The Pain Of Being Plain Jane

I watched some of the Jane Fonda apology on 60 Minutes of Communist Favorites Sunday night, and it really changed my mind. Now, I want to smack this bitch more than ever. I want to smack her hard...and looooonng. The sweet sting of my palm against her delectable cheekbone.

I'd love to throw a vacuum cleaner at her.

I didn't go to Vietnam, but it doesn't matter. Let's take an example closer to home. How did you feel on 9/11, before the politics? In the Moment. No one cares anymore about where you were and what you felt when you watched that good for nothing JFK go down. And no one cares where you were when the Twin Towers were attacked, seeing as how it's unlikely you were in them. What were you thinking watching fellow citizens get incinerated in such a surreal scene? How did you feel with the uncertainty of not knowing if your city or plane was next? Then how betrayed did you feel when you heard prominent fellow citizens saying that, whoever it is, we deserved it?

But this is America. People are so used to being safe they've started to question it. We have all sorts of voices to balance out each other that someone always has like-minded individuals to turn to for comfort in times of stress. I'm sure you got over that betrayed feeling and took care of it at the ballot box. But you still felt it. And you felt personally scared for your life for maybe the first time.

Now you're a POW. You live in worse conditions than the Schaivo girl, and to make matters better, you are fully cognizant most of the time. This is not a CBS show where cameras, producers, and medics are always on stand-by and will save your life faster than any place else in the world just to save their own careers. The only network you have access to on occassion is the loose network of other POWs spreading whatever information about their situation they can through crude codes at what today would be a rate of about .005 bps.

After weeks, months, years of these depressing and brutal conditions, a ray of hope! You will be receiving greetings from that hot piece of ass Jane Fonda. The girl to whose memory you often ran one up the flagpole while in your POW hole. And she's going to speak on Viet Cong radio! We must have won! I will soon be free! Golly, as I'm sure my peers are still saying back home, this is really swell!

But Ms. Fonda comes not with a message of victory, but one of defeat. We soldiers should just give up. The government is wrong about this war. Nobody likes what you're doing. It's hopeless. If even a spoiled Hollywood cunt like Jane Fonda can see it, we might as well die. Losing side, wrong argument. What's the use?

Perhaps even the most rigidly ideologous of you can see how this can not help the cause of America, whether you agree with it or not. And in fact, this is why there is almost universal agreement that the Vietnam War was indeed, lost. We were winning and we lost the will to finish it. Who lost us that will? It wasn't Nixon. It wasn't Fonda. It was both. The Jane Fondas used furious anger and righteous violence to put across their arguments and intimidate the nation for decades into complying with social rules that made little sense the more one was able to calmly scrutinize them. The Richard Nixons of the world were too intimidated and too adrift intellectually to come up with a counterargument that resonated with the American people as the news media did with theirs. Repositioned as the old tired establishment, the better people slunk off to regroup for when the inevitable unsustainability of a society that desires a prosperous, free nation without a strong defense against poachers.

Somebody needed to put up the rules more often back then, or maybe the protestors kept vandalizing the sign:

1) The government can and must protect you against other countries.
2) You pay taxes to help the government pay for the protection.
3) Stay behind the rope while we're fighting. It's much easier that way.
4) Even if you're right about our decision-making, trying to do something about it single-handedly makes you an asshole.

It's not like Jane Fonda hasn't been forgiven already. It's the only reason Jane Fonda didn't get executed as surely as Plain Jane Fonda would have sans the nice rack and caboose and a willingness to show them in movies and threesomes everywhere. The question isn't how much MORE forgiveness Jane Fonda deserves. The question is, how many more people have to get killed before we stop excusing this kind of self-promoting behavior?

There's only one reason Jane Fonda wants to be forgiven. To sell her book about her life in which every decision was made to promote Jane Fonda's interests. Now that she has no movies, no husband, no kids, no influence, all that's left is memories and a book. Take those away, and she's got nothing.

And then, I will forgive Jane Fonda.