Letter from Santa Clara

Give It Up, Hanoi-Jane

By Bill Costley

I’ve been coolly (if decreasingly calmly) watching the most recent earnest attempts of Jane Fonda to mainstream herself as an older, wiser, selectively repentant friend of a national victim of the past glorious century of the American Empire, which Mark Twain named when he saw it imposed on the Philippines in his day.

If you believe what the supermarket 'bloids say, sincere earnestness is what Jane thinks is required of her as a recently born-again Christian because some naive spiritual advisor has told her she must do this; or it still seems possible to do for her as she's now earnestly embracing "the possible" as a later-life strategy as a spiritual form of what was once called "possibility" or "positive" thinking.

I have only this piece of long-ago learned wisdom to offer Jane as someone a bit younger than she is (she was born 21 DEC 1937; she's now 67; I was born 21 MAY 1942, I’ll soon turn 63). Jane, given the chance then, I would have gladly done what you did, myself, much as still furiously neo-hated John Kerry did (he was born 11 DEC 1943, he's now 62). So my long-considered advice is: “Give it up, Hanoi-Jane.” Once they’d branded you “Hanoi-Jane,” they'd filled their perennially inflamed brains with what they'd actually wanted: a neo-flaming icon of an Axis Sally, a Tokyo Rose designed for the Cold War's Vietnam subEra — a Red Queen of Spades.

Comrade Jane (as they always snarkily say), you'd better finally realize that they’ll forever piss hotly on your name, face, grave, memory, howling like the perennially imperial wolves they are whenever they do it because that’s what they were & are: imperialists & wolves, always running towards the next available imperial war, full of piss & vinegar until they burst when they feel the opportunistic urge to impose their quaintly inadmissible world-empire on another increasingly easily convertible national asset. Their century-long list of lesser victims is obvious & will be continuous. Just ask any neo-con whose brain is hub-bubbling at a neo-con think-tank planning neo-wars to name the next easy victim as it's being made to appear to be inevitable, unavoidable.

They‘re the actual problem, of course, not you, Jane. They never change their core motives, just their (temporarily) re-formulated-strategies. While you aspire to move in a steadily ascending line towards what you hope is something like an attainably honorable heaven, they move in a pseudo-erratically descending line to what they know full well is a perennially manufacturable terrestrial hell: eternal war. War waged with & over fuels fulfills their eternal dreams of incendiary glory.

As long as there's still any oil-hiding sand left, they’ll draw a line in it with their perennially flaming imperial swords, since they're the sole official manufacturer's-representatives of American-branded swords, made wherever labor is cheapest, of course, increasingly in mainland/PRC China which somehow has not yet been attacked, no doubt because it’s quasi-conveniently economically capitalist while still being quasi-intolerably politically Communist.