John Wayne en Bush Jr.

In een essay over schijn en werkelijkheid in de Verenigde Staten schrijft Tom Engelhardt over de tijd en groep waaruit president Bush junior voortkomt: 'As it turns out, though, there was a third category of young men in those years -- those who essentially steered clear of the Vietnam experience, who, as our Vice President put it inelegantly but accurately, had "other priorities in the '60s." Critics have sometimes spoken of such Bush administration figures as "chickenhawks" for their lack of war experience. But this is actually inaccurate. They were warriors of a sort -- screen warriors. They had an abundance of combat experience because, unlike their peers, they never left the confines of those movie theaters, where American war was always glorious, our military men always out on some frontier, and the Indians, or their modern equivalents, always falling by their scores before our might as the cavalry bugle sounded or the Marine Hymn welled up. By avoiding becoming either the warriors or the anti-warriors of the Vietnam era, they managed to remain quite deeply embedded in centuries of triumphalist frontier mythology. They were, in a sense, the Peter Pans of American war play.' Lees verder: http://www.tomdispatch.com/