The recent 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War sparked the usual bloviation on cable news shows like Hardball.
You know the story by now -- we could have won the war but for the traitors in the antiwar movement and the media.
On Friday's show (transcript not yet available), Matthews fawned over one of those bitter veterans who told the quintessential Vietnam vet stab-in-the-back story of being spat upon by an antiwar protestor in an airport.
As with the POW/MIA myth, this whole spitting Big Lie is a powerful subconscious attack on anyone who opposed the war then, and opposes Bush now.
Someone, besides this Holy Cross professor, should speak up about it.
Jerry Lembcke, an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross, literally wrote the book on this -- "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam" -- and is still willing to stand up against the stab-in-the-back liars.
Also on Friday, he wrote this op-ed in the Boston Globe.
Here's the lede:
Stories about spat-upon Vietnam veterans are like mercury: Smash one and six more appear. It's hard to say where they come from. For a book I wrote in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on.
What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam. There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their point of origin in time and place is obscure, and, yet, they have very similar details.
Not so coincidentally, these stab-in-the-back lies surfaced around the time a reactionary Republican is running for president. Echoes of the Swift Boat liars.
The most interesting thing about these lies is their primal undercurrent:
The persistence of spat-upon Vietnam veteran stories suggests that they continue to fill a need in American culture. The image of spat-upon veterans is the icon through which many people remember the loss of the war, the centerpiece of a betrayal narrative that understands the war to have been lost because of treason on the home front.
snip
Betrayal is about fear, and the specter of self-betrayal is the hardest to dispel. The likelihood that the real danger to America lurks not outside but inside the gates is unsettling. The possibility that it was failure of masculinity itself, the meltdown of the core component of warrior culture, that cost the nation its victory in Vietnam has haunted us ever since.
Many tellers of the spitting tales identify the culprits as girls, a curious quality to the stories that gives away their gendered subtext. Moreover, the spitting images that emerged a decade after the troops had come home from Vietnam are similar enough to the legends of defeated German soldiers defiled by women upon their return from World War I, and the rejection from women felt by French soldiers when they returned from their lost war in Indochina, to suggest something universal and troubling at work in their making. One can reject the presence of a collective subconscious in the projection of those anxieties, as many scholars would, but there is little comfort in the prospect that memories of group spit-ins are just fantasies conjured in the imaginations of aging veterans.
Remembering the war in Vietnam through the images of betrayal is dangerous because it rekindles the hope that wars like it, in countries where we are not welcomed, can be won. It disparages the reputation of those who opposed that war and intimidates a new generation of activists now finding the courage to resist Vietnam-type ventures in the 21st century.
The Vietnam War was terrible for those who served there. Then as now, those who opposed a bad war supported the troops by trying to bring them home as soon as possible. Then as now, many troops don't much appreciate that kind of support.
Some of those Vietnam veterans have become delusional, wallowing in absurd stab-in-the-back conspiracy theories like the Freicorps in Weimar Germany.
A real newsperson would call such people on their lies, rather than validate the lies by letting them go out to his audience unchallenged.
But it's not in the script for media whores like Matthews to challenge right-wing liars.