In 2018, I wrote two articles about men with integrity:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/01/a-man-of-integrity.html
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/02/another-man-of-integrity.html
Frequently overlooked, however, is that fact that women also
have integrity.
The most recent example, of course, is Liz Cheney, who served
on the January 6 panel, and also recently went to Ripon,Wisconsin to appear in
public with Kamala Harris.
Earlier this year, I read her latest book, “Oath and Honor”,
which is worth reading.
If you went back in time about 50 years, you may remember that
Jane Fonda was vilified for traveling to Vietnam during the Vietnam was.
https://time.com/5116479/jane-fonda-hanoi-jane-nickname/
Amid what was widely perceived as a lack of progress in the war, its continuation prompted widespread protests in the U.S. It was around that time that Fonda focused her political activism solely on the antiwar movement. By that point, she was a prominent movie star, renowned for her performances in critically acclaimed films like Klute, Barefoot in the Park, Barbarella and They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
Having worked on behalf of Native Americans and the Black
Panthers in the 1960s, Fonda dove into protesting the Vietnam War, first with
the formation of the “Free
Army Tour” (FTA) with actor Donald Sutherland in 1970. FTA was an
anti-war show designed to contrast Bob Hope’s USO tour, touring
military bases on the West Coast and talking to soldiers before they were
deployed to Vietnam.
In 1972, Fonda went on to tour North Vietnam in a
controversial trip would come to be the most famous — or infamous — part of her
activist career, and led to her the nickname “Hanoi Jane.”
On the other hand, the antiwar feeling Fonda came to embody was relatively widespread among the American population at the time, and, as filmmaker Lynn Novick put it in discussing recent documentary series The Vietnam War, some veterans “think she was courageous for going to Hanoi and taking a stand even though they didn’t agree with everything she had to say.” More recent scholarship has also emphasized the ways in which the idea of “Hanoi Jane” has grown far beyond Fonda’s actual actions during that tumultuous period.
Oh, my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot
down U.S. planes! I plead with him, “You have to be sure those photographs are
not published. Please, you can’t let them be published.” I am assured it will
be taken care of. I don’t know what else to do. It is possible that the
Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. If they did, can I really
blame them? The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was
my mistake, and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it.
Kris Kristofferson passed away on September 28 of this year. Often overlooked is the fact that he was a Rhodes scholar, in addition to being a great actor. He was also a source of comfort to a young female singer at a concert in 1992.
The singer was named Sinead O’Connor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/arts/music/kris-kristofferson-sinead-oconnor.html
On Oct. 16, 1992, Columbia Records threw its longtime artist Bob Dylan an event at Madison Square Garden to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his first album with the label. The concert, available on pay-per-view, featured performances by Dylan along with some of the biggest stars of his era, among them Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, Johnny Cash and Eric Clapton.
But it was
the performance by the comparative newcomer Sinead O’Connor and the assist lent
her by the country veteran Kris Kristofferson, who died Saturday at 88, that proved most memorable.
O’Connor,
then just 25, was at the center of a firestorm. Just two weeks earlier, the
Irish singer was the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” when, at the
conclusion of her second and final performance of the evening, she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II and
exhorted, “Fight the real enemy,” a defiant act of protest against
sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (and also, she later revealed,
a deeply personal statement — the photograph had belonged to her mother, who
had physically abused her). The incident drew widespread outrage and turned
O’Connor into a cultural pariah.
Now,
in the wake of that polarizing moment, it was Kristofferson who was tasked with
bringing O’Connor to the stage.
I’m
real proud to introduce this next artist, whose name’s become synonymous with
courage and integrity,” Kristofferson said, in obvious reference to the
“S.N.L.” incident. (As he would later sing of O’Connor, “She told them her
truth just as hard as she could/Her message profoundly was misunderstood.”)
O’Connor took the stage to a cascade of applause and
boos, which did not let up as O’Connor stood silently at the microphone with
her hands behind her back. A minute passed, and Kristofferson re-emerged from
stage left, put his arm around O’Connor and whispered something in her ear.
As the pianist played the opening of O’Connor’s
scheduled song, the Dylan track “I Believe in You,” O’Connor motioned the band
to stop and proceeded to perform an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War” —
the same song from that fateful “S.N.L.” performance, a confrontational track
with lyrics primarily drawn from a speech the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie
I had delivered at the United Nations.
O’Connor ended the song and defiantly regarded the
audience as the jeering persisted, and began to exit the stage — but not before
Kristofferson again approached her, embraced her and walked off with her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_%28film%29
To date, the Catholic church in America has spent $4 billion
to settle sexual abuse cases, and numerous archdioceses have filed for
bankruptcy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sex_abuse_cases_in_the_United_States
Sinead O’Connor died on July 26, 2003. She was 54 years old.
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