I probably shouldn't look at those stats as much as I do, but one thing interesting popped out at me. The one post, aside from the Sarah Palin fake photo, that seems to get consistent page views on a regular basis is from way back in November 2010, The Return of "Hanoi Jane". In just the last month, this tops the list of hits on this blog, being out in front of the next most popular for the month, Rick Santorum, Communism, and the Separation of Church and State by almost double.
So I guess the title of today's entry is kind of misnomer. There hasn't been a return -- she's been there all the time, marching along with an impressive and consistent number of page views, week in and week out. Why is that?
Is it because among a certain segment of the population, "Jane Fonda" is synonymous with "traitor"? That is true enough, but that doesn't explain the continual popularity of that particular page on this blog, despite the fact that it is now over four years old and there have been only eight comments on it, the latest being from last May.
I did a Google Search for Hanoi Jane Fonda traitor and "The Return of 'Hanoi Jane'" did not come up in the top 100 hits. A lot of sites found in that search do show a visceral rabidly unreasoning hatred of Jane Fonda, though, beyond all rational thought and despite the sites that try to clear the air and examine how many of those "traitor" stories are true. (Depending on your defintion of "treason", pretty much none of them -- see this Snopes account. for example, or this open letter from NAM-POW president and former "guest" of the infamous Hanoi Hilton, Mike McGrath.)
It really remains a mystery to me.
Friday, December 19, 2014
The Return of "The Return of 'Hanoi Jane'"
Posted by Farnsworth68 at 12:07 AM
Labels: Jane Fonda, POW, Vietnam
Posts
3 Comments:
You piqued my curiosity, so I checked my stats. I kind of wish I hadn't. My all-time high pageviews is for a post I did in 2013 called "It's Hell Getting Old." It discussed marketing for Butterfly Body Liners, a personal hygiene product.
Some people are obsessed with Jane Fonda and always will be, god knows why. The other Vietnam phenomenon I've noticed is that the number of Vietnam vets who claim to have been spit on keeps climbing. One of these days I'm going to do a post on it.
Ah, yes, the old Spitting on Vietnam Veterans. That's one of my favorite memes Just this week there were two LTEs to my hometown newspaper trying to gin up some outrage over something that didn't happen 40 years ago. As I replied to those letters in the newspaper's online forum, those claims are bogus; if it had happened to me, or any other Vietnam vet that I know, there would be documentary evidence of it, such as an arrest report for my kicking the shit out of the spitter.
I've blogged on this before in these pages, for example, here, here, here, and here. I've challenged people to come up with any kind of historical proof at all, anything other than "some guy said", and no one has taken up that challenge.
See also Drooling on the Vietnam Vets in the May 2, 2000 edition of Slate Magazine.
Like "Jane Fonda is a traitor", it just won't go away.
The S.O. and I are both Vietnam era vets. The "worst" thing he remembers hearing about happening to anyone back then was an acquaintance who was traveling in uniform and wound up getting so shit-faced drunk he could barely stagger because civilians kept insisting on buying him drinks.
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