a woman of integrity

 

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.”

 While in Vietnam, Fonda appeared on 10 radio programs to speak out against the U.S. military’s policy in Vietnam and beg pilots to cease bombing non-military targets. It was during that trip that a photograph was taken of her seated on an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi, making it look like she would shoot down American planes.

 At the time, Fonda’s public criticisms of U.S. leadership caused massive outrage among American officials and war veterans. According to the Washington Post, some lawmakers saw her protests as treasonous, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars called for Fonda to be tried as a traitor. At one point, the Maryland state legislature considered banning her and her films from the state.

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.

  Since then, Fonda has apologized repeatedly for the “Hanoi Jane” photo, and clarified that actions during the Vietnam War were in protest of the U.S. government and not against soldiers. he addressed the photo in her 2005 memoir My Life So Far:

 Here is my best, honest recollection of what took place. Someone (I don’t remember who) leads me toward the gun, and I sit down, still laughing, still applauding. It all has nothing to do with where I am sitting. I hardly even think about where I am sitting. The cameras flash. I get up, and as I start to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what has just happened hits me.

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.

 Nearly a half-century later, some veterans still aren’t pleased with Fonda’s actions in 1972. In 2015, about 50 veterans protested her appearance at the Weinberg Center for the Arts in Frederick, Md., holding signs that said, “Forgive? Maybe. Forget? Never.”

 Fonda told the crowd she tries to maintain open conversations with veterans, according to the Frederick News-Post.

 “Whenever possible I try to sit down with vets and talk with them, because I understand and it makes me said,” she said. “It hurts me and it will to my grave that I made a huge, huge mistake that made a lot of people think I was against the soldiers.

 

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.

 The general public was not aware of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church until the release of the movie “Spotlight” in 2015, but O’Connor was already discussing it 23 years earlier, although the Boston Globe’s editorial staff had published an expose in 2002, for which they won a Pulitzer Prize.

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.