All Intensive Purposes

I recommend Rick Perlstein's review of Jane Fonda's War, by Mary Hershberger, an account of Fonda's voyage from Miss Army Recruiter in 1959 to space nymph in Barbarella in 1968 to cult anti-icon in 1973. Here are the historical antecedents of so much of the last six years, and hints of the stab-in-the-back strains to come as Iraq spirals away from us. For much of this, we can thank Richard Nixon:

It’s remarkable how many things that we think of as permanent features of American culture can be traced back to specific political operations by the Nixon White House. We now take it as given, for example, that blue-collar voters have always been easy pickings for conservatives appealing to their cultural grievances. But Jefferson Cowie, among others, has shown the extent to which this was the result of a specific political strategy, worked out in response to a specific political problem. Without taking workers’ votes from the Democrats, Nixon would never have been able to achieve the ‘New Majority’ he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon ‘stood the problem on its head’, as Cowie says in Nixon’s Class Struggle (2002), ‘by making workers’ economic interests secondary to an appeal to their allegedly superior moral backbone and patriotic rectitude’. (One part of the strategy was arranging for members of the Teamsters to descend ‘spontaneously’ on protesters carrying Vietcong flags at Nixon appearances. Of course it’s quite possible that the protesters too were hired for the occasion.) It’s not that the potential for that sort of behaviour wasn’t always there. But Nixon had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties.

Fonda made a rich target whom many still hate, a hate with continuing political currency -- witness the pictures doctored to show John Kerry with Jane Fonda, and the bumper stickers reading, "Jane Fonda: John Kerry with Tits."