Reply #198: Interview with Lembcke discussing Rambo & Fox's promotion of the spitting meme. [View All]

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/02/02/04

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The coverage of antiwar protests is often controversial. Some complain of too much coverage, others of too little. Coverage of last weekend's protest in Washington has been the subject of heated discussion in the liberal blogosphere, not so much because of the placement of stories in newspapers and newscasts, but because of the placement of a source inside some of those stories. That source is Joshua Sparling, an Army veteran who lost part of his leg in Iraq.

In The New York Times, he shows up in the 28th paragraph of an article on the march. According to that story, a belligerent protestor spat on Sparling and Sparling spat back. What the story didn't report, say critics, is that Sparling was part of an organized counter-protest and that he seems to be a frequent victim of soldier-haters, at least according to his own testimony on Fox News, where he has been a frequent guest, along with his father, both of whom have also been guests at the State of the Union in the seats right behind Lynn Cheney. In short, say critics, this guy is not just a veteran gunslinger but a partisan one.

BOB GARFIELD: The New York Times is standing by its story. They told us that its reporter witnessed the spitting incident with her own eyes. We take them at their word. After all, haven't we all heard of this kind of thing happening to vets from another unpopular war?

Fifteen years ago, sociologist and Vietnam vet Jerry Lembcke set out to trace the incidents of spitting stories in the media. He delved into press archives from the sixties and seventies, and what he found was shocking - not a single firsthand account of a vet getting spit on, and close to no published claims by anyone so ignobly victimized.

JERRY LEMBCKE: So it really wasn't until about 1980 that these stories began to circulate. They sort of began to pop up like mushrooms in the spring and began to appear in popular culture. Films like the first Rambo film make reference to Rambo saying he was spat on when he came home.



RAMBO: It wasn't my war. You asked me. I didn't ask you. And I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn't let us win. Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protestin' me, spittin', calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap.



BOB GARFIELD: So that's what the spitting story sounded like in 1982. Let's take a listen at what it sounds like now. Here's Josh Sparling on Sean Hannity's radio show earlier this week, describing the alleged spitting incident.

JOSH SPARLING: That was the worst afternoon of being American that I've ever had in my life. And they actually made me feel ashamed to be a soldier, almost. They, they – they kept calling me a baby killer and a murderer, and they said I was a disgrace, and I had blood covering my hands. They don't know how I sleep at night.

SEAN HANNITY: So here you give your leg for your country, here you go off and you put your life at risk for your country for the right for these morons to say whatever they want at their little rally there, and the thanks you get for it is just like a lot of vets after Vietnam – you get spit at.

JOSH SPARLING: You know that, and that's exactly almost how I felt. I, I - I thought back, and I'm sure it wasn't as bad as it was back then, but I just was like, wow, this is - must have been what they felt like.

BOB GARFIELD: Apart from your particular suspicions about this incident, tell me how the story that played out last week resembled the stories that you've been following over the last 35 years.

JERRY LEMBCKE: Well, the veracity of the stories themselves is only part of what I'm interested in. Stories like this may be true or they may not be true. Of course, I can't prove that they're not true. But it's how they play into a kind of betrayal narrative for why we lost the war in Vietnam, and in this case, why it is that we would lose the war in Iraq also, the allegation here being that it's protestors at home that undermine the morale of the troops, and some Bush administration spokespeople saying that is lending aid and comfort to the enemy. And both of these are kind of themes in the spitting stories that followed out of the Vietnam War.

BOB GARFIELD: So that would explain why, for example, the Fox News Channel jumped on the story, because it supported their political point of view that protestors are actually undermining not only the morale of the troops but actually the mission itself. Has the spitting myth always been embraced for political means?

JERRY LEMBCKE: Well, it certainly goes back to other time periods and other wars, and that was one of the things that led me to begin to think about it really as a myth. Probably the strongest instance of it was in Germany after World War I. Germany lost the war, German soldiers came home, and then later told stories, wrote memoirs, wrote diaries about how, when they came home, they were attacked by civilians.

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