Life's hard. Its Even Harder if You're Stupid"

By Rich Kozlovich

This quote from John Wayne; "Life's hard.  Its Even Harder if You're Stupid", seems to be appearing often these days....I even just used it myself.  I have watched John Wayne movies for all of my life, and I still watch his movies. He represented everything every American kid wanted to become. Over the years he was the number one rated star over and over again. One year Clark Gable beat him out. That was in 1939 when Gone with the Wind came out. Wayne was right back on top the next year. Why?

Wayne wasn't really that good an actor; although his last few movies demonstrated skills he hadn't demonstrated in the past, and his portrayal of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers demonstrated real acting skills while portraying the classic Wayne. But for the most part he was only good at playing John Wayne. So who cares? That is who we wanted to see; John Wayne playing John Wayne, a stand up stalwart real man willing to stand up for what was right irrespective of the costs. Who wanted to see John Wayne portray Ghengis Kahn?  Now there was a dumb movie! And I really hated his character in the Wake of Red Witch where he plays a villain. That isn't what I wanted to see. We like real heroes and when someone can capture the imagination of every man in the nation as a real hero.... that's who he had better portray.

John Wayne’s personal life wasn’t necessarily a reflection of the Wayne movie characterization, and I saw him interviewed and I didn’t think he was the brightest pebble in the brook, but no one cared, including me. After all - he was John Wayne.

During the height of the Vietnam War John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart were attending some sort of affair where the protestors were out in force, ranting and waving North Vietnamese flags. Jimmy Stewart had just lost a son in the war and Wayne was outraged. He boldly walked into the crowd - the flags disappeared and the crowd almost immediately turned silent, whispering… “It’s John Wayne”! They started right back up after he left, but who else could have had such an impact on such a group?

As I watch the world today I wonder - could there ever be another John Wayne? We have lost our sense of who we are, what we believe, what is right and what is wrong. For that matter, we now have difficulty determining if there really is such a thing as right and wrong. The universities, the intellectuals and the media have clouded the concept of right and wrong so badly that we now aren’t sure about anything. We’re like waves being washed back and forth against rocky shores by every new philosophical flavor of the day.

Since I spend so much time in my truck during the day I listen to the radio a great deal. Some years back I got sick of everything on the radio, including all the talk radio. Even when I agree with them I can only take so much of all of that emotional outpouring and egotism. So I bought some tapes of books, including a bunch of Louis L'amour tapes. They were pretty good too.

Some of the tapes had a section where L'amour would tell a short story about real western life. One of them involved a horse rancher who eventually became a Texas Ranger (L'amour loved the Rangers) whose horse herd was stolen by three rustlers. His friends asked him to wait going after them until they could round up a posse, but he said they would be in Mexico by then and took off after them.

A few days later he returned with his herd and was asked by everyone what happened? He said that he rode night and day until he caught up to them, and of course a gunfight ensued. He killed two of the rustlers and he arrested the third. They then asked, where was his prisoner?   He explained, that as he I was riding back the rustler kept taunting me that he was falling asleep in the saddle and when he fell asleep that night he was going to kill me and take the herd to Mexico.

He explaiine he'd been riding without sleep for some time and  realized the rustler was right, so he had to devise some way to secure him in order to safely get a good night’s sleep. So he tied his hands behind his back put him on his horse.  He then took a rope and threw it over a branch and tied it around the tree.  He tied a noose at the other end and put the noose around his neck.  Then he told them - Wouldn’t you know it! That darned horse walked off and left him in the middle of the night!

The fact of the matter was he hung the man, and they all knew he hung the man. But, so what? They were going to hang him anyway! The moral of that story? They really believed some things are right and some things are wrong. Furthermore, they knew the difference and what to do about it!

Unfortunately, as I watch events playing out all over the world and then watch people's impressions and views I realize that as a society we have all gotten really stupid. Is it any wonder life has gotten so much harder?