News Flash

News flash: Tony did not choose Journey
by zinya
06/20/2007, 11:42 AM #

+1 Reply

First of all, let me say that i'm sorta stunned (and even a tad chagrined :-) that I'm still here. As someone just yesterday (raymundo, i think it was), "I think I'm finally 'out' and then something someone says pulls me back in again" ...

eh, oui... And actually, "all due respect" goes to Mattzollerrseitz cuz it's "new info" amid this amazingly Pinkertonian search ongoing which surfaced on his blog -- which i'll reference in a minute that suddenly makes my wheels churn again, afresh ... Was literary analysis back in English 204 ever this prolongedly engaging? ...

anyway... I write for the moment to point out that one of our collective lines of reasoning to date is based on a viewer assumption so kind of basic and also so blatantly wrong ...

Bottom line: Tony, definitively, did NOT choose Journey as his jukebox selection. Someone else in the restaurant [well, besides Chase, of course] had chosen it before his choice (I even think at the time of the episode I assumed that and then, myself, forgot that in the hubbub over the choice of "Don't Stop Believin'" ... To me at the time, I think I assumed it started too soon after the end of Little Feat's song and too soon after T popped in his coins to seem like his choice was already "up" but then I conveniently forgot that immediate impression amid all the post-hoc analysis...

What brought me back to it was the following post on matt's blog by someone named beale, which i just read this morning:

Beale said...

To add a probably worthless piece to the puzzle-solving aspect of this, I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that "Don't Stop Believing" is *not* the song Tony picked. It's K5 on the juke, and while Tony's hand obscures the exact number he pushes after K, it's clearly something lower than 5. More likely he would have picked one of the last two songs he looked at, either "I've Gotta be Me" or "A Lonely Place," the selection codes of which are not visible.

Either one of those titles would be fitting for Tony's state of mind at the time in completely different ways, but I kind of like the idea of him picking "A Lonely Place," with the jukebox responding with its answer in a kind of cosmic musical dialogue.

WELL. That made me think. I, as usual (but not always), decided to not take this as gospel either and checked it out myself.

Sure enough, T absolutely pushes the farthest button to the right on the top row -- meaning the 10th and last page of the juke box list (page "K" - tabletop juke boxes skip the letter "I" so the 10th page is "K").

It's not clear what button he chooses for song # on the bottom row, as beale notes, but it does seem to be a lower # than 5, more like about 3, maybe 4 at the highest.

What we see for sure - and what beale also has wrong -- is that the Journey songs are NOT on the last page and thus cannot be K5 or another other "K" page songs. Tony previously, in one sustained shot focused on the jukebox, flipped backwards from the page with "This Magic Moment" to where Journey's two songs were on a previous right-side page, meaning that the letter to choose for the Journey songs would, at the highest, be "H," i.e., the third button from the right on the top row, not "K."

[I know, isn't this micro of an analysis a tad silly? I can't believe I'm putting my Ph.D. to this good use :-)! but here I am ... whole-hog into it ...

And, ohhh, the tribute to Chase (what a storyteller and clever-as-a-fox filmmaker!), speaking now more broadly about the episode, that he could have pulled off a finale which, 10 days later, people are still debating the meanings of and unearthing new 'facts' about! Has this EVER happened before? Not on TV, I dare say... ]

Finally, back to what beale does again have right, is that Tony indeed stops his song search - the last we see - on the two Tony Bennett songs, which the camera gives us NO indication for as to what page they are on, cutting back to them from a Tony-POV-shot to the door, which at least allows the possibility that they are on the last page, K, unlike the Journey songs which cannot be on page K.

And, as beale notes, it makes total sense that any song selector keeps the page up - last page turned to - while making selection, always cautious as song-choosers are, to make sure they're pushing the right buttons...

Therefore, we are left with Tony in fact choosing definitely NOT Journey and probably either of the two Tony Bennett songs last in his focus that we know of -- I've Gotta Be Me or A Lonely Place (which look to be #s 3 and 4 on the page)

It's someone else in the restaurant [ahem - Chase] who has chosen "Don't Stop Believin'" that just "happens" to come on as Carmela is entering and indeed then presumably evokes for them the echoes of their early family-founding years together which you talk about, raimundo, but NOT because Tony himself chose it. That should be factored in (or out) of the equation.

Why would Chase have done this? Have Tony choose a song that in fact we never hear?

Well, for the answer to THAT piece of the puzzle, i am forced (eek) to quote from none other than Fox News, where I found the following background tidbit:

Tony Soprano Finally Beats Tony Bennett

For years, Tony Bennett refused to allow his songs in “The Sopranos.” Did you know that? Tony’s manager son Danny Bennett tells me that every season, David Chase’s office would call to ask permission for a Bennett recording.

“And we always turned them down,” Danny says. “My dad felt that the show was demeaning to Italians.”

A couple of times, Chase worked in references to Tony Bennett, Danny recalled with a smile. “When Tony was shot, Carmela brought him Tony’s box set in the hospital. She said, 'These are his favorite songs.'"

But the songs were not heard.

And then, in Sunday night’s finale, a permanent impression of Tony Bennett: Tony Soprano flips through the juke box on the diner table, and finds a single: “I’ve Gotta Be Me,” backed with “A Lonely Place.” It was released in 1969.

“It was a real single,” Danny Bennett says. Indeed, there’s a long lingering close-up. But Tony couldn’t pick either one, Danny says, and Chase knew it. Danny Bennett has a theory. “David Chase put those there, but since he couldn’t have either song, he knew Tony couldn’t choose them.”

The other choice Tony Soprano lingers on is Heart’s record, “Magic Man.” But Danny points out, “It was “Magic Man (Live). The ‘live’ part is important. And he didn’t choose that one either.”

Of course, Soprano picked Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” And six days after a TV show went off the air, we are still talking about it. I am surprised that so many people didn’t understand that when a TV show or movie cuts to black, and there’s silence, death is indicated. That’s it. This is one of the oldest conventions of filmed drama. The Sopranos, I must tell you, are gone. They are not coming back, except in syndication.

Note that Fox also got it wrong in claiming that "Soprano picked Journey..."

But if the point that Tony Bennett would not allow his songs on the show reveals yet again just how clever Chase is. He gets in the 'fact' of Tony's love of Tony Bennett''s songs by having Tony choose, as the final music "choice" of the entire series, one of two Tony Bennett hits from 1969, when Tony S would have been 10 yrs old, but we never actually hear them, cuz some other patron's music choice comes up before T's and we "blackout" prior to whichever choice it was that T made ...

I couldn't find lyrics to "A Lonely Place" on the web but here, for reference, are the ones to what seems to be have "K3" on the jukebox and likely the one T chose, which thereby would also seem to warrant some reflection (as to Chase's final message re Tony) alongside the fact that we definitely have to stop saying that Tony "chose" the music Don't Stop Believin'. While Chase chose that music, Tony did not...

...as copied from a Sammy Davis Jr. lyrics website (he having made the song popular some years before Tony Bennett's cover of it):

I've Gotta Be Me Lyrics by: Chart Activity (?)

Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong Whether I find a place in this world Or never belong

I gotta be me, I've gotta be me What else can I be but what I am

I want to live, not merely survive And I won't give up this dream of life That keeps me alive

I gotta be me, I gotta be me The dream that I see Makes me what I am

That faraway prize, a world of success Is waiting for me if I heed the call I won't settle down, won't settle for less As long as there's a chance That I can have it all

I'll go it alone, that's how it must be I can't be right for somebody else If I'm not right for me

I gotta be free, I've gotta be free Daring to try, to do it or die I've gotta be me

I'll go it alone, that's how it must be I can't be right for somebody else If I'm not right for me

I gotta be free, I've just gotta be free Daring to try, to do it or die I gotta be me

Exploring a female way of "doing power"

Subject: Exploring a female way of "doing power"
From: zinya
Date: Apr 29 2005 11:32AM

In the now offscreen fascinating, meandering thread which was launched the other day by Fritz's reactions to and reflections on the LaraCroft ad image adorning the fray [fray.slate.msn.com], way down mid-thread, a query was posed by MsZilla which uptook some issues raised by her, myself and others in the course of our collective thinking through of the nature of women's "power" past, present, future and the ways the media and society portray it vs. the ways it could or should be conceived differently... Here is the synopsis query as framed by MsZ...

Not just the men who make those movies...
.... but most men in general, and most women. It's one of basis of this entire discussion.
Can you think of a way a woman could express her power in a way that isn't a derivative of a male feature?
I can't. It just isn't in our lexicon in fiction, or in real life. And it's going to be more and more of a problem.

I'd like to see this specific issue/question opened for discussion a bit further...

I had offered in that thread in one post my own lament for what has too-oft proven to be women's cloaking themselves in established male ways of doing power, perhaps unwittingly by the time they break through the glass ceilings overhanging them, they've so 'bought into' the ole-boys-club ways of 'doing power' that they themselves only know or remember how to 'do power' from the top by doing it the established (and essentially male) way ...

Here are my own instinctive responses to this question as to what could be truly 'female ways of doing power' (some of this being devil's advocacy, and beginning first with some sketches of what constitutes 'male power' as a backdrop to seeing the alternative that could be said to be more 'female'):

To me, what most typifies male power-- along a continuum where military ways of doing power is on the far end but which has 'bled over' into civilian concepts and practices as well -- is the notion of acquiescence to authority, in the extreme a propensity which results in authoritarianism, totalitarianism, repression, etc etc... Now one could say this is 'human' rather than male but -- given that we are inherently dealing in gross generalizations here but recognizing that there are grains of truth to be found in most gross generalizations, i do think it on balance fair to say that it is more the male of the species who have "done' and carried to its extremes the notion that power is most manifest in hierarchical control and symbols and practices by which others reify their power via displays (thus causing those at the top to demand such displays) of deference, obedience, capitulation, at the least acquiescence to "the guy on top."

A male orientation to power is also manifest in co-optations of rationality, imo. To wit, statistics and (more utilitarian) insistences on the equivalent "of what is good for the measurable 'average' of the social system is therefore à priori good for the system as a whole, thus favoring reliance on even such things as polling data and leading to reification of the whole concept of "normative" behavior, beliefs, aspirations such that people internalize (almost panopticon-like) the 'desirable' obeisances and constraints on conduct which the PTB (powers that be, almost inherently male) find will be complicit with and reinforcing of their own power -- status quo and all that... (This also leads, as corollary, to such power-serving notions as "what is good for GM is good for the nation.")

Well, i could go on (with other specific features of ways of displaying power or achieving power) which i think are essentially male, but let this suffice for now as backdrop to make the following points about (potential) female redefinitions of ways of "doing" power...

I believe that females -- when they don't just acquiesce to the prioritized ways of doing power which males have long "instituted" (and made seem to be synonymous with power but which in fact are only manifestations of 'staying inside the box' and not allowing for paradigm shifts or new growth or new ways of seeing) can bring to bear instead a real foregrounding of such ways of 'doing power' as:

#1. Listening as (display of) power.

Rather than the implicit -- and broadly accepted -- focus on thinking that displaying authority requires "having the answers" and being the speaker, telling others what to do, when, how, etc. (a more military-like notion of command authority: don't speak unless spoken to, don't dare challenge authority, turning the notion of 'underlings' into one of being 'sponges' expected to absorb, listen, not question, do as told, etc etc... In everything from parenting to schooling, too often this 'male' notion of doing power (which many a mother buys into, i'm not saying women don't do this) means that children grow up feeling unlistened to and resenting and then seeking compensation by getting in their own position of 'power' from which they can make other people 'shut up and obey' ... etc. Cycles of societal non-growth result from such plantings of seeds of resentment and cravings for feeling "heard" ... Imho, some wise parents (mothers and fathers alike) now increasingly recognize and implement a more listening-oriented concept of the priority and responsibility (and power) of and in parenting... What i'm suggesting is that this is inherently a more 'female' way of proceeding and of understanding that power is NOT manifest in having to speak and have answers, but in thoughtfully listening to questions. So too could be "female' ways of doing the role of CEO or Governor or film director...

However, true 'power' imho [sorry, &kath - it's sincere though -- and necessary to show that i don't presume these assertions to be 'fact'] ... true power is (or could be) evidenced by those who show themselves to be genuine listeners, sure of themselves enough that they don't display a need to "have all the answers" (a real self-defeating pitfall all too many parents fall into, thinking their job is to have the right words more than to have the welcoming ears) ... Women (on balance) more likely than men COULD bring to bear a whole other notion of a real display of power in that listening could be foregrounded more than it is in our society ... and honored for the sign of control that it is (and, not insignificantly, perhaps largely due to the degree of self-control it often requires to be a good listener).

(Political insertion: Bush gives lipservice -- ah , the irony -- to being someone who listens to the people [well, what poltiican doesn't?, but he does so in a particularly - sorry - smarmy way] but who ever sees signs of his ACTUALLY listening -- e.g., when he's out on the stump -- instead of pretending to listen but having his own preformulated pat stance that does not budge and does not truly show that he's listened with openness ... That, alas, is what a male-determined society has come to take as a given, that listening is something to give lipservice to but not to really do, to actually hear, to "hear" from another's point of view [Note that of the four skills -- reading, writing, listening, and speaking, listening is the ONLY one that is never deemed necessary to be taught in schools, but is taken as a 'given' -- Ahhh, the folly! Can you count on more than one hand the number of folks you think of as being REALLY good listeners in your life?? the skill and art of listening is vastly underrated and indeed not 'validated' in a mostly male-structured society].. More often than not, people do not truly attempt to understand where another person is coming from, checking to make sure one has 'listened well and heard not just the letter but the spirit of the other guy, especially when that other guy is less empowered, which in the case of a Pres of the US means virtually everybody else ... well, except those Mega-CEOs yanking his chain daily...

#2: Narrating stories, "anecdotal" storytelling as power.

Now while, indeed, because it was already a male-dominated public sphere when civilization developed oral and then written storytelling, narrating stories began and prevailed for centuries as the domain of men (Homer thru Chaucer/Cervantes thru Shakespeare thru modern times, with growing but still rare, "minority-voice" exceptions as women began to find their voice in recent centuries, in novels and elsewhere).. But still men dominate the telling of stories which gain traction.

Nevertheless, i posit that storytelling itself -- and recognizing the importance to us all of the anecdotal experience of individuals, fiction or nonfiction -- is an inherently female value and priority (epitomized, alas, perhaps in the notorious linkage of females to gossip, which itself may be a complicitous redirection of this female orientation -- and god knows there is power -- or at least the grasping for power -- manifest in the telling of gossip, the kind of behind-the-scenes, surreptitious basis for 'power' which women were too often reduced to historically, being denied the public sphere and instead finding -- and manipulating -- private power, on a more domestic front -- through such daily 'strategies' as the storytelling known as 'gossip')

Well, i dare say that a privileging of individual stories and a foregrounding for public consumption of what it is could be a more female approach to 'doing power' -- notably because it is a more ready access to the emotional core of social problems and issues -- as opposed to the rational approach that turns instead to expository argumentation, to poll-taking, number-crunching, finding 'normative' or 'average' assessments. Narrative storytelling offers as resonating touchstones into the emotional/spiritual core of humanity ... I think that, on balance, this is more of a female trait and instinctive sense of where 'power' lies or can lie (the power to truly 'touch' emotional truth, finding the universal messages in individual personal stories of experience) ... Society has tended, at least in the public domain -- and you hear this mostly out of the mouths of men -- to pooh-pooh the esteem which stories could hold by dismissing such 'reportings' as merely "anecdotal" ... Think of how established medicine (again, a still-male-structured domain) pooh-poohs as "anecdotal" the experience of sufferers if it can't be "proven" to have a replicable, broad-based existence. It's only been in the recent era of "postmodern" shifting of epistemological bases which are validated as 'legit' that academia, for example, has begun to accept that dissertations can take the path of 'narrative argument' and stand up to scrutiny without instead having to privilege the more 'scientific' or "objective" expository and numbers-crunching ways of doing argumentative 'proof' ... Slowly but surely now, narrative argumentation has gained some still-marginal traction in academia and, I would posit as have many feminist scholars, that such foregrounding of narrative argumentation is indeed a female contribution.

And, i dare say, it offers increasingly a way in which females can "do power" and use their increasing frequencies in higher ranks (e.g., CEO, Governor) by attending to the 'anecdotal' experience of underlings in whatever organization rather than dismissing it if it isn't provable as a "majoritarian" or normative, average pov. In a sense, the privilege of narrative bases for knowledge is a key way of recognizing minority voices and thus is anti-authoritarian and privileges 'individuality' and diversity of voice over what i would propose is a more male-privileged view of systems of power which depend on conformity and normativeness. (Please don't misunderstand: of course, women are as prone to men to enforce modes of conformity and normative behavior in our present society. My argument is that, in doing so, they are -- unwittingly? -- yielding to and buying into what is at bottom a male way of gaining complicity and enforcing hierarchical order which ultimately serves a more male authoritarian model of power.)

Well, okay, i'm exhausted. Too much blather [my own knee-jerk internalized acquiescence to male standards of exposition and feeling guilty for not being pithy and concise :-)]. Stopping here and opening this hopefully to feedback from at least some of you and then thinking through what holds up and what doesn't in these initial answers of mine to MsZ's very important and well-posed query ...

A short comment on spitting.

Subject: A short comment on spitting.
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Apr 21 2005 3:45PM

Happened to catch this morning's interview on The Today Show (with MattLaurer&KatieCouric) with Michael A. Smith, who is in the news for having stood in a bookstore line for 90 minutes so that he could spit a mouthful of tobacco juice in Jane Fonda's face. He was unrepentent, saying when he returned from Vietnam through LAX in Los Angeles, he was confronted with a 'line of anti-war protestors who proceeded to spit on me'. His grievance with Ms. Fonda is, of course, for her ill-conceived trip/photo-op to North Vietnam at the height of the war. One photograph shows her sitting, laughing, on an anti-aircraft gun, surrounded by her amused and delighted hosts. It was, and remains, a hurtful image to most vets. It seems the sleek Ms. Fonda, who has led a materially privileged life, suffers from a remarkable paucity of taste and decorum but has now, with a book to hawk, come to her senses and recognises that grainy photograph and the trip it frames, to have been a monumental lapse of judgement (although, I must say, one is hard pressed to find sufficient evidence that she's displayed good judgement frequently enough to make this occasion a 'lapse'). In any event, she's now sorry and can't we all be friends and just read a good book ('like, for instance, this one I'm holding') or maybe aerobicize together. But I really don't have a problem with Jane and, frankly, I didn't have a problem with her back when she took her trip to North Vietnam. I didn't much care one way or the other. She's always seemed kinda transparent to me, she still does. But Mr. Smith is another kettle of fish. I don't know if he's really a Vietnam veteran or not. He's 54 which puts him at the youngish margin for having served in the Nam but it's possible. This morning, he was wearing a sweatshirt with an embroidered Eagle,Globe&Anchor and the word 'Marines' under it. So I guess he's saying he was in the Marine Corps. I don't know, maybe. But this makes it even more difficult for him to have been in the Nam because in 1972-73 (he'd have been 18) there were few Marines left in South Vietnam but like I say it's possible. And I hope so because in the next few days, people are going to be digging into his background. It will be simple enough to find his service records and then we'll all know if he went to Vietnam and in which branch he served. My problem with Mr. Smith is his story about the lines of anti-war protestors he found waiting for him at LAX and that they 'spit' on him. I came back from overseas through Los Angeles and no one spit on me, there were no lines of antiwar protestors and if truth be told, no one seemed to notice me at all even though I was wearing a dress uniform with appropriate rank insignia and ribbons. No one even glanced at me. Further I'll say this, if anyone had spit on me (or at me) there'd have been an old fashioned melee, someone would have needed stitches and I'd have spent some time in the brig. I don't know where that part of Mr. Smith's story is. Did he just 'take it' passively? In all my friends who are veterans, we've heard this spitting story over and over again and none of us had a similar experience, not one. And if returning Vietnam vets had been faced with this kind of treatment at the airport, I'd have gone down to the airport to be with them and I wouldn't have gone alone. But no such incidents were reported in the Los Angeles Times, no local news anchor mentioned it, Los Angeles Police and airport security make no mention of it in their histories of the period. In fact, no such story appears in the New York Times either. It was a bad time for the country.
Even after all these years, its still painful to think about. But if we're going to think about it and talk about it, let's keep it real. Mr. Smith says he was acting on behalf of all Vietnam veterans upon whom Ms. Fonda spit all those years ago. Well, he's not doing it on my behalf, I'll be responsible for my own dance card, thank you very much. I think Jane Fonda and her opinion about Vietnam are and were nearly irrelevant. I can't imagine standing in a line for an hour and a half to be close to her for any reason. I think Mr. Smith needs to get over it and move on.

http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=14450054

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Subject: the spitting urban legend
From: Fracas
Date: Apr 21 2005 3:55PM

Sociologist Jerry Lembcke who wrote The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam thinks that it didn't. When a NYT columnist repeated the story in 2000, Lembcke challenged it:

I faxed a letter to the Times letters' editor saying that, "in research for my book….I found no evidence that such incidents ever took place. It would have been impossible for protesters with rotten vegetables to get close to a wounded soldier returning from Vietnam." I pointed out that, "stories of spat-upon veterans are apocryphal. They discredit the Americans who opposed the war and help construct an alibi for why we lost, namely, that we were betrayed on the home front by disloyal fifth columnists." My letter was never printed.

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Subject: I got a kick out of Sean Hannity last night..
From: Jack_Dallas
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:26PM

He kept showing pictures of Fonda sitting on the AA Battery and called it a "Tank".

I hate the bitch, but I wouldn't stand in line for an hour and a half to see someone I like, much less someone I detest, just to tell her off. We do need to move on.

Our side lost, Fonda's, Kerry's and Ramsey Clark's side won. Let's get over it.

Jack

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Subject: RE: A short comment on spitting.
From: zinya
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:32PM

hi rye,

thanks much for this posting. And for any of us who have followed and 'absorbed' your past postings about your vietnam years, i know and appreciate (well, as much as a contemporary who angsted from these shores, not those could) what it represents to you to relive those experiences and their fractured counter-interpretations then and still now...

Part of my response to your post is already in my reply above to Fracas' post.

What i decided to add here is that i had first-hand experience with something related which i can attest is NOT 'urban myth': In 1976, i volunteered in the US Senate campaign of Tom Hayden, already then married to Jane Fonda, an ultimately losing campaign. But one afternoon after work during the primary campaign, i was standing on the street in Westwood handing our campaign brochures, and out of the blue a relatively petite clearly upper-middle-class, well-dressed woman spit at ME as she looked at our signs for Hayden, seethed out the words "Jane Fonda" and her spittle landed at my feet. It was stunning.

Such was the venom then .. and i dare say the chances of more than just this one woman turning their hatred for Jane Fonda into their own spittings on whoever they came to view by association as the 'internal enemy' (us liberals!! eek!!) made me wonder to what extent the stories of servicemen being spit on were, instead, projections as 'cover stories' over conduct which instead was going in the opposite direction, toward -- not from -- the "left." Maybe my experience was a fairly isolated experience, i don't know, and it only happened once, most stunningly because of the appearance of 'decorum' from which it spewed ...

again, rye, a heartfelt appreciation for the thoughtful sincerity of your post ... good to see ya.

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Subject: RE: I've no idea whether or not anyone
From: Ele_
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:56PM

sput on veterans upon their return from Vietnam. Yet, even if someone did this is no excuse for a man to spit on an old lady - and that's what Ms. Fonda is, regardless of her facelifts - thirty years later. I hope she will press charges and the brute will get something other than probation.

Having said that, I shall breathlessly wait for this top poster's article condemning delinquents who have thrown pies at Ms. Coulter

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Subject: I heartily condemn anyone who would waste
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Apr 21 2005 6:19PM

a pie on Ms. Coulter. There, take a breath.

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Subject: RE: A short comment on spitting.
From: GeminiToo
Date: Apr 21 2005 5:48PM

I don't remember hearing about protesters spitting on vets until many years after the fact (in the eighties, I think). I knew a number of vets who returned and none of them reported being spat on. I also do not remember any contemporaneous reports of spitting, and I'm sure given the passions back then such incidents would have been reported had they occurred.

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Subject: Well,
From: HawkEye
Date: Apr 21 2005 7:58PM

The Department of Veterans Affairs can't seem to find independent corroboration (or any Police Reports) for Vietnam Veterans getting "Spit On" upon returning to the United States of America.
There are Vietnam Veterans who "claim" (in more ways than one, as they file a claim for it) they were Spit On though... and say that they can no longer sleep well at ngiht thinking about it, or work, so they would like to be Service Connected for the injury suffered.... which they believe falls under PTSD. It does seem to have messed up Michael Smith, I wonder if he is getting Tax Payer Funds for the "Event"?

You know, a guy just off the plane from Vietnam getting spit on would most likely cause a little trouble... and there would have been a Report.... and strangely enough it is Republicans (or those who openly support Republicans) who most often report getting "Spit On" you would think they would have fought back a little bit.



HawkEye

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