Fonda: Jane and Roger and Tom and Che and…
Che, you ask? Jane Fonda and Che?
Well, sort of. According to a new biography of Fonda being published in early October, some time in the early 70s she “supposedly confided during a feminist consciousness-raising session, ”˜My biggest regret is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.’”
By now she may have accumulated a few more regrets, although I’m not at all sure any of them would be political ones. Aside from her more famous betrayals of this country during the Vietnam era, she has been both the perpetrator and the recipient of various personal betrayals. She left her 18-month-old daughter with first-husband Vadim. She had many affairs, as did her husbands. And as far as f***ing goes, she may not have f***ed the trendy Guevara, but she certainly was f***ed over by Vadim, Tom Hayden, and others. Hayden in particular sounds like a piece of work.
Fonda sounds like a person continually looking for what Milan Kundera has called circle dancing. She tried to find it in men and in causes (with Hayden it was men with causes). Here’s Kundera on the general subject:
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
In Jane’s case, best stick to exercise videos and acting.
That’s OK Jane, Che got to F*** a lot of people- or should I say snuff a lot of people- in his day as Jailer and Guerrillero.
Many of the aging leftists remind me of the crack about the Bourbon monarchs: they forget nothing ; they have also learned nothing.
The circle dancing metaphor for Jane Fonda certainly puts all those exercise videos in a whole new light.
1. From Neo’s link regarding Fonda’s return to the USA after the Hanoi Jane photo was taken: ‘What is a traitor? What is a patriot?’ was her angry retort. ‘I cried every day when I was in Vietnam. I cried for the Vietnamese and I cried for the Americans, too.’
“What is a traitor? What is a patriot?” Wow, that’s deep. And Foucault and Derrida weren’t big yet.
This is a ploy that the Left continues to use, especially in recent years: when it’s pointed out that they don’t make sense, their reaction, implicit or explicit, is that they operate on a higher cognitive level than their critics–on a higher moral plane too–and it’s a waste of their time to respond.
2. History will bring them down, but they could take the country with them. Not just the country, but the West.
3. The Right is not immune to a similar attitude.
Their guiding philosophy predisposes them to extremism. While everyone rebels to different degrees as they develop, there are also generational progressives (rebels with a cause and without a clue) who never confront reality. This continues to be true even when reality can neither be ignored nor modified. They are simply to heavily invested in their failure and their egos cannot bear the pain of correction.
To gs’s point, by nature, everyone is vulnerable, but by design, conservatives are subject to the consequences of the same false principles in the exception. There is something positive to be said for approaching reality with rational moderation.
As for Fonda, she could always f*** Kim Jong Il. There is no better and committed representative of left-wing ideology than that lunatic.
My regret is that this stupid b!tch didn’t meet Guevara in his professional capacity, as Castro’s chief executioner.
For that matter, the same goes for Vadim (OK, he’s a wobbler, but what the hell), Hayden (a real prize package), and of course Guevara himself.
Four more worthless people who more richly deserve the long drop are difficult to imagine.
– enable extreme sarcasm mode – “Well, Jane always did have good taste in men.” close extreme sarcasm mode.
Before anyone else goes for it, I’ll do it: “Jane, you ignorant slut…”
Now I want to watch Inception again 🙂
“By now she may have accumulated a few more regrets”
And probably an STD or two.
Jane makes no bones about wanting to destroy her country. Che could have used a woman like that – (Oh wait, he did, and 99% of them died) and I can’t wait to see her statue in south Florida. What a martyr, and what a great activity for the children of South Florida to throw stones at.
Back in the 80s I was flying a schedule that entailed flying into Santa Barbara almost daily with a two hour layover. In those days Jane and Tom were living in the hills above Santa Barbara, ironically quite near President Reagan’s ranch. One day in the newsstand at the small (really small) airport I spied Tom Hayden leafuing through a magazine. I knew who he was from all the bad old days of the 60s when his face was familiar on TV news. However, this was not the wild haired, ill-dressed, raggedy andy of his hippy days. No, he was decked out to the nines. $500 Harris Tweed sport jacket, lamb’s wool flannel trousers, an expensive shirt and tie all set off by a $50 razor cut hairdo with hair curling stylishly over his collar. Even his hands and fingernails looked perfectly manicured. Talk about a leopard changing his spots. Jane was making big bucks with her exercise videos and he was in the California assembly at the time. Apparently he had lost all interest in being an “authentic” revolutionary and was enjoying the luxuries that money can provide.
Old Henry never gave his daughter the love she longed for. She has spent her entire life trying to find it. It appears she is still searching. Such a shame. In spite of her apology to Vietnam vets, she is still despised by most of us. I no longer despise her. When I think of her, which is almost never, it is with pity. She is one miserable human.
I would gladly donate one of my favorite Che t-shirts to scuzzy Jane, including one of my favorites:
http://tinyurl.com/3eyv36p
I was chuckling about OB’s comment, and then I got to Sgt. Mom’s! Now that was a clever one!
Before I read either of those comments, I was just going to say that any hope I may have had that Jane Fonda might have learned something, anything, in the last 40+ years was erased by her idiotic comment about Che.
I gather that certain expendable toilet accessories are available with her face on them, for use in military latrines.
Kurt: that comment about Che was apparently made around 1971.
I don’t know whether she’s learned much in the intervening years, but don’t assume she hasn’t just by that comment.
A willing and eager participant in the f**k up of her life is not f*ked over. She surveyed the waters, took the dive, swam deeply, and drank more than her fill. No excuses, no passing responsibility to others, eyes wide open.
” … finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.”
In a flight from the terror and trauma of being a self, these neurotics will warm themselves by whatever fire they can, even if they believe that it too is ultimately pointless.
Perhaps the purpose of the circle, whether it be a religious or secular circle, is to live a holy life, a life of service, a life dedicated to a higher purpose. It is not for personal fulfillment and when it becomes the anchor of one’s soul, or used to catch a high, the circle corrupts. Or perhaps the circle is corrupted by the person who ill-uses it and the resulting inner knowing (guilt) either drives the person up or down, in or out.
The circle, as the means not the end to those who want to give life purpose, responds much like eating will sustain life but kill it when the focus is on pleasure rather than service. So the circle must not become a servant of one’s unwarranted or exploded desires. The greatest need of all is acceptance (religiously this might be called salvation or atonement) which the circle cannot give or take away authentically.
In Jane Fonda’s case, her blindness to her hypocrisy, which is that she thought she was using the circle for a higher purpose but she wasn’t, led her down and trapped within. And as JJ pointed out, she wasn’t given much of a start, but then, doesn’t seem to have learned much on the way. According to one view, it is never too late to have an awakening and even if it occurred at the very last breath of life, the whole life would be redeemed and counted as worthy.
I like the metaphor of the circle dance. Reminds me of the children’s song about the plague:”Ring Around the Rosie.”
In line with Curtis’ comments:
Well, when we look for reasons for living in something outside of or somebody other than ourselves, are we not certain to end our lives in some pit of despair? Revolutionaries seem to come to bad ends; for example, the rendering of a dedicated Bolshevik activist in A. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon; or Ernesto Guevara’s execution without trial by a peeved Bolivian soldier. The progressive socialists, a lesser breed, just look adolescently stupid on their way to a dead end.
Every time I see a Che t-shirt, I wanna puke. Every time I see a pic of Jane Fonda, I wanna puke on HER.