[Marxism] Jane Fonda

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/perl01_.html
LRB | Vol. 27 No. 22 dated 17 November 2005 | Rick Perlstein

Operation Barbarella
Rick Perlstein

Jane Fonda?s War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon by Mary 
Hershberger [ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · New Press, 228 pp, £13.99

You don?t know America if you don?t know the Jane Fonda cult. Or rather, 
the anti-Fonda cult. At places where soldiers or former soldiers 
congregate, there?ll be stickers of her likeness on the urinals; one is an 
invitation to symbolic rape: Fonda in her 1980s ?work-out? costume, her 
legs splayed, pudenda at the bulls-eye. Every night at lights-out 
midshipmen at the US Naval Academy cry out ?Goodnight, bitch!? in her 
honour. They?ve learned, Carol Burke writes in her study of military 
folklore, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane and the High-and-Tight, what you 
learn at all the service academies: ?that being a real warrior and hating 
Jane Fonda are synonymous.?* When Maya Lin?s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was 
built on the Washington Mall, well-organised veterans who criticised it as 
the ?gook monument? ? Lin is Chinese-American ? were allowed to open their 
own kiosks nearby. These became the cult?s temples, the places to buy its 
sacraments and phylacteries; bumper stickers, for example, saying ?Jane 
Fonda: John Kerry with Tits?. Phyllis Schlafly and Tom Wolfe have both 
described the memorial wall as a ?monument to Jane Fonda?.

A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the 
summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his 
?lenient and humane? treatment to the visiting actress, spat on her instead 
and was beaten almost into blindness; prisoners secretly gave her their 
social security numbers to prove their existence to the outside world ? 
Fonda turned the numbers over to their captors and men were supposed to 
have died from the beatings that followed. The reliability of such tales is 
suggested by a piece that appeared in the Washington Times, a right-wing 
daily, in 1989: a former pow, Air Force Major Fred Cherry, recalled Fonda?s 
voice ringing out over the prison public address system during an ?extended 
torture siege? in 1967. Fonda didn?t speak out against the war until 1970.

The cult matured in the 1980s when America finally began to accept that it 
had lost a war which hadn?t been worth fighting in the first place. This 
was around the time Ronald Reagan observed: ?Boy, I saw Rambo last night. 
Now I know what to do next time this happens.? The moment had come to fix 
the blame where it properly belonged: not on Lyndon Johnson, not on Richard 
Nixon, but, as Burke points out, on the oldest story in the world, ?the 
seductive woman who turns out to be a snake?.

Last year, the Fonda cult allowed thousands, even millions of anguished 
veterans and their sympathisers to hold onto their shaky faith in American 
innocence, while acting as the conduit for the character assassination of 
the Democratic presidential candidate. ?They?re the men who served with 
John Kerry in Vietnam,? the announcer said in the notorious TV commercial 
produced by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. ?And they?re the men who spent 
years in North Vietnamese prison camps. Tortured for refusing to confess 
what John Kerry accused them of . . . of being war criminals.? The tropes 
come straight from the Fonda mythology. A doctored photograph was 
circulated (it showed up in several newspapers) showing Kerry on a 
speakers? platform with Fonda. The picture was found to be a fake, but the 
association had already been planted. ?John Kerry with Tits?: five 
syllables full of implications for the politics of gender, power and 
anxiety in America.

(clip)

--

www.marxmail.org


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism