One of our good folks pointed out to me that the thing that really worried him about my long article describing the SPLC attack was that I sounded panicked.

My reply was, “I WAS panicked. Look, man, I stopped being John Wayne before you were born.”

I have been through a LOT of shocks. When I hit one, I go to my friends and share it with them. That’s what I did with you.

This is the way I have gotten through a very hard life and a very bad set of shocks. I was raised around The Weakest Generation, and I heard a few thousand lectures about how they were heroes, “Scared, of course, but all soldiers are scared.”

Every word they said sounded a lot more like John Wayne in the movies than the terrified kids they actually were.

Nobody made the reality clearer or more often than the Duke himself, “I wasn’t in those battles. I was acting.”

John Wayne was the opposite of Tom Brockaw. Yes, he made a lot of money on the World War II generation’s image of itself, but unlike Brockaw he never did it by patronizing them.

I have learned the hard way that if I try to put on an act when I’m scared or under pressure, it costs me effectiveness in DOING what must be done.

John Wayne was a professional actor. Tom Brockaw is groveling lickspittle.