Sunday, May 01, 2005
Jane Fonda etc.
I liked Cat Ballou. Lee Marvin was funnier than hell, Stubby Kaye and Nat King Cole were never in finer voice, and how can you dislike a film that included Gilligan's old sidekick, Dwayne Hickman? And Jane Fonda was, well, eminently worth rescuing.
But now we have Jane and Vietnam. Again. With all due respect to the families who lost people in that war, isn't it about time we let it go? We don't have to forget, but wouldn't we be a little healthier if we moved on?
The guest speaker at my company's quarterly business meeting was a former POW who now travels the country giving motivational speeches. Part of me is empathetic -- my generation, he was imprisoned, tortured -- a man like that desires our respect and admiration. But a little voice in the back of my head kept reminding me that he (and we) were doing something that he (and we) shouldn't have been doing. That it wasn't all that simple. The bombs we dropped on Vietnam -- those bombs killed people. Real people. This certainly isn't an excuse for torture, but perhaps an explanation for the vindictiveness and sadism evident in the treatment of the POWs.
Jane and the ex-POW -- still in our faces after all these years. You see, the Vietnam War is like turnip -- if you belch 30 minutes after swallowing it, you can still taste the turnip in your mouth.
But now we have Jane and Vietnam. Again. With all due respect to the families who lost people in that war, isn't it about time we let it go? We don't have to forget, but wouldn't we be a little healthier if we moved on?
The guest speaker at my company's quarterly business meeting was a former POW who now travels the country giving motivational speeches. Part of me is empathetic -- my generation, he was imprisoned, tortured -- a man like that desires our respect and admiration. But a little voice in the back of my head kept reminding me that he (and we) were doing something that he (and we) shouldn't have been doing. That it wasn't all that simple. The bombs we dropped on Vietnam -- those bombs killed people. Real people. This certainly isn't an excuse for torture, but perhaps an explanation for the vindictiveness and sadism evident in the treatment of the POWs.
Jane and the ex-POW -- still in our faces after all these years. You see, the Vietnam War is like turnip -- if you belch 30 minutes after swallowing it, you can still taste the turnip in your mouth.
# posted by Bill @ 11:08 AM 
