Anyone who has been paying a modicum of attention to this year's presidential election knows one thing about John McCain: He was a POW. He and the GOP have been singing this song like a blackbird all night and day for months, with the crescendo coming in last night's nth telling of the tale by the candidate himself on national TV. Setting aside that McCain has completely flip-flopped on his position of not utilizing that experience for political gain, there is one part of the story that I am surprised no one in the TM or even here (sorry if I missed such a diary) has chosen to point out. Put simply: why did it take being tortured to finally make John McCain love his country?
More after the jump...
In his speeach last night McCain said the following:
I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency, for its faith in the wisdom, justice, and goodness of its people.
I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again; I wasn't my own man anymore; I was my country's.
Here's the thing, according to his Wikipedia page (I know, not the greatest source but what do you want on short notice):
John McCain was born in 1936 at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone to naval officer John S. McCain, Jr. (1911–1981) and Roberta (Wright) McCain (b. 1912...McCain has Scots-Irish, Anglo-Irish and English ancestry. His father and his paternal grandfather both became four-star United States Navy admirals.[6] His family, including his older sister Sandy and younger brother Joe,[4] followed his father to various naval postings in the United States and the Pacific...In 1951, his family settled in Northern Virginia, and McCain attended Episcopal High School, a private preparatory boarding school in Alexandria. In high school, he excelled at wrestling and graduated in 1954.
Sounds pretty all-American so far doesn't it? Fancy prep school and all.
Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, McCain entered the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. There, he was a friend and informal leader for many of his classmates, and sometimes stood up for people who were being bullied [hmmmm?]. He also became a lightweight boxer. McCain came into conflict with higher-ranking personnel, he did not always obey the rules, and that contributed to a low class rank (894 of 899)...He did well in academic subjects that interested him, such as literature and history, but studied only enough to pass subjects he struggled with, such as mathematics.
OK, so he sucked as a student (just like W), graduated at the bottom of his class and was still commissioned as an officer. Lucky, being the son and grandsone of admirals, no?
McCain's pre-combat duty began when he was commissioned an ensign, and started two and a half years of training at Pensacola as a naval aviator. While there, he earned a reputation as a partying man. He completed flight school in 1960, and became a naval pilot of ground-attack aircraft, assigned to A-1 Skyraider squadrons aboard the aircraft carriers USS Intrepid and USS Enterprise in the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas. The planes he was flying crashed twice and once collided with power lines, but he received no major injuries.
So he was a partying asshole who crashed three planes. He was not a "fighter pilot," he flew planes that dropped bombs on people and things.
On July 3, 1965, McCain married Carol Shepp, a model originally from Philadelphia.[20] McCain adopted her two young children Douglas and Andrew.[18][21] He and Carol then had a daughter named Sidney.
Nice, the all-American story for sure.
Here's my question: What was not to love about that life and his country at that point?! This guy had every damned opportunity you could imagine, He went to school on the country's dime, got a job (that he probably didn't earn - how very republican - got married and started a family.
Yet according to McCain's countless retellings of his time in captivity, he only learned to love his country when the viet cong beat the shit out of him in the Hanoi Hilton. What the fuck took him so long. I'm sorry, I don't mean to come off as overly harsh here, but if that's what it took to make him realize how great a life he had and what a great country he lived in, then he's a fucking idiot! The guy got every break, was living the American dream, but couldn't realize that until it was all taken away. That just strikes me as the behavior of an ingrateful fool.
I appreciate what McCain went through. It must have sucked. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. That said, I think it's pathetic that it took such a traumatic experience for him to realize how great this country had been to him and to love it (if you believe the story is anything more than a ploy for getting votes). Strikes me as incredibly ignorant really.
Are we to assume that the average American down't really love their country because they've never been tortured? I think that's a pretty high bar to set for the claim. Can Barack Obama never really love American until he's been tortured? Ridiculous of course!! Instead, he loves his country because of the opportunities that it has offered him. He was smart enough to appreciate those opportunities and capitalize on them. Shouldn't that be the true measure of one's appreciation of one's country? Shouldn't we have more respect for someone that has appreciated the gifts and opportunities this country has provided them for their entire life? If you believe what McCain says about his awakening to how much he loves his country, doesn't it suggest he was pretty ignorant for it to have required five years of torture to make him realize how good he had it?
I don't doubt John McCain loves America. I just can't believe it took him so freaking long to realize that he should. To me, this story is very telling. McCain was a pretty thoughtless, ingrateful, dick before his capture. Doesn't that tell us something pretty important?