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.
STATE BLOGS
