February 3, 2007

Scrapbook on Fonda

In the new Weekly Standard, The Scrapbook describes milling about the anti-war rally in Washington last week, and samples the media's fawning coverage of the mixed bag of humanity in attendance. I'll beg the magazine's indulgence and cite a couple of paragraphs not available online, on the coverage of Ms. Fonda:

Our attention was drawn, however, to the appearance of none other than Jane Fonda on the speaker’s platform. The Post was similarly intrigued, but seemed content—and curiously credulous—to view Miss Fonda entirely uncritically. The passive voice got a good workout in the Style section depiction of her. Describing a 1972 photograph of a helmeted Jane Fonda sitting happily atop a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun—aimed at you-know-whose aircraft—the Post explained that this appalling spectacle “was viewed by many as sympathetic to North Vietnam.”

Then there was her assertion “I haven’t spoken at an antiwar rally in 34 years. Silence is no longer an option.” Unlike the Post, which accepted this as gospel, and reported that Miss Fonda had been otherwise engaged in the intervening decades, The Scrapbook was struck by the precision of her memory. Thirty-four years would take us back to the winter of 1972-73, when sheand actor Donald Sutherland, songbird Holly Near, and others were finishing the worldwide tour of their “F.T.A. [F—the Army] Show”—“a satirical revue. . . [featuring] protest songs, anti-war humor . . . and agit-prop theater designed to increase awareness and spread resistance” (the New York Times)—on college campuses, at coffeehouses, and outside U.S. military bases here and in Japan, the Philippines, and Okinawa.

Indeed, The Scrapbook is just old enough to remember that, during those locust years when Jane Fonda (in the words of the Post) was “a workout maven, postfeminist arm candy for billionaire media magnate Ted Turner, a vocal Christian and an autobiographer,” she was also, with second husband Tom Hayden in their spacious L.A. residence, host to a parade of strongmen from Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime, as well as visiting officials of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the Communist guerrilla army seeking to destroy the democratically elected government of El Salvador.

Jane Fonda may not have spoken at rallies during that time, but silence was never an option when she could lend her voice to the enemies of her country.

Posted by dan at February 3, 2007 12:33 AM