Fool Me Once. . .

For those old enough to remember celebrated actress and political activist Jane Fonda’s career, you might recall that in the 1970s, she spent much of her time speaking out against the Vietnam War. She was highly effective in portraying the U.S. as the villain.

In 1972, she was invited to visit Hanoi to show solidarity with the American people. Fonda accepted and sparked a major controversy by making several broadcasts on Radio Hanoi, where she urged American airmen to stop bombing North Vietnam. She agreed to meet with groups of American Prisoners of War (POWs) and interacted with Vietnamese citizens and soldiers. Moreover, Fonda permitted herself to be photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun site. This image earned her the epithet “Hanoi Jane,” and she is still regarded as a traitor by many in the United States.

Last August, presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders said we have “less than 11 years left to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy if we are going to leave this planet healthy and habitable.”

On Tuesday (Nov. 5th), Jane Fonda appeared on ABC’s talk show, The View, apparently in support of her four recent orchestrated arrests, to warn Americans that “We are the last generation who can make the difference between life and death of the planet.”

During the first week of November, The View averaged just shy of 3 million viewers. With her eyes dramatically focused on the camera, Fonda resolutely mirrored Sanders’ earlier prediction of doom, “The climate scientists are saying this is it. We’re not going to be able to turn it around. We have eleven years to avoid catastrophe, and we can’t do it unless people mobilize by the millions in the streets.” Fonda certainly has the credentials to move an audience emotionally due to her prior award-winning performances. But do those credentials extend to sound the alarm of our imminent doom?

Fonda may be uniquely qualified to understand how the fossil fuel industry is responsible for our destruction and her need to warn the American public. While her education credentials are indisputable, they do not show any technical competence in understanding the non-linear nature of weather systems and climate change.

For her primary and secondary education, she attended Brentwood Town and Country School,[1]Greenwich Academy,[2] and Emma Willard School.[3] Fonda then enrolled at Vassar College[4] in Poughkeepsie, NY, from 1955-57 through her sophomore year, before traveling to France in the summer of 1957 to enroll in the Académie de la Grand Chaumiére[5] in the fall. While her expertise is not immediately apparent based on her formal education, surely it must stem from an independent study of the problem that has inspired her to save us from extinction.

Fonda, part of a generation of our most celebrated actors that includes Ann Bancroft, Robert De Niro, James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Al Pacino, was taught by the legendary actor and director Lee Strasberg, who is regarded as the “father of method acting in America.” A key aspect of Strasberg’s coaching method was his insistence that actors delve into their own experiences to uncover emotions that mirror those of their characters in specific scenes. By ‘reliving’ their genuine emotional responses, sometimes called “affective memory,” their performances elicit authentic emotional reactions from audiences. Consequently, Fonda may have evoked an emotional response in as many as 3 million Americans watching The View, collectively facing the bleak prospect of a catastrophic extinction within a decade.

The original prediction that we would have only 12 years left came from the 2018 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describing the steps required to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) above pre-industrial levels— which happened to be identical to the goal set out in the Paris Climate Agreement (PCA).

To accomplish that goal, the IPCC report stated that countries must reduce their anthropogenic (that’s us) carbon dioxide emissions (e.g., from automobiles, power plants, and all human-activated processes) to a net zero effect by the year 2050. The report’s path to successfully producing the 2050 result requires getting almost halfway there by 2030, which, on the report’s release date, was only 12 years away.

Before we all start getting our affairs in order in anticipation of our collective demise, we should consider Ms. Fonda’s credibility.

Hanoi Jane did redeem herself after her controversial romance with the North Vietnamese military machine. In 1979, she opened a fitness studio in Beverly Hills, CA. Its success led to her studio’s expansion in California and five books, 12 audio programs, and 23 videotapes, including ‘The Jane Fonda Workout” (1982), the top-grossing fitness video of all time. Fonda managed to inspire legions of American women to rehabilitate their bodies into sexually desirable figures for the benefit of Americans who identify as men.

Thank you, Jane, for re-beautifying American women! However, the cliché at the beginning forces me to pass on your call to avoid catastrophe.    

[1] Brentwood Town & Country School in Los Angeles CA is a K-12 independent coed day school.

[2] Greenwich Academy in Greenwich CT, is a private school for girls.

[3] Emma Willard School in Troy, NY, is an independent university-preparatory day and boarding school for grades 9-12.

[4] Vassar College is a private, independent, residential  liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, which fosters intellectual openness and lively exploration through its widely varied course offerings.

[5] Académie de la Grand Chaumiére is an art school in the Montparnasse district of Paris, FRANCE.