THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

LEFTIST "CHAMPIONS OF THE WORKING CLASS" NEVER SEE | 1999-11-06

In the 1960s, about the time she was being photographed behind a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun, Jane Fonda discussed Communism. "If you knew what Communism really was," said Hanoi Jane, "you would get down on your knees and pray for it." The idea of praying to a God Communism claims does not exist to bring you Communism is a bit ironic, but Fonda would never notice it.

Fonda's beloved Communism is supposed to produce a Workers' Paradise. Like other fashionable leftists, Fonda loves the working class, but only if they don't get too close.

This attitude toward working people is illustrated by Hanoi Jane's opposition to nuclear power.

Hanoi Jane's attacks on atomic power plants is based on her and her ideological buddies' claim that atomic energy is dangerous. If she had ever met any coal miners or oil rig workers, Jane Fonda would know that EVERY form of energy production has killed thousands of people.

Except nuclear power. Outside of Communist countries, no one has ever died from the production of nuclear power.

In other words, all the deaths the Friends of the Working Class talk about from nuclear power are purely theoretical. Death from other forms of power production is very real. But Hanoi Jane would never know this, because those deaths occur in the working class, a group of people who, to her, is largely mythical.

Unlike the trendy leftist Friends of the Working Class, I know and have worked with an awful lot of actual working people, both on the job and in politics. When I was staying with coal mining people in West Virginia, I heard a very long list of people who had died in the mines. Likewise, if you talk with oil rig workers, dead people pepper the conversation.

I hazard a guess that Hanoi Jane has never sat down and had a drink with a single coal miner or rig worker. The fact that death in energy production is real is something she would never think of.

And no one is likely to bring it up.