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Robert responds to Tom
Robert — (archived)

RNE's input is interesting. I didn't take the original premise as binary, that it either never happened or happened everywhere and all the time. Urban myths and stereotypes and prejudices are all built upon small kernel of truth, inflated and embellished beyond reason. The more interesting question is how much truth there is at the heart of this myth. And I don't think even you'd object to the characterization of "myth", which describes as much its emotional power and staying power as its percentage of truth. It's become a notion of epic proportions.

I doubt that it was ever a widespread phenomenon. For one thing, despite all the anger and protests, attacking returning soldiers would be inconsistent with particular strain of Leftist thought at the time, "peace, love, dope" or "sex and drugs and rock and roll". Not to say that lots of people didn't let anger overcome their principles, or that that there weren't a lot of people with a shaky grasp of the principles, and scary radical factions like the Weathermen. But there were a sufficient number of genuine committed pacifists in the mainstream that ill-behavior toward returning soldiers would have been censured.

Perhaps this is just anecdotal, but a number of images have survived from those times depicting very pacifistic behavior toward soldiers. There's that archetypical image of a young hippie girl placing a flower in the barrel of a soldier's gun. Why aren't there just as many images of soldiers being attacked and spit upon? Do you believe that those images and testimonial accounts have all been expunged from the records to rewrite history? Remember that the Right was hardly muzzled at the time, and there were plenty of conservative newspapers and broadcast commentators around denouncing the antiwar movement.

Many of the stories allegedly take place at LAX. Did the Orange County Register never send a reporter and cameraman over to document it? Would they have failed to spread the news far and wide if they could have? How about George Putnam of KTLA, the Rush Limbaugh of the '60s? How could it go on right under the nose of hard-nosed Conservatives without some attempt to draw attention to it?

It's things like that that make ER's topic so fascinating. You go along blindly accepting "conventional wisdom" and "common knowledge", and then one day somebody questions your assumptions, and all of a sudden when put on the spot you can't really remember any definite basis for accepting an idea or anything in particular that happened to explain why you believe it. And when the documentary record is no help, the puzzlement deepens. Have we really been sold a bill of goods all this time?

That RightWing mindcontrol stuff is spooky. Talk about The Power to Cloud Men's Minds!

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