Who spit on who? (ZOT!!! Who meowed at whom?)

MetroBlab ^ | 4/22/04 | Jesse Fox Mayshark

[Whappen]

OK, so we all know the stereotype, right? The veterans came home from Vietnam and were greeted -- at the airport, at the mall, who knows where -- by throngs of dirty hippies, all of them just waiting for the veterans to get close enough for them to SPIT on. You know this one, yeah? Everybody knows it. Heard it somewhere, from someone. Maybe even from someone who says it happened to them. And maybe it did happen to someone, somewhere. It's possible. People do all sorts of things at demonstrations. But the thing is, there are no contemporary accounts of it happening, anywhere. The idea, the suggestion that anti-war protesters spit on Vietnam veterans, doesn't surface anywhere until 1980. That article (written by a Vietnam veteran, by the way) is an abstract of a book on the same subject exploring the birth and evolution of the protestor-spitting-on-veteran iconography.

This is no small thing. Ask your average 18- or 21-year-old for their impressions of Vietnam War protesters, and -- if you find an 18- or 21-year-old who's informed enough to have any such impressions -- you'll probably at some point hear them talk about protesters spitting on veterans. Hey, they've seen First Blood, they know it's true.

It's strange, and not a little dangerous, that even as the national consensus has, over time, moved to a sort of grudging acknowledgement that the American involvement in Vietnam was basically wrong-headed from the start, the people who fought longest and loudest to bring the killing to an end (many of them veterans themselves, like a certain presidential candidate) have been systematically marginalized by the popular histories. The spitting-on-vets thing is kind of the cornerstone of that marginalization, as if that were somehow standard behavior for people who were against the war (many of whom were, again, veterans).

Among the interesting things in that article is that he notes that the only actual evidence he can find of people spitting during anti-war demonstrations is of demonstrators being spat on by pro-war counterdemonstrators.

[dirtboy]

I think a better question for you is, who zotted who?

[Pan_Yans Wife]

Welcome to Freerepublic.

[Constitution Day]

Interesting first post.

[Psycho_Bunny]

lol

[Old Sarge]

KITTEN CHOW PING!

[dirtboy]

From your newly-crafted homepage:

Those that do not remember (or ignore) the past are doomed to repeat it

Repeat THIS:

[Constitution Day]

[Lokibob]

5-------4-------3------

ZOT!!!!

[Shryke]

LOL, ya, let's go ahead and redo history! DAMN those Nam vets for spitting on those patriotic hippies!

[grassroot]

whom.
Who spat on whom.

[Constitution Day]

(Who meowed at whom?)

LMAO!

[So Cal Rocket]

While I did not witness my brother getting spat upon, which he said happened at least three times after serving in Viet Nam, I did witness people calling him a "baby killer" and "war criminal" when my family picked him up at LAX shortly after his return from Viet Nam.

I was 11 years old at the time and I cried... my brother was my hero.

[laconic]

Read Bob Greene's book, Homecoming. Its full of first-person accounts of veterans spat on, always by those in groups (protection, you know) and often at places like San Francisco Airport.

[Incorrigible]

I know a guy who testified before Congress that he and many others committed war crimes in Vietnam. Should I believe him?

[Catspaw]

You're really a waste of a good ZOT!

[Howlin]

But the thing is, there are no contemporary accounts of it happening, anywhere

*Shudder*

I believe the word is contemporaneous.

[glock rocks]

Who left the door open?

[GrandEagle]

This should be interesting.....

[dead]

Maybe a couple of them didn't spit, but most hippies, as a rule, were worthless assholes who didn't bath or wipe their ass after crapping.

All the hippies that didn't OD grew up to be the barely-employable, twice-divorced parents of equally worthless, MTV-obsessed, semi-literate, college dropouts now populating fringe leftist internet forums.

Welcome to FR! Hippy free since '83.