Burt Prelutsky writes that although he never crossed paths with the Duke during either of their long Hollywood careers, "I find myself missing him more and more as time goes by":

Sometimes I find myself missing him the most when I’m watching a modern western, and it occurs to me that the leading man would be more at home in a tutu than in chaps.

Sometimes, though, all it takes is a news item to get me wishing that Wayne was still in his prime, still making movies, and that somewhere down the line I’d get to see the big lug taking certain matters into his own capable hands.

Recently, the item that grabbed my attention was a public opinion poll that reported that 25% of young American Muslims see nothing wrong with suicide bombers in “certain circumstances.” Presumably, those would be circumstances in which only Christians and Jews were the victims. This is the same crowd that’s always complaining that they’re the victims of racial profiling.

So, do you really blame me for wishing that I could look forward to going to the local Bijou in the near future and see the Duke mopping up a bunch of these whiny punks in a movie that might be called, “Allah, Be Damned”?

But the beauty of modern Hollywood is that as life become more and more abstract due to the information age and the Internet replacing the industrialized society of the past, films keep pace with the times! Whereas in the past we could see Wayne in the role of a soldier re-enacting World War II, these days, Hollywood prefers more and more symbolism and subtext. Today's postmodern Hollywood believes its audiences aren't fully prepared for two-fisted scenes of Al Qaeda taking it on the chin in Iraq or Afghanistan. So we get movies like 2005's Stealth, of which Mark Steyn wrote:

The money shot is — stop me if this rings a vague bell — a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.

And movies like this year's Transformers, where the American military fights robots from another planet--who can be any bad guy you wish them to be, or merely robots. (Or its flipside, the recent Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise remake of the War of the Worlds, whose screenwriter told a Canadian magazine that the invading Martians represented the US military.)

So, much like Spinal Tap's audience becoming more selective, it's not like Hollywood's plots are becoming narrower, they simply require more and more imagination from their audiences to work. And, hey, isn't that what movie make-believe is all about...?