatness.

The responsibility of being the personification of America's mythic
greatness was an intolerable burden for Wayne. This and his guilt
about dodging military service drove Wayne into his lunatic
right-wing, racist, chicken hawk politics.

Trump, on the other hand, has no excuse for his lunatic right wing,
racist, chicken hawk politics.

John Wayne used only one match each day, to light his first cigarette.
He lit all his other cigarettes with the one he was putting out. From
his early teens he smoked between three and six packs daily. In 1964,
when he was 57. Barely able to get through a scene of Otto Preminger’s
In Harm’s Way without a coughing fit, he went for a medical
examination that revealed a golf-ball-sized tumor on his left lung.

He had surgery to remove most of the diseased lung. The surgeon had to
go in through his back, and removed parts of four ribs.

He kept on smoking, but switched to cigars.

He became a frequent visitor to Mulege. He would visit on his motor
yacht, the Wild Goose or fly into town. He made plans to move to
Mulege. He took Spanish lessons. He delighted in the sport fishing,
the killing of the great creatures of the sea.

Wayne is said to have coined the phrase, the Big C. After his lung
cancer operation he claimed to have beaten the Big C. But the Big C
was back. This time it was stomach cancer.

He was an alcoholic. Directors would try to film all of Wayne's scenes
in the morning because by the afternoon he was often a mean, surly
drunk.

In 1969 he made True Grit. It won him his only Academy Award. In 1975
he revived his character, Reuben "Rooster" J. Cogburn in the sequel
Rooster Cogburn which co-starred Katherine Hepburn.

There is much of the dying Wayne in Cogburn, and this is the John
Wayne that Mulege got to know.

Like Cogburn, Wayne never had an alcohol free day in his adult life.
They were both alcoholics. In his lifetime cinematic work Wayne was
defined as a killer, as is Cogburn's life. They were both fat, old,
and determinately killing themselves in their failure to change really
bad lifestyles. The real Wayne was ruthlessly cruel, part of a
ruthlessly cruel thing in his persecution of his political enemies,
his Jewish leftist purge of Hollywood. Cogburn had served under
Confederate General William Quantrill, infamous for his atrocities.

They both fought for white supremacy.

And yet, in the end, you still can't help liking them, for their grit
in the face of death, for their compassion, and kindness, as their
lives were ending. For their perseverance in finding a kind of
redemption.

They both were cultural explorers who preferred living in other
cultures. Cogburn lived in Fort Smith, Arkansas in the back of a
Chinese dry-goods store, along with the proprietor, his friend and
gambling buddy Chen Lee. Wayne, as he was dying spent a lot of time in
Mulege.

Natty Bumppo died high in the Rocky Mountain among the Pawnees, who in
the end were his people.

Wayne came to Mulege for the fishing. He came here for the towns authenticity.

He is remembered for his kindness, generosity, for getting to know
many people in town, being interested in their lives.

He is remembered for his last fight - his fight with cancer, his fight
with his death.

Wayne wanted to be buried under a tomb stone with three Spanish words
- and nothing else.

FEO (ugly)

FUERTE (strong)

FORMAL (dignified)

And that's how he's remembered in Mulege.

He was ugly and bloated by sickness. A lot of pain had come into the
face of the young man herding ducks that John Ford had seen.

And yet, he was strong and dignified in the face of death