Gary Williams
Mike Ballard wrote:
> Apparently some guy spat tobacco juice at Jane Fonda recently.
> Revenge?
> Manipulation?
>
>>From Australia,
> Mike B)
>
> *************************************************************************
>
> The New York Times business section of November 2, 1998, carried the
> story, "A Bicycle Path From Wall Street to Vietnam," written by Laura
> A. Holson. The story was about Peter D. Kiernan, III, who organized a
> bicycle tour of Vietnam. Kiernan is a banker at Goldman, Sachs &
> Company. In her report, Holson wrote that Kiernan had been moved to
> organize the trip when he heard a Vietnam veteran talk about his
> coming-home experience. The veteran, identified in Holson's story as "a
> top executive," reportedly told Kiernan that he had returned from
> Vietnam on a stretcher with a bullet in his leg. He said, "college kids
> rushed up and poured rotten vegetables on him. They spat on him. He was
> so ashamed."
>
> On the day Holson's story appeared, I faxed a letter to the Times
> letters' editor saying that, "in research for my book The Spitting
> Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, I found no evidence
> that such incidents ever took place. It would have been impossible for
> protesters with rotten vegetables to get close to a wounded soldier
> returning from Vietnam." I pointed out that, "stories of spat-upon
> veterans are apocryphal. They discredit the Americans who opposed the
> war and help construct an alibi for why we lost, namely, that we were
> betrayed on the home front by disloyal fifth columnists." My letter was
> never printed.
>
> ...
>
> Though the Times had not acknowledged my criticism, I nevertheless
> thought the presence of my position may have been felt and that maybe
> we had seen the last reference to spittled veterans in the pages of
> that paper. My optimism grew when Lars-Erik Nelson reviewed Robert
> Timberg's book, John McCain: An American Odyssey for the New York
> Review of Books, October 21, 1999. In his book, Timberg accused the
> anti-war movement of hostility to Vietnam veterans and said protesters
> had spat on men returning from the war. Reviewing the book, Nelson
> called Timberg's accusation a "slur that should be dealt with once and
> for all" and then went on at some length to do just that, citing my
> book as his source.
>
> ...
>
> The spat-upon veteran stories have been likened to urban legends in
> that they are manifestations of something in the nation's collective
> subconscious, perhaps lingering unsettledness about the war. But unlike
> urban legends, which believers seem willing to relinquish their hold on
> once the mythical side of the stories is exposed, the accounts of
> defiled veterans seem to be proliferating and their tellers are
> surprisingly defensive about the veracity of the tales. Shafer's
> thoughtful Slate.com editorial received nearly 300 postings, one of the
> largest ever for that site. Many of them defended the spitting stories
> and several respondents, claiming to be veterans, offered new versions
> of having been welcomed home by spit, human feces, and worse. One
> veteran claimed a "hippy chick" spat dog semen on him after giving her
> puppy a blow job. Some of the postings contained expressions of
> hostility against Shafer and me that writers debunking, say, the
> "hookman legend" would never receive. The volume and vehemence of the
> defense of the spat-upon veteran stories, in other words, suggest that
> there are some deeply cultural elements at work in their telling.
>
> The image of spat-upon veterans is an icon through which the country
> constructs its memory of what the war was about and the fictive nature
> of that icon suggests that America has never come to grips with the war
> itself. Screened out by the accounts of forgotten warriors and
> spat-upon veterans are the politics that got us into the war and the
> history that thousands of GIs joined the effort to end the war; buried
> beneath the images of protester's animus for veterans is the history of
> the real war in which 3,000,000 Vietnamese died fighting for national
> independence.
>
> The historical amnesia left by our own mythologizing of the war means
> that the vast majority of Americans do not know how we got to the peace
> that we've just celebrated. Reclaiming our memory entails a struggle
> against some very powerful forces that toy with our imaginings of the
> war for reasons of monetary, political, or personal gain. Remembered as
> a war that was lost because of betrayal at home, Vietnam becomes a
> modern-day Alamo that must be avenged, a pretext for more war and
> generations of more veterans. Remembered as a way in which soldiers and
> pacifists joined hands to fight for peace, Vietnam symbolizes popular
> resistance to political authority and the dominant images of what it
> means to be a good American. Journalists are major players in the
> construction of those memories and we need to hold them accountable for
> their work.
>
>
>
>
> full: http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/3600
>
> ******************************************************************
> Live in harmony with the Earth. Abolish the wages system.
> http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
>
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