Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

This young GI met Donald Sutherland in a bygone era. RIP to an original.

Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda and others on stage

Donald Sutherland (left), Paul Mooney, and Jane Fonda performing in an anti-Vietnam War FTA (Free The Army) show in the Philippines in 1971.

Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty Images

Page is an American journalist, syndicated columnist and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.

News of Donald Sutherland's death at age 88 took me back to a day in 1971 when he was protesting the Vietnam War onstage with Jane Fonda and I was one of about 1,000 off-duty soldiers in their audience.

I hoped, in the spirit of John Lennon's anthem, to give peace a chance.


We were outside Fort Lewis, Washington, now known as Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where I was stationed as a draftee waiting for Vietnam orders that, as it turned out, never came.

The show was a traveling review organized with Vietnam Veterans against the War who enlisted Fonda and Sutherland and other stars in their effort. They called it "FTA," a spoof of the military's recruitment slogan, "Fun, Travel and Adventure."

The troupe, which later would perform near bases around the Pacific Rim, officially called themselves "Free the Army" in their publicity materials, although GI jargon quickly replaced "Free" with another F-word to describe their disgust at the continuing quagmire.

More than five years had passed since the first combat troops arrived in Da Nang, Vietnam, and morale, as my Marine friends would say, was lower than whale blubber.

I really wanted to meet Sutherland, which I managed to do for a brief moment backstage. He was a friendly fellow, as I had been told he would be, and remarkably soft-spoken like some of his more enigmatic characters.

He also was reported to have a jolly and raucous reputation, perhaps comparable to "Hawkeye" Pierce, his character in Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H," in which he co-starred with Elliot Gould, who played Trapper John McIntyre.

I wanted to just say thanks to Sutherland for helping my morale, as well as countless other GIs I knew. To me, "M*A*S*H" wasn't so much an anti-war movie as therapeutic relief for my post-draftee gloom.

Unlike Jerry Lewis' "Sad Sack" comedies of previous years, the military doctors that Sutherland and Gould portrayed were not goofballs. They were competent officers who performed their duties with professionalism and dedication along with anything that might lighten the dreary task of working amid combat conditions. They sounded no less sarcastic than my barracks buddies did about the Catch-22 contradictions of war that seemed to be stuck in an endless time loop without much clarity of purpose, other than "Get those commies!"

That's probably why the movie did so well at the box office and became one of the most successful TV series of all time. The contradiction of setting a comedy in the midst of a war captured the surreal situation of the real-life war that disrupted my life and thousands of others, too many of whom failed to make it back home.

Anyway, I was going to say all that to Sutherland, but in my nervous excitement I blew the big moment by reaching out to shake his hand while calling him by the wrong name: "Mr. Gould," I said, "It's a real honor to meet you."

Alas, the feeling was not quite mutual in that moment. His eyebrows arched with surprise, while my buddies laughed and I tried hopelessly to recover before he moved on to shake the next hand. Oh, well, that's show biz, I guess.

Anyway, I feel privileged to have been an eyewitness to the FTA show since, as odd as it was, memories of it have faded along with so many other bizarre episodes that characterize the 1960s and early 1970s. Fortunately, a documentary about the FTA show has been on Netflix, gratefully giving me the evidence that all of it happened and was not just a post-'60s hallucination.

In its aftermath, Fonda ignited a firestorm in 1972 with her infamous visit to the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi during which she was photographed sitting on an antiaircraft gun of the sort that was shooting down some of our fighter jets. The backlash was understandably ferocious. She has expressed regret for her lack of good judgment in that instance, which overshadowed the advocacy she, Sutherland and others had organized to advocate for American troops.

She continues to be hounded by outraged veterans and their families, despite her widely praised work in "Coming Home," the 1978 movie in which she starred with Jon Voight, who plays a wounded Vietnam veteran struggling with recovery.

Fonda, who worked with Sutherland on the 1971 hit "Klute" and dated for a time afterwards, said she was "stunned" and heartbroken to hear of his death.

Yet, for better or worse, they both leave a legacy of having helped to launch an era of Hollywood activism that continues today and shows no signs of ending soon.

(C)2024 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Read More

Iguanas on the Tombstones: A Poet's Metaphor for Colonialism​
Photo illustration by Yunuen Bonaparte for palabra

Iguanas on the Tombstones: A Poet's Metaphor for Colonialism​

Iguanas may seem like an unconventional subject for verse. Yet their ubiquitous presence caught the attention of Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada when he visited a historic cemetery in Old San Juan, the burial place of pro-independence voices from political leader Pedro Albizu Campos to poet and political activist José de Diego.

“It was quite a sight to witness these iguanas sunning themselves on a wall of that cemetery, or slithering from one tomb to the next, or squatting on the tomb of Albizu Campos, or staring up at the bust of José de Diego, with a total lack of comprehension, being iguanas,” Espada told palabra from his home in the western Massachusetts town of Shelburne Falls.

Keep ReadingShow less
Does One Battle After Another Speak to Latino Resistance?

Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti, and Paul Thomas Anderson pose during the fan event for the movie 'One Battle After Another' at Plaza Toreo Parque Central on September 18, 2025 in Naucalpan de Juarez, Mexico.

(Photo by Eloisa Sanchez/Getty Images)

Does One Battle After Another Speak to Latino Resistance?

After decades of work, Angeleno director P.T. Anderson has scored his highest-grossing film with his recent One Battle After Another. Having opened on the weekend of September 26, the film follows the fanatical, even surrealistic, journey of washed-up revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who lives in hiding with his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), some fifteen years after his militant group, French 75, went underground. When their nemesis Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces, Bob and Wila again find themselves running from the law. When Wila goes AWOL, her karate teacher, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), is enlisted to help Bob find his daughter. Although ambitious, edgy, and fun, the political message of the hit film is generally muddled. The immensely talented director did not make a film matching the Leftist rigor of, say, Battleship Potemkin. Nor can the film be grouped among a veritable cavalcade of fictional and non-fictional films produced during the last twenty years that deal with immigrant issues along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Sleep Dealer, El Norte, and Who is Dayani Cristal? are but a few of the stronger offerings of a genre of filmmaking that, for both good and bad, may constitute a true cinematic cottage industry.

Nevertheless, the film leans heavily into Latino culture in terms of themes, setting, and characters. Filmed largely in the U.S.’s Bordertown par excellence—El Paso, Texas—we meet the martial arts teacher Sergio, who describes his work helping migrants cross the border as a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” We learn that the fugitive revolutionary, Bob, is known by several aliases, including “The Gringo Coyote.” His savior, Sensei Sergio, explains to him outrightly that he’s “a bad hombre”—cheekily invoking the hurtful bon mots used by then-candidate Donald Trump in a 2016 debate with Hilary Clinton. The epithet is repeated later on in the film when Bob, under police surveillance in the hospital, is tipped off to an exit route by a member of the French 75 disguised as a nurse: “Are you diabetic? You’re a bad hombre, Bob. You know, if you’re a bad hombre, you make sure you take your insulin on a daily basis, right?” All this, plus the fact that the film’s denouement begins with a raid on a Mexican Restaurant in Northern California.

Keep ReadingShow less
​Jimmy Kimmel onstage during the 67th GRAMMY Awards

Jimmy Kimmel onstage during the 67th GRAMMY Awards on February 01, 2025, in Los Angeles, California

Getty Images, Johnny Nunez

Why the Fight Over Jimmy Kimmel Matters for Us All

There are moments in a nation’s cultural life that feel, at first, like passing storms—brief, noisy, and soon forgotten. But every so often, what begins as a squall reveals itself as a warning: a sign that something far bigger is at stake. The initial cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel by Disney, along with the coordinated blackout from network affiliates like Nexstar and Sinclair, is one of those moments. It’s not merely another skirmish in the endless culture wars. Actually, it is a test of whether we, as a society, can distinguish between the discomfort of being challenged and the danger of being silenced.

The irony is rich, almost to the point of being absurd. Here is a late-night comedian, a man whose job is to puncture the pompous and needle the powerful, finding himself at the center of a controversy. A controversy bigger than anything he’d ever lampooned. Satire that, depending on your perspective, was either too pointed or simply pointed in the wrong direction. Yet, that was not the ostensible reason.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bad Bunny preforming on stage alongside two other people.

Bad Bunny performs live during "No Me Quiero Ir De Aquí; Una Más" Residencia at Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot on September 20, 2025 in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Getty Images, Gladys Vega

From Woodstock to Super Bowl: Bad Bunny and the Legacy of Musical Protest

As Bad Bunny prepares to take the Super Bowl stage in February 2026—and grassroots rallies in his honor unfold across U.S. cities this October—we are witnessing a cultural moment that echoes the artist-led protests of the 1960s and 70s. His decision to exclude U.S. tour dates over fears of ICE raids is generating considerable anger amongst his following, as well as support from MAGA supporters. The Trump administration views his lyrics and his fashion as threats. As the story unfolds, it is increasingly becoming a political narrative rather than just entertainment news.

Music has long been a part of the American political scene. In 1969, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released “Ohio,” a response to the Kent State shootings that galvanized antiwar sentiment.

Keep ReadingShow less