Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Have you noticed that 2-day deliveries are taking 4 to 5 days to arrive?Shipping companies can’t hire enough warehouse workers and delivery drivers.Have you noticed how long it takes to get the food you ordered?Restaurants can’t hire enough kitchen workers and wait-staff to serve their customers.Service companies nationwide are seeing just 3 or 4 job applicants respond to online recruitment ads that used to generate 40 to 50 inquiries.The limiting factor for business growth in 2021 won’t be a shortage of sales opportunities. It will be the shortage of employees.The Wizard of Ads Partners are rapidly writing recruitment ads for hundreds of businesses across America. Phone lines are ringing and email inboxes are dinging with new requests for recruitment every hour.If you are reliable, conscientious, have a good attitude and are willing to work with your hands, you can write your own ticket anywhere in America.The construction trades can’t find enough people to pour foundations, erect frames, hang sheetrock, build cabinets, lay flooring, and install roofing.Home service companies can’t find enough people to fix plumbing, run wiring, repair air conditioning, paint walls, clean gutters, trim trees, or power-wash driveways, decks and sidewalks.The strongest employers are starting new employees at $80,000 a year and experienced tradespeople are spiraling upwards beyond $100,000 faster than the tornado that carried Dorothy and Toto to Oz.“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” indeed.Twenty years ago, the internet was the Emerald City. Tech workers were needed everywhere.But then we figured out how to do a lot of that work with software instead of people.Follow a rainbow to where it touches the ground today and you will find a happy, hard-working, hands-on service worker. These men and women are the new pot of gold.Companies that rise to the challenge of recruiting, training, and retaining good people will be the ones who leapfrog ahead of their competitors.Do whatever it takes to become the company that everyone wants to work for “if they are lucky enough to get hired” by you. You’re going to have to pay your employees more than you planned, but you’re also going to be able to charge more than you planned.The service company who can answer the phone and say, “Yes we can and we’re on our way,” is the company you want to be.This is the mountain you must climb if you want to see the view from the top.Roy H. Williams

An overwhelming force enters the marketplace.A train is coming. You wish it wasn’t.1. Will you stand on the track with your back to the train and deny its existence?This business owner is saying, “Their customer is not our customer. They will not affect us.”He is doomed by his delusion.2. Will you denounce the train to everyone who will listen?This second business owner says to state and local government, “We don’t want them here.”He may win a battle or two, but he will always lose the war.3. Will you face the train with one foot on each rail and say, “Bring it on”? This third business owner is saying, “I’m better at this than you are. I’ll make you regret coming to my town.”I’ve occasionally seen this business owner defeat the giant, but only if the giant was sick, distracted, or not in the mood to fight. Usually the little guy loses.There are two proven ways to defeat a giant:1.Go where the giant cannot.Trains run on rails. The rails dictate where the trains go.Sam Walton was a small-town retail hustler in a hillbilly state. The giants who occupied the promised land were Sears, Kress (K-Mart), and J.C. Penney.Big department stores need big populations. As a general store, Sam could operate profitably in towns too small for Sears, Kress, and J.C. Penney. Sam opened his first stores outside of Arkansas in Sikeston, Missouri and Claremore, Oklahoma; towns of about 10,000 people.Sam Walton grew Walmart to $8 billion – a size equal to Coca-Cola at the time – before he opened a store in a town large enough to have more than one McDonald’s.2. Let the giant show you the way.Stand alongside the track and grab hold of the train as it passes. This is a strategy that businesses owners 1, 2, and 3 never considered.Once aboard, stand between the train cars where you don’t have to fight the wind. Let the train cut a hole in the wind for you. You are riding in the slipstream. Haven’t you seen race cars pull up tight behind the leader and ride along in their slipstream until the time was right to slip to the inside and slingshot past them?Walmart was slow, but they did act in time. They studied Amazon and saw what was working. Then they committed to upgrading their online shopping experience.They allowed the giant to show them the way.Wal-Mart wasn’t able to slingshot past Amazon,* but they were able to retain their status as a giant. They did not become a has-been like Sears, Kress, J.C. Penney, or Blockbuster Video.Is there a train headed your way?What is its name?What is your plan?Roy H. Williams*Although Walmart currently does more total volume than Amazon, their online volume is only one-sixth as big. Additionally, Amazon’s market cap of $1.7 trillion makes that company worth 5 times as much as Walmart.

Information can be objectively true but have no relevance to you personally.This is the difference between objective reality and perceptual reality.The opposite is true, as well.You can perceive a person to be beautiful when that person is objectively average. You can also perceive information to be important when in truth, it is not.But in perceptual reality, that person is beautiful.In perceptual reality, the information is important.Objective facts do not win the heart and mind. The magic that creates perceptual reality – personal truth – is relevance.Relevance is a happy shout of Yes to the question, “Do I care?”Just because a thing is true doesn’t mean we have to care.The first time I taught publicly about perceptual reality was in 1994 when I was invited to speak to 1,500 jewelers in London at the 400th Anniversary Celebration of the Goldsmiths of the United Kingdom. Afterwards, Pennie and I were whisked away to the world headquarters of DeBeers to meet with Roger Van Egan, their director of marketing.DeBeers wanted to know why my small handful of jewelry clients were selling 20 times more diamonds than the average American jeweler.My answer, in a word, was “relevance.”On date nights, my jewelers were on the radio speaking to couples in cars.“The Christmas season is a GREAT time to get engaged. She’s going to want to show her new engagement ring to everyone she cares about, and most of those people are going to be conveniently gathered together at Christmastime. If you show up at the Christmas party of your girlfriend’s parents and she is NOT wearing an engagement ring, you get to listen to Great Aunt Gertrude talk all night long about her recent gallstone operation. But if your girlfriend IS wearing an engagement ring, the only thing Aunt Gertrude will want to know is whether you’d like another piece of pie before, or after you ride Cousin Larry’s new motorcycle. One more thing: the day she starts wearing your engagement ring is the day her Mom quits calling you “What’s-his-name.”“But your ad didn’t say anything about why he should buy an engagement ring from your client! You said only that he should buy an engagement ring!”Au contraire, mon frère. That ad made my jeweler fun, approachable, and most importantly, NOT SCARY.But when courtship mode has run its course and the honeymoon is over, men who believe “actions speak louder than words,” tend to be poor communicators.Seeds of doubt, disillusionment and divorce are planted when a woman thinks, “This is not the man I married. He doesn’t love me anymore.”“Ladies, many of you will be fortunate enough this Christmas to find a small, but beautifully wrapped package under your tree bearing a simple gold seal that says Schiffman’s. Now you and I both know there’s jewelry in the box. But the man who put it there for you is trying desperately to tell you that you are more precious than diamonds, more valuable than gold, and very, very special. You see, he could have gone to a department store and bought department store jewelry or picked up something at the mall like all the other husbands. But the men who come to Schiffman’s aren’t trying to get off cheap or easy. Men who come to Schiffman’s believe their wives deserve the best. And whether they spend 99 dollars or 99 thousand, the message is the same: men who come to Schiffman’s are still very much in love… We just thought you should know.” [Hard stop. No location tag.]That ad on the radio said to men, “Buy a diamond from Schiffman’s and she’ll know that – unlike “other guys” – you are still very much in love. Now won’t THAT be grand!”Jewelers today are intently focused on reaching engagement ring customers because there are slightly more than 2 million weddings in the US each year.But there are currently 62.34 million married couples. Do the math. I did. And I quickly came to the conclusion that the jewelry business needed an objective way to categorize a diamond as an “Anniversary Diamond.”So I made one up.“You gave her an engagement ring at the beginning of your journey. You’ve come a long way together. Now it’s time to give her a big Anniversary Diamond.”“What’s an Anniversary Diamond?”“It’s a diamond that’s at least twice as big as the one in her engagement ring.”“Why twice as big?”“Because that’s how you say, ‘I love you twice as much today as the day I married you.'”Do you remember what I said about relevance? If Mister “actions speak louder than words,” still loves her but can’t find the words to tell her, I’m confident he can still find his way to the jewelry store.She wins, He wins, the jeweler wins, and I win.The first rule of persuasion is this: you cannot take a person where you want them to go until you first meet them where they are.When you enter the perceptual reality of the customer, you meet them where they are.Now all you have to do is speak to the felt need – something that they already care about – and support your position with an objective fact.Objective facts are always delighted to support you.“Win the heart and the mind will follow.The intellect can easily create logic to supportwhat the heart has already decided.”Roy H. Williams

“Don’t look where you don’t want to go.”Every mountain climber knows this rule, and I want you to know it, too.Your mind has conscious and unconscious power over your actions. When you imagine something, you begin bringing it to pass.What is the mountain you’re trying to climb?If you want a happy and joyful marriage, imagine what that would look like. Not just from your own perspective, but from your partner’s perspective, too. Think about it often.If you want to build a successful business, imagine what that would look like. Not just from your own perspective, but from your customer’s perspective, too. Think about it often.Think about how you can make the biggest difference in the shortest amount of time with the resources you have available. Don’t wish for what you don’t have. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.If you do what I just told you, you will occasionally reinvent the wheel, but that’s okay. That wheel will be your wheel, and you will understand that wheel in ways that no one else understands wheels.Business writers like to write about companies who disrupt their categories.Disruptors are people who reinvent the wheel.In 2004, Blockbuster Video had 9,094 locations, 84,300 employees, and nearly $6 Billion in revenues. Things were fine. Why reinvent the wheel?Netflix reinvented the video-rental wheel when they eliminated the car drive to the video rental store. And then they reinvented the wheel again – their own wheel this time – when they eliminated the mailing of DVDs.I was intrigued with Roving Reporter Rotbart’s interview with Carl Schramm on MondayMorningRadio a couple of weeks ago. Schramm manages a $2 Billion foundation whose goal is to help entrepreneurs succeed. It’s safe to say he knows a lot about entrepreneurship.According to Schramm, successful entrepreneurs are marked by 3 characteristics: Determination, Experimentation and Innovation.“Experimentation and Innovation” sound a lot like reinventing the wheel to me.Blockbuster still has one location open in Bend, Oregon.Q: How did that Blockbuster store survive?A: Determination, experimentation, and innovation.They reinvented the wheel.Rachel Greenblatt of NBC reports the Covid lockdown had three big winners: The introverted, the productive, and Jeff Bezos.This makes sense to me because:1. Introverts do their best work when they are not distracted by social interruptions. (I do my best work in the 6 hours following 2:30AM each day. I am usually asleep by 7PM.)2. Highly productive people used the lockdown as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel.3. Jeff Bezos believes every wheel needs reinvention. Except the flywheel, of course. (Jeff Bezos fans will laugh at that line. The rest of you just need to Google, “Jeff Bezos flywheel.”)Indy Beagle says Aroo.I’ll tell him you said Aroo back.Or you can just meet Indy in the rabbit hole and Aroo him yourself.Roy H. Williams

Your assumptions about the intelligence of your customer will colorize and slant your ad writing in ways of which you are not even aware.Is the customer stupid?The writer of the 139th Psalm did not believe that customers are stupid. He said to God, “I will praise you; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”Harvard University Medical School made a 3-minute film that illustrates the idea that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” It’s called The Inner Life of a Cell, and Indy Beagle has embedded it on the first page of the rabbit hole for you. To enter the rabbit hole, all you have to do is click the image of Indy at the top of the Monday Morning Memo.In the book, Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind, we read,“Wizard’s First Rule: People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”When you make unsubstantiated claims, or if you “substantiate” your claims with sophistry, false facts, overstatements or hyperbole, you are writing under the assumption that people are stupid. But a lot of money has been made by giving gullible people false hope. When a person deeply wants to believe that what you are saying is true, they will believe it, in spite of the fact that you are lying.The assumption that people are stupid will help you write more effective political advertising, direct response advertising, and television infomercials. It will also help you build your downline in multilevel marketing.But conning stupid people out of their money is like beating up little children. I can do it, I just don’t want to.There are two ways to write ads that target intelligent people. The first way is to immediately substantiate your claim with highly credible evidence each time you make a statement of benefit.EXAMPLE: Black Diamonds. Exotic. Rare. And Beautiful. A star exploded and sent an asteroid hurtling toward our galaxy a long time ago. That asteroid was more than half-a-mile wide, and it flew through space until it struck the earth. That asteroid was made of black diamonds. The National Science Foundation announced the news about these outer-space diamonds and then the New York Times wrote a story about them. Black Diamonds. Exotic. Rare. And Beautiful.The second way to advertise to intelligent persons is to use “Magical Thinking,” a style of writing characterized by elements of the impossible woven with a deadpan sense of presentation into an otherwise true story. Magical Thinking goes beyond the realm of exaggeration and moves into the realm of entertainment.EXAMPLE: Life is happier when it’s less cluttered. Your house will be bigger! Your teeth will be whiter! Angels will sing! You’ll be a better dancer. Go to 1-800-GotJunk.com and prepare to be amazed.If you make untrue statements and expect them to be believed, you are writing to a stupid person. But if you make untrue statements for the purposes of entertainment – knowing they will not be believed – you are writing to an intelligent person.If I provided an example of advertising filled with strong assurances, baseless claims, puffery and hyperbole with no evidence to support those claims, you would say, “Wow. I hear ads like that every day.”And now you know why people are so very annoyed by most advertising.Roy H. Williams

When a person assumes they have superior wisdom, they will offer you their advice. This is an unmistakable sign they think you are an idiot.I smile when a person says to me, “Can I offer you some friendly advice?” They instinctively use the word “friendly” as a qualifier because, deep in their guts, they know what they are about to say isn’t friendly at all. They want to give me their critique, their criticism, their evaluation.Still smiling, I shake my head and say “No.”Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life.You don’t need advice. You need encouragement.Not flattery. Encouragement.You can do the thing you would like to do.Of course you can.You can become the thing you want to become.Of course you can.You can achieve the thing you hope to achieve.Of course you can.I don’t know how long it will take, or what you will have to endure, but I do know that you can do these things if you decide to. The only enemy you cannot outwit or outwait is death.You were created in the image of God.He does not think you are an idiot.And neither do I.Roy H. Williams

Bad ads waddle like a porcupine and make lots of little points.Good ads charge like a rhinoceros and make a single point powerfully.This is true regardless of your choice of media.Ad budgets are like that, too.When universities ask me to address their Advertising & Marketing majors just prior to graduation, I always warn those young “advertising experts” never to give advice to friends or family members who are involved in a local business. “This is because everything you have been taught assumes you will go to work in marketing for a Fortune 500 company, or for an advertising agency that places the media for large, national brands. You have not been taught how to grow a local business.” And then I ask their professors – in front of the students – whether they agree or disagree with what I just said.One hundred percent of the time, without exception, every professor has agreed with me. Most of the time, they start nodding their heads in affirmation when I say, “…everything you have been taught assumes you will go to work in marketing for a Fortune 500 company…”The most dangerous of these Fortune 500 concepts is the idea of a “media mix.”The widespread belief about the value of a “media mix” has caused small business owners to sprinkle their ad budgets across several different media because they are worried they are going to “miss” someone. After all, “Not everyone listens to the radio.” “Not everyone watches the news.” “Not everyone looks at billboards.” “Not everyone blah, blah, blah.”Advertiser, you can’t afford to reach everyone. You’ve got to choose who to lose.Would you rather reach 100% of the people and convince them 10% of the way, or reach 10% of the people and convince them 100% of the way? Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.Don’t be a porcupine. Be a rhino.If you sell a product or a service that most people will need sooner-or-later and you suspect you’ve been sprinkling your ad budget, “a little bit here and a little bit there,” try spending 80% of your ad budget on a single mass media and the remaining 20% online. The choice of mass media is up to you, but it’s hard to go wrong with local broadcast radio or television newscasts. People rarely record the TV news on their DVRs. They watch it live. The same is true of live sporting events.By the way, in case I forget to tell you this later, repetition is effective.“Wait a minute,” you say, “you told me to be a rhino and not to sprinkle my budget, but now you’re telling me that 20% of my budget should be spent online! What’s up?”Google is the new phone book, so you must have an online presence. Properly used, mass media will make you the provider that people think of immediately and feel the best about, but the first thing those people are going to do when they need what you sell is go online to look for your phone number, or your store hours, or your street address, or at your online reviews.You’ve got to show up when your customer is looking for you.There are instances – particularly in the home service categories – when it makes sense to use geotargeting. If time and energy are an underutilized resource, the placement of door hangers and lawn signs and the slipping of flyers under windshield wipers are old-school techniques that still pay big dividends. This is what I call, “shoe leather on the sidewalk.”The geotargeting of neighborhoods can also be done online, and geofencing will even allow you to target the people who enter and exit a specific building. Cool, huh?“But what if I sell a product or a service that only a tiny percent of the population will ever want or need?”Friend, that’s when you bet your entire ad budget online. But make sure that your gross profit margin will allow you to spend 25% to 33% of total top-line sales on advertising, because when all the shouting is over, that is what you’re likely to spend.(Meanwhile, those local advertisers who are betting on the effectiveness of mass media are spending only 6% to 12% of total top-line sales on advertising.)Mild surprise is the foundation of delight.In your ads,A. if you say what your customers expected you to say, they will be bored.B. if you make unsubstantiated claims, they will not believe you.C. if you speak to anything other than a felt need, they will ignore you.D. if you say something new, surprising and different, you will gain their attention.E. if you give them reasons to like and trust and believe you, they will.9. If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The intellectual mind will always create logic to justify what the emotional heart has already decided.10. Repetition is effective,repetition is effective,repetition is effective.Roy H. Williams

Brian, good thoughts!The Neuroscience of Behavior Change link you sent was a great explanation of what Dr. Alan Baddeley calls “Procedural Memory.” You will recall this from The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop at Wizard Academy.Working Memory is consciousness, imagination, the thought you are thinking NOW.Semantic Declarative Memory contains things you can remember, but you cannot remember how or when you learned them.Episodic Declarative Memory is like Semantic Declarative Memory, except that you can remember the episode; the how and when of the learning.Procedural Memory is long-term, involuntary, automatic recall. It is electrical memory aided by chemical traces along the neural pathway. A perfect golf swing, the movement of fingers by a typist or a concert pianist, or the automatic recall of an advertiser’s name; all these are positive expressions of Procedural Memory.Procedural Memory = Salience (impact or relevance) x Repetition.The greater the impact of the message, the less repetition is required. And keep in mind, repetition costs money.The Short-Term Goal of the Direct Response Ad Writer is to speak to an immediately-felt need of the customer who is currently, actively in need of the product or service in question.The Short-Term Goal of the Future Needs Ad Writer is to create Episodic declarative memory by saying or doing something new, surprising, or different, so that future recall of the episode might be established. To do this, the ad writer must make the reader/listener/viewer smile, laugh, cry, become nostalgic, become fearful, or get angry.This is because emotion triggers adrenaline and adrenaline is the biochemical adhesive that creates those chemical traces along the neural pathway. Information without emotion is of limited value.The Long-Term Goal of the Future Needs Ad Writer is to deliver a series of salient messages with enough repetition-over-time to create Procedural Memory, but without any of the negative associations that come with anger, sorrow and fear.So now you understand PTSD. It is simply is a negative expression of the long-term, involuntary, automatic recall known by neuroscientists as Procedural Memory, a product of Salience (importance, relevance, or surprise) times Repetition. With enough salience, a repetition of only one is sufficient to create Procedural Memory.Always good to hear from you Brian!Oh. One last thing: Those of you who didn’t see Brian’s email to Indy Beagle in last week’s rabbit hole were likely intrigued by the new, surprising, and different opening of today’s Monday Morning Memo: “Brian, good thoughts!”“Am I reading a private email to someone named Brian?” Or you may have wondered, “Brian who?” or if your own name is Brian, you may have asked, “How is the wizard personalizing the main body of the Monday Morning Memo to each individual reader?”In any case, those opening 3 words achieved reader/listener/viewer engagement, the first step in The Short-Term Goal of the Ad Writer.Aroo,Roy H. Williams

1492: An Italian, funded by the Queen of Spain, sailed west to find the east, discovered a small island in the Caribbean, decided it was India, and sailed home to share the happy news. Ponce de León, Balboa, Cordoba, Cortés, Coronado and 24 other conquistadors were sent from Spain to bring home whatever they could find.1562: France sent Laudonnière on 3 expeditions to South Carolina and Florida, but Spanish Admiral Menéndez slaughtered the French in 1565 and built the fortress city of St. Augustine, Florida. 1620: Religious misfits from Holland and England boarded a ship called the Mayflower, crossed the Atlantic in 66 days, landed at a place called Plymouth Rock, met some friendly natives and celebrated Thanksgiving with them, presumably on the last Thursday in November.1662: A Dutchman named Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from a group of local Indians for merchandise worth 60 Dutch guilders and built a thriving community there. It is considered to be the greatest real estate deal in the history of the world. Two years later, the English showed up with cannons and announced that they would now be in charge. The Dutch asked, “Can we keep our houses and our businesses and all of our stuff?” The English said, “Sure, no problem. You just have to let us be in charge.”The Dutch smiled and said, “Welcome to America.”In the decades that followed, the sons and daughters of Spanish conquistadors and French explorers and religious misfits and Dutch traders and English soldiers were joined by tens of thousands of optimistic adventurers and entrepreneurs and families who dreamed of a better life. They came from everywhere.And then slave traders arrived with shiploads of captives for sale. But no one smiled at the captives and said, “Welcome to America.” In fact, these dark-skinned newcomers were not allowed to keep houses or businesses or anything else, not even their own children.July 4th, 1776: A new nation was born when everyone got tired of the English being in charge. And as this baby nation grew, her people began to sing.1886: The song of Ellis Island, the song of the Statue of Liberty.“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”– Emma Lazarus1904: The song of a Century of Progress.I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy, a Yankee Doodle, do or die.A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July.I’ve got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart, she’s my Yankee Doodle joy.Yankee Doodle came to London just to ride the ponies, I am the Yankee Doodle boy.– George M. Cohan1968: The song of our Wandering Years.“Kathy, I’m lost”, I said, though I knew she was sleeping,“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,They’ve all come to look for America…”– Paul Simon1980: The Song of CelebrationEverywhere around the world, they’re coming to America.Every time that flag’s unfurled, they’re coming to America.Got a dream to take them there. They’re coming to America.Got a dream they’ve got to share. They’re coming to America.They’re coming to America. They’re coming to America.They’re coming to America. They’re coming to America.Today… today… today… today… today!– Neil Diamond 2010: Lady Liberty no longer lifts a torch, but a toast to the newcomers.“So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways, all my underdogs! We will never be, never be anything but loud and nitty gritty, dirty little freaks. Won’t you come-on and come-on and raise your glass? Just come-on and come-on and raise your glass!”– Pink Sitting in the back corner of the classroom, a silver-haired gentleman was the last to stand and introduce himself. He cast his gaze about the room for a long moment before he spoke. “As I sat and listened to you people introduce yourselves, I thought, ‘Never in my life have I been surrounded by so many weirdos, wackos, mavericks and misfits. It’s as if this wizard fellow sent out the mating call of the albino monkey, and you are the strange people who answered.” Then he sat down and smiled as he concluded, “And I just can’t tell you what an honor it is to be counted here among you!”   That man was Keith Miller, the bestselling author of The Taste of New Wine, a book that sold several million copies as it rocked the foundations of Religious America back in 1965. (Christian booksellers kept Keith’s book under the counter because it had the word “wine” in the title.) Keith’s assessment of Wizard Academy was correct. For 21 years, it has been the home of proud misfits who are not afraid to fly their own flag and chart their own course as they journey toward the star that beckons them in the night. Wizard Academy is a waystation where travelers meet to learn new things and laugh and talk for a while about where they are headed and what they hope to find. Come. Your friends await you. Roy H. Williams

Hollywood has been feeding us romanticized history ever since Birth of a Nation splattered across the silver screen in 1915.Romanticized history is a lie.People will always believe lies that reinforce their worldview.Hollywood feeds us romanticized history because we love it, and the fictions we love best are those heroic stories of pioneers and settlers and cowboys during the years of America’s westward expansion.John Wayne was a powerful icon of rugged individualism for two generations of American men. He was self-reliant and manly and brave, the living embodiment of maximum masculinity. There was no woman in distress he could not save, no wilderness he could not tame, no fight he could not win.His real name was Marion Morrison and he grew up in Southern California. According to WIKIPEDIA, “He lost a football scholarship to the University of Southern California as a result of a bodysurfing accident and began working for the Fox Film Corporation…. It was John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) that made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to one biographer, ‘John Wayne personified for millions the nation’s frontier heritage.’”The real-world Americans who traveled westward in the hope of finding a better life were, for the most part, poor people with nothing to lose. With few tools and no resources, they improvised as best they could. They endured painful hunger, parching thirst, desperate cold, raging disease and the untimely death of people they loved.We romanticize these struggling families of an earlier century and call them “self-reliant, rugged individuals.” We imagine them as strong, beautiful characters in a John Wayne movie.Here is my question: When you scrape the Hollywood glitter off these people and see them real, was their resourcefulness an expression of exuberant confidence, or was it a product of their abject desperation?Many of you sympathized with the millions of us Texans who shivered in our homes for several days at below-freezing temperatures with no heat, no light, no water and no toilets.I drilled numerous yellow holes in the snow.No electricity means no hot meals, and in southern states like Texas, icy streets mean no deliveries, no fire trucks, no ambulances, and no police. Even the grocery stores were closed.The hospital nearest our home was evacuated.When Pennie and I had been without water for 3 days, the ex-governor who presided over the deregulation of energy in Texas (and dismantled the regulations that would have insured the consistent delivery of water and electricity in our state,) called a press conference to proudly announce that Texans would gladly, “be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”Now there is a man who has watched one-too-many John Wayne movies.And then there is the senator from Texas who decided that, “to be a good Dad,” he was going to hop on a jet and find some comfort at The Four Seasons in sunny Cancun, Mexico. But I can make room for that. I don’t really blame him for it. If I wasn’t concerned about Covid, I might have done it myself.The “John Wayne” part of that story is that he flew to Cancun with a mask on his face displaying the image of an old Texas flag from our pre-statehood years. That flag shows the star of Texas with a big cannon and the words, “Come and Take It.”In 1835, when European settlers revolted against the government of Mexico, they got control of a cannon in a border town, then flew a flag with a drawing of that cannon and added the words, “Come and Take it.”Basically, they were just flipping the bird to the Mexicans.But why – 186 years later – would a person flaunt a symbol that insults Mexicans while escaping TO MEXICO to get away from 3rd world conditions back home?One-too-many John Wayne movies, that’s why.Born in Texas and raised in the dangerous part of an Oklahoma town, I am no stranger to violence. My willingness to embrace it when it presents itself is alarming to most of my friends. So please don’t think you can write me off as an effete little man who needs to be sheltered from the harsh realities of life.I have all this on my mind today because of a quote in the February 15th Monday Morning Memo from John McCain, a man who was everything Marion Morrison pretended to be.“War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.” – John McCainMcCain’s statement has been rattling around in my head for the past two weeks. I agree with him completely; there is nothing glorious, nothing honorable, nothing virtuous about hardship, pain, and suffering. “Only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.”Men who have been engaged in face-to-face, mortal combat almost never spout tough-guy platitudes. They leave the swaggering talk to those posturing, posing men who have watched one-too-many John Wayne movies.Roy H. Williams