November 8, 2005
Nonsense on Stilts, Part II Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:35 AM EST Then there’s the question of Vietnam veterans’ getting spat on when they came home. Since the mid-1980s some commentators have been calling these stories an “urban myth,” and a recent article on this site said such tales were “apparently apocryphal.” The chief text supporting this view is The Spitting Image (1990), by Jerry Lembcke. (Lembcke’s last book before that one was Capitalist Development and Class Capacities: Marxist Theory and Union Organization, which, according to a sympathetic review, “argues for a restoration of the classical Marxist position” on labor and complains that “much of the U.S. Left has marginalized the working class.”) Lembcke admits the difficulty of “proving a negative” (i.e., that no spitting incident ever occurred), then intrepidly sets out to do just that—and claims success. His main piece of evidence is that he did not find any “documented” cases of spitting on veterans, of incidents captured on film or written about in contemporary publications. This is a rather extreme case of the modern American delusion that if something didn’t happen on television, it didn’t happen at all, and to his credit, Lembcke offers another proof: “Anti-war activists could not have been spitting on veterans while at the same time befriending them in off-base coffeehouses.” Therefore, since “relations between veterans and the anti-war movement were empathetic and mutually supportive” (after all, newspapers and the organizations’ own archives say so), “the image of spat-upon veterans must be false.” But facts are stubborn things. While Lembcke was writing his book, the journalist Bob Greene published a column in the Chicago Tribune asking Vietnam veterans a simple question: “Were you ever spat upon when you returned home to the United States?” He received more than 1,000 responses, many more than could be printed in the newspaper, so in 1989 he published a book called Homecoming. The book contained 60-plus recollections by veterans who had, indeed, been spat on, along with roughly equal numbers from (a) vets who said they were never spat on and (b) ones who said they were not spat on but were abused or mistreated in worse ways. Lembcke’s reaction? They’re all liars, every one of them. Seriously, that’s what he says. After all, “these claims surfaced fifteen years after they supposedly happened” (the fact that no newspaper columnist asked for the veterans’ recollections before then is evidently a minor point). He also complains that Greene posed a leading question; to be properly scientific, he should have asked something neutral, like “What were your homecoming experiences?” Moreover, Lembcke writes, “Weren’t hippies too passive to be spitting on anyone, much less on people they allegedly considered to be trained killers?” Finally, he cites “the curious fact that many of Greene’s spat-upon veterans claimed the spitter was a girl or a woman. Told this, students of gender behavior are likely to respond, ‘It has to be a myth. Girls don’t spit.’“ Anti-war protestors acting unladylike? Just plain impossible, says Lembcke. Step right up, folks! Watch as Lembcke the Magnificent snaps his fingers, twitches his nose, shouts “Hey presto!” and makes five dozen veterans disappear! You won’t believe it! (Note: Lembcke the Magnificent is also available for parties, bar mitzvahs, seminars, and teach-ins.)
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