Don't get us wrong: we hate John Wayne as much as the next guy—and the next guy is Joseph Stalin. But the Board of Supervisors would've wrecked Orange County's reputation and history if it followed Fourth District supe Chris Norby's June 9 suggestion to rename our regional airport after the Fox television program The O.C. instead of the western movie idol.
Norby originally pushed for the name switch because he wanted the county to piggyback on the teen soap's now-worldwide popularity. “I think we need to capitalize on the newfound fame,” Norby told the Orange County Register on June 10. “O.C. is hot throughout the country. It's something they borrowed from us to make it popular.”
But after weathering hundreds of angry emails, Norby recanted two days later. A typical complaint was the one from Wayne's own son, Ethan, who told the Los Angeles Times on June 11 that his father “stood for a lot more than [The O.C.] does . . . 72 years representing something, I think that's more important than a fad.”
What Wayne represented Ethan doesn't make clear—and maybe he doesn't have to. In 1979, when the Associated Press asked then-county Supervisor, now-dead Thomas Riley why he pushed for renaming the county airport after Wayne, Riley didn't cite his friend's charitable work, a love for Orange County, or even any film in which Wayne played a flyboy like The Wings of Eagles and Central Airport. Instead, Riley claimed that Wayne deserved recognition because he “exemplified in his character the qualities of the West—a love of freedom, fundamental optimism, a search for new frontiers and super-strong patriotism.” And when a campaign to take Wayne's name off the airport arose in the late 1980s, Riley reiterated, “In the minds of young Americans, John Wayne is one of the greatest American patriots in the West.”
When asked by the Weeklywhat Wayne stands for, Norby himself laughed. “He's the stereotypical American,” he responded. “You know what he represents!”
John Wayne the Legend has so eclipsed John Wayne the Man in the Orange County psyche that we cannot separate the two. More than anywhere else, we've deified Wayne in a matter that approaches blasphemy. It's telling that the only other jurisdiction that took Wayne so seriously was the Soviet Union. “In [Soviet leader Joseph] Stalin's warped mind,” wrote Michael Munn in John Wayne: The Man behind the Myth, “the Americans had invented some new secret weapon, more subtle than a nuclear bomb.” Wayne's pro-American rhetoric in film and real-life so worried Stalin, according to Munn, that he allegedly tried to get the Duke assassinated.
Renaming John Wayne Airport would accomplish what Stalin couldn't–only the victim now would be Orange County's soul. John Wayne Airport is the best explanation as to why shows like The O.C. even exist, or why this county receives an inordinate amount of national media attention relative to its size—namely, because we're so wonderfully fucked-up we name our airports after B-grade actors.
We named our airport after an actor who embodied mayhem, a man who retired here to the hired-hands comfort of Newport Beach only after earning millions, someone with no true roots in the county—we named John Wayne Airport after us. But we would never admit that. Instead, the politicians who renamed what was once Santa Ana Airport after Wayne and the people who still support this choice wrap their rationale in the same hosannas of God, country, and liberty that Wayne espoused and county conservatives love to think of as exclusive to this county.
Wayne is our Ronald Reagan—a former actor to which we tie our collective delusions. If Wayne ever ran for office, we would've given him a similar Reaganthon upon his death. Instead, we named an airport after him, and we're worldwide laughingstocks because of that. But it's this conservative kookiness—more than beaches, Disneyland, debutantes, or Dennis Rodman—that keeps this county in the news. To get rid of the John Wayne name on our airport would—dare I say?—make us normal, and therefore unattractive to the Josh Schwartzes of the world. And who wants that?
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