The spitting on Vietnam veterans myth

In the Sunday Chronicle's Datebook section, a story perpetuates the myth of Vietnam veterans being spat on when they returned home:

It was the doomed war in Southeast Asia that made up the program for the Broadcast Legends’ spring luncheon. The war — and radio’s role. The ranks of the Legends, a group of radio and television veterans in all phases of those industries, obviously includes Vietnam War vets, and four of them recalled those times...The bad memories did not end with their return home. They were vilified by antiwar protesters. Landing in Hawaii, [Steve]Dini remembers, people at the airport “called us baby-killers...and they were spitting on me.”

Bullshit. Or, to be fair, it's almost surely bullshit. If Dini can document that, it would be unique among other such stories. Jerry Lembcke has written extensively about this myth (see The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam).

From Lembcke's op-ed in the NY Times last year:

Acknowledging that I could not prove the negative — that they were not true...there is no corroboration or documentary evidence, such as newspaper reports from the time, that they are true. 

Many of the stories have implausible details, like returning soldiers deplaning at San Francisco Airport, where they were met by groups of spitting hippies. In fact, return flights landed at military air bases like Travis, from which protesters would have been barred. 

Others include claims that military authorities told them on returning flights to change into civilian clothes upon arrival lest they be attacked by protesters. Trash cans at the Los Angeles airport were piled high with abandoned uniforms, according to one eyewitness, a sight that would surely have been documented by news photographers — if it had existed...

The Book of Mormon

From Up in the Valley:

Sister Pincock, from North Carolina. Sister Madsen, from New Mexico. Proselytizing on Rayen St. They were so nice and so far from home it was all I could do not to invite them over for dinner. I had to tell at least two white lies to make my escape. Lying to Mormon girls! Behold the perfidy of Mr. UpintheValley.

Trump: Personal and professional sleaze

New York Magazine

From New York Magazine:

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” declared Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States”...It is hardly a coincidence that so many greedy people have filled the administration’s ranks. Trump’s ostentatious crudeness and misogyny are a kind of human-resources strategy. 

Radiating personal and professional sleaze lets him quickly and easily identify individuals who have any kind of public ethics and to sort them out. (James Comey’s accounts of his interactions with the president depict Trump probing for some vein of corruptibility in the FBI director; when he came up empty, he fired him.) Trump is legitimately excellent at cultivating an inner circle unburdened by legal or moral scruples. These are the only kind of people who want to work for Trump, and the only kind Trump wants to work for him...

truthout