Jane Fonda and the Anti-War Movement

Some not-too-intellectually-reflective writers on the left are questioning whether Jane Fonda carries too much historical baggage to be an effective "representative" of the current anti-war movement.

Most of this blathering about whether "we" in the "peace movement" should find a better "representative" than Jane Fonda presupposes all sorts of unproven assumptions--that there is a unified peace movement (there isn't), that it has some kind of stable agent with the right or responsibility to approve or disapprove of people speaking in its name (it doesn't), etc.

There is also a self-importance in this kind of judgmental rhetoric that is really unwarranted, since peace movements have never stopped wars. Not to say that they couldn't, just that they never have.

The idea that any celebrity in the peace movement is uniquely more vulnerable than others to attacks from the pro-war crowd is equally unfounded--empirically so, in fact. You can be a veteran whose arms and legs were blown off in Vietnam and still be labeled unpatriotic and treasonous if you oppose Bush's war drive. Your character will be assassinated and your heroism will be questioned, and you'll lose elections, etc. What's at work here is far bigger and more endemic than the relative political vulnerability of one naive, privileged liberal celebrity--who has just as much right and responsibility as anyone else to speak out against this administration.