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Spitting in the Face of U.S. Troops by Mark Engler Dissent October 14, 2010 clip - Last week, the Supreme Court took up a case regarding a right-wing fundamentalist pastor, Fred Phelps, whose anti-gay congregation has taken to protesting at military funerals, carrying signs that read "Fag Troops" or "Thank God for Dead Soldiers." Phelps doesn't seem to care whether or not the dead soldiers in question were actually gay. He believes that the killing of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is the result of America's immorality and its tolerance for abortion and homosexuality-the latter supposedly expressed in the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. The father of one Marine killed in Iraq sued after his son's funeral was protested, beginning a long legal battle. The Supreme Court ultimately heard arguments about whether his family's right to grieve in peace should be taken into consideration in constraining the free speech of Phelps's followers. I'll put aside the legal issues involved in this case going to the Supreme Court. (That the current court is taking on any free speech case probably bodes ill for civil liberties.) Instead, I want to consider for a moment the concept of demonstrating at military funerals-or targeting returning troops in general with protests. The idea that the people rallying outside military funerals are "Fags Die, God Laughs" adherents of the religious Right, rather than godless leftists, will be a shock for many Americans, especially conservatives. It contradicts a deep-rooted myth. A persistent narrative about the Vietnam War is that anti-war protesters of the 1960s and 70s vilified the troops, spitting in their faces upon their return to the United States. This storyline was perhaps most memorably presented by veteran John Rambo in the now- classic film First Blood. When he breaks down at the end of the movie, Rambo explains resentfully: I come back to the world, and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of crap! Who are they to protest me?! Who are they?! Unless they've been me and been there and know what the hell they're yelling about! I like Rambo as a series of action movies, and I've written about the franchise's conflicted politics. But this point is definitely one that Rambo's writers get wrong. Historian Jerry Lembcke, author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, has done a very convincing job of debunking the story of spat-upon soldiers. As Jack Shafer summarized in an article for Slate, Lembcke investigated hundreds of news accounts of antiwar activists spitting on vets. But every time he pushed for more evidence or corroboration from a witness, the story collapsed-the actual person who was spat on turned out to be a friend of a friend. Or somebody's uncle. He writes that he never met anybody who convinced him that any such clash took place. While Lembcke doesn't prove that nobody ever expectorated on a serviceman-you can't prove a negative, after all-he reduces the claim to an urban myth. In most urban myths, the details morph slightly from telling to telling.... Lembcke uncovered a whole lot of spitting from the war years, but the published accounts always put the antiwar protester on the receiving side of a blast from a pro-Vietnam counterprotester. Surely, he contends, the news pages would have given equal treatment to a story about serviceman getting the treatment. Then why no stories in the newspaper morgues, he asks? full -- http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=288 ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
