Perry on Politics � 2004 Timothy Perry

VVAW Flyer:

Somebody's dug one up:

A US Infantry Company Just Came Through Here!

If you had been Vietnamese....

We might have raped your wife and daughter.

I think Kerry was "a" leader, not "the" leader of VVAW, but it's still pretty rough stuff. It reminds me, and I suspect it will remind others, of this political stunt:

"Notice: These men are Potential rapists."

This banner headline advertising an anti-rape performance art piece appeared on campus kiosks at the University of Maryland at College Park on the evening of April 29, 1993. The following afternoon another version, "Any of these Men May Have the Potential to Be Rapists," was mounted for about two hours on a temporary wall on the campus quad. The clincher was the sea of names: some 4,500 identifiably male names culled from the student directory were presented as the local population of potential rapists.

I quote an approving review, showing that there were (and still are) some Americans who thought it was clever. The effect on early 1990s American culture was to help out the already-begun death spiral of feminist credibility. Opponents could say, quite honestly, that feminist theory 'teaches that all young men are potential rapists.' It played well with "performance art critics," but not so well with the average American father and mother.

You can imagine how happy you'd be to see your name on a list of "Potential rapists." You can imagine how happy US Infantry companies were to find themselves painted with the same brush as University of Maryland students. You can imagine how happy Kerry will be to find himself asked, "Do you still believe, as your organization stated in the 1970s, that American soldiers are potential rapists? Do you still believe the Army's effect on young men is to 'turn them into a butcher or a corpse'?"