JANE FONDA at an antiwar conference in the Netherlands in 1975 (Wikipedia).
Jane Fonda was in the news this week – national as well as local – when the Westminster City Council held a special meeting on Friday to pass a resolution demanding that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors rescind its awarding its own resolution honoring the film actress for her work on climate change.
The council’s objection didn’t have much to do so much with the ice caps melting as it did with her notorious visit to North Vietnam in 1972. Not only did she express doubt that POWs she met with were telling the truth that abuse and torture of American prisoners (mostly pilots) was routine, she posed for a photograph on an anti-aircraft battery wearing a military helmet.
The implications of the image were obvious; Jane was seeming to be giving tacit approval to the killing of American airmen.
That has dogged her all her life. She was slow to apologize and even when she made a more abject mea culpa, it was far too late.
Yes, she was just an ignorant young woman with little to no understanding of what she was doing. Still, she did it willingly. Some people say, give her a chance. She apologized.
But there are 58,000 Americans who died in that war. They can never hear her regrets. She was a privileged rich kid whose actions mocked the working class kids who fought the war. They didn’t have the option of being willing fools, like Jane.
You don’t have to feel that the Vietnam War – whose implications still echo strongly, especially in Orange County – was the best course for America, to understand that there’s a difference between honest dissent and shallow Hollywood political theater.
Just as it’s too late to save the lives of those 58,000 – not to mention the many who were wounded physically or emotionally scarred – it’s too late for me to feel comfortable saying, “That’s OK, Jane.”
The life you lead depends on the decisions you make. She made a bad one in 1972, and it follows her yet. Just like memories of the wounded who wore the uniform in an unpopular war a half-century ago.