02.27.08 5:00 AM CST
• Letters
• Chip Rowe
A number of readers wrote about the letters that we published in response to our Playboy Interview with Robert Redford (November).Says Jack Decker of Lebanon Junction, Kentucky: “I can’t believe the only responses to Redford’s interview are from a girl whose ignorance is made worse by her claim to be attending college and a guy in Florida who still gets worked up about Jane Fonda. People like that have made liberal a dirty word.”
“Every time you interview someone of liberal opinion (Al Franken, Keith Olbermann, Robert Redford), a loud minority of right-wing nuts grab their megaphones and issue a chorus of denunciations,” says Robert Borden of Jemez Springs, New Mexico. “They’re entitled to their opinions, but let’s have some perspective. George Bush has an approval rating of 29 percent, nine percentage points less than Barry Goldwater got stomped with. More than 80 percent of the American people think the country is going in the wrong direction, and 54 percent favor impeaching Dick Cheney. While Iraq goes up in flames, the Taliban has made a comeback in Afghanistan. After seven years of lies and incompetence, even GOP candidates are talking about ‘change.’ Change from what, do you think? I think it’s safe to say that most people think Redford is an excellent actor and a patriotic citizen who cares about his country. His criticism of the Bush administration is, if anything, understated.”
“It seems to be very popular these days to compare any protest to the travesty we are perpetrating in Iraq to that picture of Jane Fonda and her trip to Hanoi,” adds Jay Sedrish of Playa del Rey, California. “That photo of her sitting on a Viet Cong piece of artillery (I believe it was an anti-aircraft tank) did more to raise the consciousness and stir debate and dissent than all of the pictures of fighting men and woman on TV at the time. It was clear to all of us that the war was lost, but Nixon just wouldn’t get the heck out. Just as is happening now, the administration paraded flacks to sugar-coat and lie to the public about the death and destruction. For those of us who didn’t believe in the legality of the war, Fonda’s photo was a finger lifted to the whole school of thought that somehow justified our indiscriminate killing of civilians. She was on the right side of the issue.”
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