Links, Page 12
[I have decided to place the following email remarks to me under “Links” rather than “Comments” because I shall include a link to the amazon.com page(s) for the book cited in the email I recently received. I thought the book itself might be helpful to some interested in the Vietnam War period.]
From Raksha (November 28, 2007)
I just read your review of the story "Something Worth Fighting For" on your website. Based upon your few remarks, it's obvious from your review that you have never met a liberal! If you really believe there has been some recent politically correct shift "away" from disrespect for Vietnam vets, then you've obviously never talked to a liberal as a person AND as a liberal at the same time. We would have been happy to give you our opinion on Vietnam vets or any other subject if you'd ever thought to ask us.
There was never any disrespect to turn away from, for politically correct reasons or any other reasons. What you thought you were seeing was never there.
You said in your review that you "have no doubt" that some spoiled middle-class kids spat upon returning Vietnam vets, but that in your conservative working-class neighborhood nobody would ever have thought of doing such a thing. Let me clue you in about something: We would never have thought of spitting on a Vietnam vet either! I never did it, could never have imagined myself doing it. Nobody I knew could have imagined doing it either. Why would we spit on our own brothers?
That just happens to be one of the most vicious urban myths about "liberals" ever perpetrated by the right wing. It was debunked several years ago in a book called The Spitting Image. I haven't read the book, but I did read a review of it so I know the methodology used in the study. The author went through many back issues of the San Francisco Chronicle from the 1960s and early 1970s, looking for write-ups and police reports of incidents where anti-war protesters spat on returning Vietnam vets, greeted them at airports with taunts of "baby-killer" and so on. He found a few questionable incidents (which I believe happened at demonstrations) but there were very few even of those.
So essentially...IT NEVER HAPPENED! "The Spitting Image" is a myth the right keeps alive for the purpose of demonizing and discrediting those of us who oppose the war in Iraq and who opposed the war in Vietnam for similar reasons.
—Raksha
