They Really WILL Say ANYthing! Peter Fonda
A New TWSA! Feature. This is a new addition to TWSA!, the first in a series of “They Really WILL Say ANYthing!” posts. Saying anything is not confined to admitted politicians, mind you, but everyone, including Peter Fonda, and . . . me. I’m a partisan and when I look into the mirror I see myself often saying anything. And if I do, and I know I do, please get in touch and I’ll include it in the series.
We’re all politicians of a sort, aren’t we? This post about the actor Peter Fonda – known to us baby boomers as the incredible Captain America in Easy Rider – has been an enigma politically. I’d put him in the libertarian camp, but with actual concern for others. Yet, having said what he said at this year’s Cannes Film Festival makes him an excellent example of how we really will say anything. . . Please read on . . .
Mr. Fonda, In This Case, Internalizing Is Good. How did Peter Fonda make the grade as one who will say anything? Well, saying anything, in this case, is about how we shoot off our mouths without thinking of our pasts, without remembering how we portrayed ourselves. In some cases we do so we threaten our own truthfulness about that past portrayal, and teeter on the brink of hypocrisy. Fonda’s wrathful hyperbole is where he makes the grade for induction into the TWSA! “Hall of Saying Anything.”
Background. Fonda, at the Cannes Film Festival this year, opened his mouth a bit to wide. An avid environmentalist, he was – understandably – upset about the Obama administration’s handling of the Gulf oil spill, and their permitting BP the upper hand in the clean-up, as well as their suppression of the Coast Guard and their reporting on the spill. Fonda himself had been turned away when he tried to view the damage at the Gulf beaches.Turned away by BP clean-up personnel. Referring to this, he told a Cannes crowd that he had sent an email to President Obama calling him a “fucking traitor” for allowing “foreign boots on our soil [BP personnel] telling our military – in this case the coastguard – what they can and could not do, and telling us, the citizens of the United States, what we could or could not do.” O.K., so far, no real damage done.
What he said to make the Hall of TWSA! Speaking four days later to the Telegraph’s Richard Eden, Fonda went one anything to far . . . Here’s what escaped from his mouth:
“I’m training my grandchildren to use long-range rifles,” said the actor, 71. “For what purpose? Well, I’m not going to say the words ‘Barack Obama’, but …”
(NOTE: The “…” in the quote above doews not indicate that he continued his comments, but that he ended them “trailing off.”) (See the article here)
Why does this qualify? Fonda’s words are unlike any I’v heard for their sheer self-immolating audacity, for their skirting the possibility of arrest by the Secret Service, and for their unvarnished intent. He held nothing in reserve. He has not retracted or re-phrased.
Why, though, is he now in the Hall of TWSA!? Lots of people say crazy things about Obama. Yet Fonda has allied himself with another attitude throughout his life: anti-violence. \
Simply watch his take on sudden, unexpected violence in his 1969 masterpiece Easy Rider. There, all three Rider characters are killed by utterly senseless acts of extreme violence by men who simply could not abide something foreign to them: the Rider’s unapologetic statement of personal freedom.
Thirty-two years later, in Fonda’s Cannes statements, he seems to have forgotten that, unless one believes (as some do) that implicitly condoning the assassination of President Obama is an exercise of his freedom of speech. To me, against the backdrop of epidemic gun violence in our country, his words are more like yelling “compassion” at a Tea Party rally – mass mayhem as everyone races to the exits.
