Next thing you know, Fonda will be complaining that she was born too late to sleep with Stalin
Jane Fonda is back in the news today, with a British tabloid reporting on Fonda’s one big regret in life: she didn’t sleep with Che.
Actually, the whole thing is a bit more nuanced than that. The Daily Mail report looks at Fonda’s life in the 1970s. (A previous story examined Fonda’s bed hopping in the 1960s, as husband Roger Vadim upped the ante on the history of promiscuity that she had already brought into the relationship.) In the 1970s, Fonda’s shtick was Left wing activism, and what could be more hip and Left wing than announcing to your consciousness raising group that you regret not having sex with Che?
The great thing about that particular regret was that the people to whom she was speaking knew that, when it came to Jane, her high profile meant that sleeping with Che wasn’t just a vain dream. It could have happened. Had she theatrically announced that she was sorry to have been born too late to sleep with Stalin, everyone would have laughed at her. Anyway, mass murderer Stalin wasn’t cool the way mass murderer Che was. If you’re going to pick a totalitarian thug on whom to hang your libido, go for the cute one.
What comes through loud and clear when reading about Jane Fonda is that she was a pathetically lost soul, a pretty woman who found meaning in her life only through relationships with men who used her fame to achieve their own nefarious, immoral ends.
The real tragedy isn’t Fonda’s individual drama and mistakes. Instead, it’s that her fame effectively allowed those on the Left to use her to promote their messages to the larger public. While our military was justifiably disgusted by the games she played with the Viet Cong, she nevertheless became the anti-war poster child on college campuses across American and around the world. And heck, if Fonda wanted a piece of Che, how evil could he have been?
Sadly, Fonda was just the beginning. Modern Hollywood is filled with her ideological children — ill-educated, ill-informed airheads with pretty faces and large soap boxes, who are being used by a Leftist establishment that flatters their non-existent intelligence, and uses them to trumpet Leftist values to the youngest and most vulnerable people in our society.
Hat tip: Memeorandum