In parts 1-4 two weeks ago, I wrote a series of articles quite critical of Barack Obama's echoing rightwing narrative frames demonizing forms of dissent.
those who attack America's flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.
Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.
In part 3, "Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Jane Fonda?", I expanded the critique of Obama's echoing rightwing Vietnam-era myths by taking on the image of Jane Fonda. I drew on Jerry Lembcke's paper, "Gender, Betrayal, and Public Memory: America's Lost War in Vietnam" to illuminate how Jane Fonda was reinvented as an icon of cultural betrayal years after the fact, in stark contrast to the historical realities of the time, and how this reinvention fit into some of the oldest myths of American identity.
Then in part 4, "Patriotism Smackdown: "Hanoi Jane" vs. Tricky Dick", I looked at how it was actually Richard Nixon who was responsible for the senseless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in South Vietnam, as he schemed along with Henry Kissinger to prevent the signing of a peace treaty in 1968, before the November elections.
Collectively, these aticles go to show that Barack Obama tacitly--at the very least--embraces a view of political history since the 1960s that is deeply shaped by rightwing fantasies of liberal treachery, and that deliberately ignores and excuses the actual reality of rightwing treachery. The charge is not that Obama makes such a fantasy the cornerstone of his politics. He clearly does not. But he does allow this fantasy to define the limits and outline the shape of his politics. It is defines the box in which he lives--and in which he would have all of us live with him.
This fifth installment--unfortunately delayed by illness--completes the series by taking a longer historical view of the underlying dynamic in terms of one of its classic metaphors--the "stab in the back" that played such a crucial role in the emergence of Naziism after Germany's defeat in WWI.
In doing so, I'm going to hitch a ride through the 20th Century with Kevin Baker, who wrote a fantastic piece for Harpers a couple of yearrs ago, "Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth". In it, Baker makes specific reference to Lembcke and The Spitting Image, which we'll get to shortly. But he begins with a very tight thesis paragrph that cuts to the chase
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.
This is what we're up against--to this very day. But it's not just fighting off this profound evasion of responsibility and the wildly proliferating demonology it produces. There's also the little detail about getting past all this delusion to actually come up with something that makes sense as foreign policy--something we can't even get close to doing so long as we're spending all our time fighting off--or even worse, being seduced by--rightwing demons. If you don't believe me, just ask Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. She tried to have a normal life, but, well. You know.
It was post-WWI Germany, and a fellah named Adolph something-or-other who really got the ball rolling on this whole stabbed-in-back fantasy, in a way that the American right later picked up on, "big time," as America's #2 war criminal would say. Gory details on the flip.
The last diary in this series, Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Jane Fonda?, looked at how a mythology was created after the fact to use Jane Fonda ("Hanoi Jane") as a symbol for blaming the loss of the Vietnam War on the anti-war movement. In particular, Fonda was presented as a betrayer of the troops. But, as is almost always the case with rightwing narratives, whatever accusations they may make about others are almost invariably true about themselves. "Projection" is the name of the game, and this episode is no exception. Indeed, there is now compelling evidence that Richard Nixon himself is fully deserving of all the calumny that has been heaped on Jane Fonda, and much, much more besides.
You see, in 1968, records now show, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger interfered with the Paris Peace Talks, to prevent the war from being ended before the 1968 elections. As a private citizen at the time, Nixon had no right whatever to be doing such a thing. In fact, what he did could arguably be construed as treason. Whatever the legal situation, however, one thing is clear: 20,763 American troops died on Nixon's watch, while another 111,230 were wounded. That's over 130,000 American troops who would have lived, or not been wounded had Nixon not interfered, and Johnson secured the peace treaty he so desperately sought to rescue his reputation as best he could. Over 130,000 American casualties that Richard Nixon is directly responsible for, simply in order for him to become President.
And the right wants to paint Jane Fonda as a betrayer of American troops?
In Part II of this series, I referred to Jerry Lembcke's book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, and his examination of the myth that anti-war protesters commonly spat on returning veterans. I quoted from an interview in which he touched on an important aspect of his book, the attempt to make sense of the myth in terms of blame-shifting, similar to that which took place in Germany after WWI, blame-shifting that would, eventually lead to the rise of the Third Reich. In this installment, I want to quote extensively from some more recent work that Lembcke has done focusing on another aspect of that same phenomena--the demonization of Jane Fonda.
There is a striking similarity between the two subjects. Just as Vietnam vets and the anti-war movement were close allies, rather than antagonists back in the late 60s and early 70s, Jane Fonda was a very popular figure with the troops, one of the priniciple organizers of the counter-culture alternative to the Bob Hope USO shows, known either as "Free the Army," or in its more colloquial form, "Fuck the Army."
In Part One of this series, I used Langston Hughes's poem "Let America Be America Again" to sharpen some of the inconsistencies in Obama's speech about patriotism. Here, I want to dig deeper into what appears to be a fundamental aspect of what's wrong with Obama's vision-his acceptance of righwing mythology about the nature of anti-war activism from the Vietnam Era. In this diary and the next, I draw primarily on the research of sociologist-and Vietnam vet-Jerry Lemcke, to discredit and analyze two prominent rightwing mythic narratives about Vietnam, both of which seek to shift responsibility for losing the war away from those responsible for the war and onto those who opposed it. In the diary following that, I'll look at how this fits into a much longer historical pattern of rightwing mythmaking.
This diary is about the myth that anti-war protesters commonly spit on returning veterans. The next is about the myth of "Hanoi Jane"--portraying Jane Fonda, who was actually well-liked by the troops, as someone deeply hostile to them, and responsible for their defeat.
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." - Samuel Johnson, April 7, 1775.
"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first." - Ambrose Bierce, 1911
Obama's sudden lunge to the right has many facets to it. For one thing, as Arianna Huffington argued, it was supremely stupid politically, going against everything that had previously distinguished him-which only intensified the question of why he did it. This short diary series is an attempt to answer that question in terms of the larger history of American politics that shaped this political moment-a larger history that has shaped Obama in ways he seems quite ignorant of.
It also draws on concepts of cultural hegemony and culture war as originally conceived by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly a concept of "culture war" much deeper and more penetrating than is generally connoted by the term.. Although Gramsci was clearly a man of the left, his formulations have been widely embraced. No less a figure on the right than Rush Limbaugh wrote about him in his 1992 book, See, I Told You So. And Limbaugh, unlike Obama, actually understood what the term "culture war" means-it is a struggle for control over the cultural institutions whose influence determines what is taken for granted in talking about political reality.
The rightwing control of talk radio is a perfect example of such control, an example that crucially depended on Reagan's FCC overturning the decades-old "Fairness Doctrine." Using the public airwaves to repeatedly demonize large segments of the American people without opportunity for a reply is the sort of fundamental abuse of the public trust on which conservative power is based. This single example alone should suffice to show that the idea Obama promulgates, that we can simply put the culture wars behind us by an act of political will, is both enormously appealing and utterly deluded.
