Right. What is the origin of this myth of Vietnam Vets who were "spit upon, called baby killers, & the like by anti-war activists," I wonder?
The problem is that right-wing populism has coopted the idea of soldiers & veterans as victims, making use of "counter-cultural," even "left-populist," motifs in the process:
***** From Douglas Kellner, _Media and Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Polticis Between the Modern and the Postmodern_, London: Routledge, 1995.
Rambo and Reagan
The first Rambo film, First Blood (1982), presented the Vietnam veteran as a victim and merged an uneasy set of images that ascribed responsibility for his victimization to societal forces and that showed them driving him to violence. In the plot, Special Forces veteran John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is searching for a member of his unit, who he discovers died of Agent Orange contamination, thus situating the Vietnam veterans as victims of their government. Unable to hitch a hide, Rambo walks into the small town of Hope, and is arrested by the sheriff who complains that he needs a haircut and bath. Mistreated by the sheriff and his deputies, Rambo escapes and wages war against the local and national guard law enforcement agencies, being positioned as a victim of oppressive authority and power. At the end, he surrenders to his former Special Forces commander Col. Trautman (Richard Crenna) and breaks down, crying that although he was a hero in Vietnam, he cannot even hold a job and is a figure of contempt and hatred, thus blaming all of society for making him an outcast.
In the second Rambo film (1985), Rambo is transformed into a superhuman warrior who rescues U.S. POW's still being held in Vietnam, thus transcoding the paranoia of contemporary conservativism concerning missing POW's in Vietnam.2 The film is but one of a whole series of return-to-Vietnam films that began with the surprising success of Uncommon Valor in 1983 and continued with the three Chuck Norris Missing in Action films of 1984-6. All follow the same formula of representing the return-to-Vietnam of a team of former veterans, or a superhuman, superhero veteran like Rambo, to rescue a group of American soldiers "missing in action" who are still imprisoned by the Vietnamese and their evil Soviet allies....
The film Rambo synthesizes the "return-to-Vietnam" cycle with another cycle that shows returning veterans transforming themselves from wounded and confused misfits to super warriors (i.e. Rolling Thunder, Firefox, First Blood). All of these cinematic attempts to overcome the "Vietnam syndrome" show the U.S. and the American warrior hero victorious this time and thus exhibit a symptom of inability to accept defeat. They also provide symbolic compensation for loss, shame, and guilt by depicting the U.S. as "good" and this time victorious, while its communist enemies are represented as the incarnation of "evil" who this time receive a well-deserved defeat. In these cinematic fantasies, it is always the "enemy" that performs vicious and evil acts, while the Americans are virtuous and heroic. Cumulatively, the return-to-Vietnam films therefore exhibit a defensive and compensatory response to military defeat in Vietnam....
On the other hand, Rambo and the other Stallone-Norris meathead-hero films can be read as expressions of white male paranoia which present males as victims of foreign enemies, other races, the government, and society at large. The return-to-Vietnam films also exhibit an attempt at remasculinization, in which highly masculist male behavior is celebrated, as a response to feminism and other attacks on male power. In The Remasculinization ofAmerica, Susan Jeffords (1989) argues that Vietnam was a terrible blow to masculine pride, for which American males experienced great guilt and shame. A vast amount of Vietnam films and literature deal with this problem, she claims, attempting to heal the wounds and to reconstruct a damaged male psyche.
Yet the films can also be read diagnostically as symptoms of the victimization of the working class. Both the Stallone and Norris figures are resentful, inarticulate, brutal, and thus indicative of the way many American working-class youths are educationally deprived and offered the military, or activities like sports that channel violence into socially acceptable behaviour, as the only way of affirming themselves. Rambo's neurotic resentment is less his own fault than that of those who run the social system in such a way that it denies his class access to the institutions of articulate thought and mental health. Denied self-esteem through creative work, they seek surrogate worth in metaphoric substitutes like sports (Rocky) and war (Rambo). It is symptomatic that Stallone plays both Rocky and Rambo during a time when economic recession was driving the Rockys of the world to join the military where they became Rambos for Reagan's interventionist foreign policies.
The Rocky-Rambo syndrome, however, puts on display the raw masculism which is at the bottom of conservative socialization and ideology. The only way that the Rockys and Rambos can gain recognition and self-affirmation is through violent and aggressive self-display. And Rambo's pathetic demand for love at the end of the first two Rambo films is an indication that the society is not providing adequate structures of mutual and communal support to provide healthy interpersonal relationships and ego ideals for men in the culture. Unfortunately, the Stallone character intensifies this pathology precisely in its celebration of violent masculism and militarist self-assertion.
Reading Rambo politically
What is perhaps most curious, however, is how Rambo appropriates countercultural motifs for the right. On one level, the film is about the triumph of the individual over the system, continuing the dominant trope of individualism in American ideology, but giving the concept a particularly rightist and masculist twist after the 1960s appropriated individualism as social revolt and non-conformity. Moreover, Rambo has long hair, a headband, eats only natural foods (whereas the bureaucrat Murdock swills Coke), is close to nature, and is hostile toward bureaucracy, the state, and technology -- precisely the position of many 1960s counterculturalists. This is an excellent example of how conservative ideologies are able to incorporate figures and fashion which neutralize and even reverse their original connotations as oppositional style and behavior. The film also incorporates radical anti-state disourses and images, for Rambo's real enemy is the "governmental machine, with its massive technology, unlimited regulations, and venal political motivations. Rambo is the anti-bureaucratic non-conformist opposed to the state, the new individualist activist" (Berman 1984:145). Thus Rambo is a supply-side hero, a figure of individual entrepreneurialism, who shows how Reaganite ideology is able to assimilate earlier countercukural figures, much as fascism was able to provide a "cultural synthesis" of nationalist, primitivist, socialist, and racialist ideologies (Bloch 1991-1995)....
Yet the identification of Rambo with natural man against machine technology is problematized in that Rambo is also identified with technology, and specifically murderous military technology. Rambo's bow and arrow shoots missiles that explode with nuclear impact, thus merging nature and technology. Rambo's knife, a risible phallic symbol of aggressive masculinity, is also high-tech, enabling him to cut through barbed wire and to suture his wounds with a needle and thread conveniently stored in its butt. The knife also directs him with a compass, and, of course, provides him with a powerful weapon with which he can quickly and efficiently dispatch his adversaries. Moreover, Rambo is associated too with the power of helicopters, explosives, and other weapons, thus merging technology and nature in images of a pure "fighting machine."...
The film machine also mobilizes images and displays of gender and race to its ideological work. In regard to gender, one might note that Rambo instantiates a masculist image which defines masculinity in terms of the male warrior with the features of great strength, effective use of force, and military heroism as the highest expression of life. Symptomatically, the women characters in the film are either whores, or, in the case of a Vietnamese contra, a handmaiden to Rambo's exploits who functions primarily as a seductive and destructive force. Her main actions are to seduce Vietnamese guards -- a figure also central to the image of woman in The Green Berets -- and to become a woman warrior, a female version of Rambo, who helps Rambo fight the bad guys. Significantly, the only (brief and chaste) moment of eroticism in the film comes when Rambo and his woman agent kiss after great warrior feats, and seconds after the kiss (of death) the woman is herself shot and killed. This renunciation of women and sexuality highlights the theme that the male warrior must go it alone and must thus renounce erotic pleasure. This theme obviously fits into the militarist and masculist theme of the film, as well as the genre of ascetic male heroes who must rise above sexual temptation in order to become maximally effective saviors or warriors.3
The representations and thematics of race also contribute fundamentally to the militarist theme. The Vietnamese and Russians are presented as alien Others, as the embodiment of Evil, in a typically Hollywood scenario that presents the Other, the Enemy, "Them," as the embodiment of evil, and "Us," the good guys, as the incarnation of virtue, heroism, goodness, innocence, and so on. Rambo appropriates stereotypes of the evil Japanese and Germans from World War II movies in its representations of the Vietnamese and the Russians, thus continuing a manichean Hollywood tradition with past icons of evil standing in for -- from the Right's point of view -- contemporary villains. The Vietnamese are portrayed as duplicitous bandits, ineffectual dupes of the evil Soviets, and cannon fodder for Rambo's exploits, while the Soviets are presented as sadistic torturers and inhuman, mechanistic bureaucrats....
William Warner (1992) has pointed out that the torture and suffering of Rambo, highlighted by the cinematography, enacts a sado-masochistic position whereby the spectator experiences the pain as just punishment for the guilt of the loss of masculinity and U.S. imperial power in Vietnam. Then, through a magical reversal, the subject attains the pleasures of the sadistic position by participating in Rambo's mastery and power over his adversaries. Such a scenario thus provides a psychic resolution to the trauma of loss in Vietnam and empowers spectators who are experiencing loss of power in the present hard times.
Jeffords (1994) reads the torture scenes in the Rambo films as demonstrating that the national body can recover from wounds and reconstitute itself as dominant, as powerful, as in control. The Rambo body also provides the norm of the powerful body that can protect us from harm and against which soft and weak bodies can be differentiated and seen as lacking. She argues that the inept sheriff and his deputies and the National Guard in the first Rambo represent the soft bodies that make the U.S. prey to foreign and domestic subversion. The Stallone, Norris, Schwarzenegger and other "Hard Bodies," by contrast, present the ideal man needed to preserve the existing society from its enemies and from internal decay and feminization....
Consequently, although the U.S. was denied victory in Vietnam, it has attempted to achieve it in media culture. This phenomenon shows some of the political functions of media culture which include providing compensations for irredeemable loss while offering reassurances that all is well in the American body politic....
The Rambo effect
Rambo was one of the most popular films of its era. It opened at a record-breaking 2,074 theaters and had the third-largest opening gross in movie history -- $32,548,262 in its first six days (New York Times, May 30, 1985). Rambo quickly became the number one film in box office receipts:
In its first 23 days of release, Rambo, which cost $27 million to produce, has grossed a phenomenal $75.8 million at the box office. Only two films in history, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Return of the Jedi, have had more successful launches. (Time, June 24, 1985)
By the end of the Summer, it had grossed over $150 million in the U.S. alone to become one of the most popular films of the day (Business Week, August26, 1985). Moreover, it spawned a whole culture of "Rambomania" which:
is spreading faster than the fire storms set by the hero's explosive warheads. Hollywood megahits of summers past have flooded the market with such whimsical souvenirs as furry Gremlins and cuddly E.T.s. This year stores are stocking up with war paraphernalia: a $150 replica of Rambo's high-tech bow and arrow, Rambo knives and an assortment of toy guns, including a semiautomatic job that squirts a stream of water 10 ft. Youngsters will soon be able to pop Rambo vitamins, and New Yorkers can send a Rambogram, in which a Stallone look-alike will deliver a birthday message or carry out a tough assignment like asking the boss for a raise. The U.S. Army has started hanging Rambo posters outside its recruitment offices, hoping to lure enlistees. Rambo fever is even spreading overseas. The film has already broken box-office records in Beirut and the Philippines, and 25 companies have signed contracts to distribute Rambo merchandise, even in countries where the film has not yet opened. (Time, June 24, 985)
...On the other hand, Vietnam veterans protested against the film all over the country, claiming that it provided distorted representations of both Vietnamese and American vets, while promoting violence, and they picketed theaters that ran the film....
[Endnotes omitted; the entire excerpt is found at <http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~corse/media.html>.] *****
Yoshie