Statues of Jane Fonda, generally sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun aiming at an imaginary U.S. jet bomber, grace thousands parks and town squares across America, permanent reminders to the person who will always be remembered for her heroic role when the granite of the Vietnam Memorial turns it dust.
It is always thus in America, which should comfort the current crop of citizens staking out a reputation by bashing anyone involved in fighting this war.
War-mongers accuse former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee; Rep. Pete 'George Bush enjoys watching American soldiers get their heads blown off' Starks; just about every other elected Democrat; actors George Clooney, Sean Penn and Matt Damon; all-around nut Barbra Streisand; rock star Bruce Springsteen and the Dixie Chicks of scoring cheap politic points by piling on an unpopular president fighting wars triggered by 9/11.
These folks, along with Hillary, Barak, Edwards, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, can shrug off such criticisms.
They can rest assured that they will be remembered for all time in the same way that Revolutionary War protestors such as … uh … hmmmm … their names escape me but will soon come back; and of course opponents of the Civil War, the noted, ah, there was that magnificent orator, oh, what was his name, it'll come back; the valiant few who put out their hands after Pearl Harbor.
The tradition starts with the Revolutionary War, when illegal combatants slaughtered peaceful Hessian immigrants; to Vietnam, when a constant barrage of accusations of atrocities and mis-reported battle field conditions snatched defeat from the jaws of victory; down to the Iraqi war, when carloads of peace-loving Iraqi men carrying AK-47 assault rifles and tons of explosives to assist their mining businesses are automatically targeted as terrorists and blown away.
 LEFT: American Tory John Pultroon receiving tar & feathering honor, Boston 1774. Pultroon, for his speeches and pamphlets that argued that it was criminal to take up arms against the lawfully constituted colonial governments, has been honored with statues across America.
Anti-war activists of today must be reminded that school children will sing their praises down through the centuries. Americans have always preferred to celebrate its anti-war panic-mongers. Who today remembers George Washington; Andrew Jackson; Abraham Lincoln; Ulysses S. Grant; Teddy Roosevelt and the Charge up San Juan Hill; 'Black Jack' Pershing and 'doughboys' who saved Europe; Dwight D. Eisenhower, D-Day and Iwo Jima; the 50,000 U.S. soldiers in Korea wearing summer uniforms caught in the Chosun Reservoir by 400,000 invading Chinese in minus 20 to 30 F. weather for months of combat they finally won. All forgotten.
Instead, town squares from Massachusetts down to Georgia all usually have at least one statue to a Revolutionary War anti-hero.
In the town of Seymour, Connecticut, a statue at the head of the falls of the Naugatuck River honors Joshua Wheedler, who famously called American soldiers “cowards” for hiding behind trees to mow down British soldiers sent here on peacekeeping missions. Wheedler pointed out the colonists even shot Brits trying to help farmers get their crops in. These Brits converted their muskets into harvesting tools by attaching three-foot long scythes to them. Even as the English ran with their scythes pointed forward in harvesting mode towards fields of hay and wheat, colonists falsely screamed “bayonets” and opened fire.
Wheedler is immortalized in a statue that shows him covered in tars and feather, his mouth carved into a full-bellowed cry and his eyes wide as he searches for the enemy, not in panic and fear as a minority of detractors insist.
The inscription on the pedestal, “Get your Sorry Tory A__ Back to England,” which of course refers to the petition that loyal colonists asked Wheedler to present to King George begging for forgiveness.
“We view this statue as a model for some of our current anti-war heroes,” Vermissen Rückgrat, U.S. Commissioner on Peace Memorials, told reporters. “Obama, Hillary, John Edwards have all used variances of Wheedler's insistence that it was America who had wronged and failed to comprehend our adversaries and talking to them was sure to bring peace. They too will look good in tars and feathers, mounted backwards on horses who are kicked into stampeding.”
Rückgrat also points to the Civil War for modern parallels.
“I think the Democrats in 2008 can adopt the Democratic Platform of 1864 word-for-word and use that to sweep back into the White House,” Rückgrat said, “The overwhelming majority of Americans were sick and tired of the Civil War by then, and the document shows Democrats have remained true to their inner selves.”
The Democrats nominated the first Union general who ran the Army of the Potomac, George McClellan, as their presidential standard bearer. McClellan, much as protest generals of today as Wesley Clark, claimed the civilian leadership consisted of incompetent fools who would never win the war.
Here are just two of the Democratic proposals from their 1864 Platform:
(full text http://www.sewanee.edu/faculty/Willis/Civil_War/documents/democratic.html)
, That this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity of war-power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.
I am sure that every American would have something to throw onto these statues. They should also be encouraged to go up to
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