I don't have HBO, so I was spared Jane Fonda's appearance on Bill Maher's HBO show last week. Judging from what Ann Althouse has written about it, I saved myself not only the monthly cost of HBO, but also an unhealthy spike in blood pressure.
Maher has just said that since a veteran spat on her at a reading, she can say that's "penance enough." Fonda says "hundreds" of Vietnam vets have come to her readings in the last few weeks "and they've been fabulous... They have forgiven me. So there are some who are stuck back there. But most are not." Then Maher has this:
Yeah, it really is on them at this point, isn't it? If somebody can't get over something in 35 years.
Somebody? Something? Maher didn't go to Vietnam. Who is he to say get over it? Sure, there are "things" that if you're still stewing about them 35 years later, you've got a problem, but if you haven't gone to war, have the decency to refrain from telling people who have that they need to get over it.
Who is Fonda to tsk at people who are "stuck back there"? She does a big shrug and says, "Well, you know the problem is, we've never really come to terms with the war," (emphasis mine)...
Fonda means Vietnam, but it's more than that. Both the Civil War and the Vietnam War drove wedges in the ideological split that continues today from the time "when the first Scots-Irish parcels from Ulster — turned away from the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts — headed for the hills of New Hampshire",
but began around the time Hadrian was building a wall.
James Webb, in Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, explains how today's "most visible fault line between the people of this [Scots-Irish] culture and those who so adamantly shape modern America's intellectual and political agenda began during the turmoil of the civil rights issue":
One does not need to defend the conduct of those who opposed racial integration in order to understand it, and one does not need to condemn the actions of those who pushed for integration in order to call into question some of their long-term motives. After a hundred years this issue was balled up in a Gordian knot that was almost impossible to untie. One could never question the motives, or even the tactics, of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose equanimity was Lincolnesque in its breadth of vision. But others, white and black alike, were bent on using the issue to foment a larger revolution. (emphasis mine)
The Students for a Democratic Society - the SDS - a major player in the Vietnam anti-war movement, formed in 1962 to bring 'revolution' to America, using race as the primary issue... "the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry" was one of these 'others'. (Tom Hayden, a key leader of the SDS, with Jane Fonda ran the Indochina Peace Coalition.) These were the 60's core of the cultural Marxists and activist Left radicals whose influence and power had been growing for decades in academia.
Who was the enemy "poster child" of the civil rights movement? The Southern Redneck, the cultural descendant of the Ulster Scot and the iconic Confederate Soldier, whose only visible advantage over Southern blacks was not being excluded from the front of the bus and the "Whites Only" bathrooms and lunch counters. As Webb puts it:
...if these were the people who took something away from black America, where did they hide it — inside their corn-shuck mattresses?
And who are the Vietnam veterans that Fonda wants to forgive her? According to Webb, the South had a 32% higher casualty rate in Vietnam than the Northeast, with West Virginia's higher than any other state.
...these casualities, were occurring at a time when the draft laws gave liberal exceptions to those who remained in college, and when the more advantaged members of the age group were actively counseled on how to avoid military service. Only 11 percent of the draft-eligible males ... actually went to Vietnam, and only 33% served in the military at all.
Vietnam Veterans, as the military of this country has always been, are more often than not, Jacksonian populists -- the natural enemy of and greatest obstacle to the activist Left, of which Jane Fonda is still a member in good standing. While one motto of the Jacksonian populist might be "No Surrender" another might be "Never Forget". This doesn't mean Jane Fonda can't or won't be forgiven. Yet, is the forgiveness asked for because she has seen the error of her ways, or because... damn, it's been 35 years!
Or is this forgiveness being sought because, as Mead says, "...Jacksonian political allegiance will be one of the keys to the politics of the twenty-first century."
I expect we will see a lot more not-so-humble pleas for forgiveness before the 2008 elections.
