Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Jerry Lembcke ISBN: 0-8147-5147-4 Publisher: New York University Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.33 (9 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Try Google...
Comment: Google dispels all of the "research" done for this book. I would advise Jerry Lembcke to find new work...maybe writing for the likes of Al franken.
Rating: 1
Summary: History through pink colored glasses.
Comment: Ideologues generally make poor historians. This book is proof of this maxim. Written by a leftist college professor, (redundant, I know), the author attempts to disprove the myth that anti-war radicals treated veterans returning from Vietnam like plague-bearing rats. This thesis will elicit guffaws from any honest person who had the misfortune of living through the sixties. Vets were routinely called racists, fascists, rednecks, babykillers, and a multitude of obscene insults by radicals who considered themselves the enlightened and anyone who disagreed with them scum. Chants in support of the forces killing American troops, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is sure to win!", were a staple at "anti-war", actually pro-communist, rallies. With a laughable argument and turgidly written, this book is a prime example of the type of politicized junk history produced by academics today. A true time waster except for aging members of the SDS and other radical groups nostalgic for the days of their youth.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Thought-Provoking Read
Comment: I have to start this review by making it clear that my gut reaction to this book is one of hostility. I enjoyed reading it, and simply couldn't put it down once I started, but it made me angry and I found myself disagreeing with the author all over the place, and feeling all the more frustrated because I hadn't marshaled a whole bunch of factoids and info snippets to throw back at him.
For one thing, Lembcke is himself a rabid leftist who refuses to acknowledge the possibility of any other viewpoint. At one point, he says, outrageously, that the left always argues a point by using reason, logic, and empirical evidence whereas the right uses myth and legend and appeals to emotion. A person of wider reading and more profound learning would not say such a thing. You're going to tell me that writers like David Hume, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, and T.S. Eliot (all rabid conservatives by today's standards) were a bunch of dummies who didn't know how to argue. And hell, I think George Will is a lot more witty and lively than all the dime-a-dozen academic morons trying to sound like Lacan and Foucault.
But I found myself disagreeing with the author so vehemently not because I was a vet who got spat on (I was a toddler during Watergate) but because of a few personal experiences which, to me, do lend great weight to the "myth" of a vicious antiwar left meting out abuse to returning vets. First, my father and my uncle were Vietnam veterans who remain quietly proud of their service (and no, they don't put bumper stickers on their vehicles or wear t-shirts advertising that fact). I have often asked them about what their homecoming was like. They were never spit on, but they do vividly recall a very chilly atmosphere back in the states for vets, especially in college. Peers shunned you. Contrary to what Lembcke says, the only guys that showed them any kindness were the old-timers in the VFW hats. Although Nixon and the right held the reins to the sinews of power, the left, by the early 70s, DOMINATED the media and popular culture and public perception. To be a vet in those days was highly uncool, unless you chose to get up in front of a Senate committee and tearfully blabber about atrocities the government made you commit or let yourself be manipulated by the antiwar movement (and the Tom Haydens and Dave Dellingers, who never set foot on a real battlefield, were always looking for "credible" witnesses).
I can accept the idea that the story of hippie girl spitting on the returning vet is a sort of urban legend. And sure, Nixon and his guys used the POWs and pro-war vets for cynical political purposes. But to say that the "spitting image" was some sort of sinister government conspiracy that has had everybody hoodwinked for the last three decades is a bit much.
What proof does Lembcke have that this never happened? "There is not a single documented case" of spitting that he can find. Never mind the question of how in the world a "case" of spitting would ever be documented (were the spat-upon vets supposed to file complaints with the sherriff's department, or what?), Lembcke overlooks the possibility that the "spitting" is a convenient figural device to represent a whole range of hostile behaviors which were more subtle and did not involve the exchange of bodily fluids. For a good example of what I'm talking about, read the "prologue" in Frederick Downs' "The Killing Zone", where the author of this memoir recalls his feelings of hurt and bewilderment when some jerk on a college campus asked him (Downs) if he'd lost his arm in Vietnam. When Downs replied "yes" the guy said "Serves you right."
It doesn't take any stretch of the imagination, for me, to believe that this actually happened, and was perhaps, in some areas of the country, typical. Why? Because of a conversation I once got into with a professor and a graduate student (who was old enough to have served in Vietnam but didn't) about the NLF's strategy of terror. When I made a passing remark about how horribly brutal the guerillas could be when dealing with their Vietnamese and American enemies, I was made to understand, in very strident terms, that US soldiers and Vietnamese collaborators with the RVN DESERVED to die horrible deaths. "They should have never gone over there in the first place," I was told. This conversation took place five years ago but I will NEVER forget it. And no matter how much Lembcke tries to get me to believe that the antiwar left recieved returning vets with hugs and kisses, this incident will always get in the way of being able to believe it.
I realize that I'm not going to be able to discount Lembcke's book based on what a couple of relatives or some old fuzzy tenured leftist tell me--I'm not a professional scholar but I know enough to see that anecdotal evidence isn't acceptable to a wider audience of readers who don't know you personally. But I can't help thinking that Lembcke is slightly guilty of that same trick. He is a former member of VVAW, and just because HE was treated well and welcomed with open arms by antiwar activists he thinks that every other vet had the same experience.
I have no problem believing that most segments of the antiwar movement showered love and flowers all over vets who wanted to join them and speak against the war. We all know how much a church loves a repentant sinner--he's always useful for melodramatic testimonials.
But thank God we live in a society (unlike the "Democratic" Republic of Vietnam) where we can have public disagreement and heretical opinions openly expressed with impunity and without fear of retribution. I disagree with Lembcke, but I have to admit that he writes well and that this book is never boring, and readers like myself thrive on argument and define ourselves through opposition!
For an interesting counter-perspective, read "Stolen Valor": a devastating study of Vietnam vet fakery.
 |
Title: Designing Disney's Theme Parks : The Architecture of Reassurance by Karal Ann Marling, Neil Harris, Erika Doss, Yi-Fu Tuan, Greil Marcus ISBN: 2080136399 Publisher: Flammarion Pub. Date: 15 February, 1998 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
 |
Title: Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image by David Greenberg ISBN: 0393048969 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 06 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
 |
Title: The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation by Hayden White ISBN: 0801841151 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1990 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
 |
Title: Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Critical Perspectives on the Past) by Sam Wineburg ISBN: 1566398568 Publisher: Temple Univ Press Pub. Date: 29 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
 |
Title: The Foucault Reader by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0394713400 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 November, 1984 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
