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Book Review: “The Age of American Unreason,” by Susan Jacoby
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Susan Jacoby
The Age of American Unreason
Pantheon Books, 384 pp., $26.00
“How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?” a British newspaper headline asked about the Americans who voted for George W. Bush a second time. The 2004 election returns have inspired dozens of books by authors—most of them, as even less than brilliant citizens of the world’s sole remaining superpower could guess, adherents of the political left—seeking to answer the Daily Mirror’s snotty question. The 2006 film “Idiocracy,” which extrapolated a dysgenic future caused by the ruinous overreproduction of the willfully moronic, marked the zenith of this cultural output.
To be fair to our lame duck president, fear for the state of the national I.Q. predates Bush, 9/11, and the vampire-like resilience of the widespread belief (33 percent, according to the latest 2007 CBS poll) that Iraq carried out the attacks on New York and Washington. Books like “Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, or Add,” “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America,” and “Dumbing Down: Culture, Politics and the Mass Media” appeared under Clinton. You get the idea—of course, you’re one of the few who can still read.
The modern-era antecedent for the idiotarian industrial complex is Richard Hofstader’s magisterial “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” the classic cold-blooded indictment of a postwar educational system that prized utilitarianism over learning—”choose a major that will get you a job,” ordered millions of dream-crushing parents—and the popularity of an extreme strain of evangelical Protestantism whose devotees ignore carbon dating technology in favor of their belief that the earth is 6000 years old.
“Anti-intellectualism in American Life” won Hofstader the 1963 Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps because stupid people aren’t as dumb as you’d think, it has since become less profitable for social critics to cry “I’m OK, You’re a Moron.” 20th Century Fox sat on Mike Judge’s critically-acclaimed comedy movie “Idiocracy” for two years before essentially sending it straight to DVD—probably, reported The New York Times, because “the film is simply too stark a critique of American culture.”
To screw up a metaphor, Susan Jacoby’s awkwardly titled “The Age of American Unreason” bangs its exasperated head against the wall of our Xbox/MTV/SportsCenter anticulture, begging those who have yet to succumb to the iPod people to hear her case that things have gotten even worse since Hofstader. “During the past four decades,” writes Jacoby, “America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic. This form of anti-rationalism, at odds not only with the nation’s heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater knowledge than its historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics.”
Whoa.
You’ve read the stories. “Less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” CNN reported in 2006, “33 percent [of Americans between 18 and 24] could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map. “In the Middle East, 63 percent could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map, and 75 percent could not point out Iran or Israel.” The good news is that so few of them vote.
So has Jacoby. “In 2002,” she points out, “the National Endowment for the Arts released a survey indicating that fewer than half of adult Americans had read any work of fiction or poetry in the preceding year—not even detective novels, bodice-ripper romances, or the “rapture” novels based on the Book of Revelation.”
Maybe you, like me, find postmodernism-influenced literary fiction insufferably pretentious and laden with ponderous metaphors. Maybe you don’t like romance novels either. So try this one instead: “Fully 42 percent [of Americans] say that all living things, including humans, have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”
Not convinced that you live in a nation of imbeciles? Here’s my favorite quotable post-Jacoby cocktail-party fact niblet: “Many teachers—products of the same inadequate public schools [that avoid teaching subjects like evolutionary theory because they sometimes provoke angry comments from fundamentalist Christian parents]—do not understand evolution themselves. A 1998 survey by researchers from the University of Texas found that one of four public biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.”
Duuude.
Jacoby, like Hofstader, blames education and religion for a national character defined as much by ignorance and arrogance as personal responsibility and rugged individualism. So much American history boils down to Thomas Jefferson not getting his way. In 1786, Jacoby notes, Jefferson floated a bill in Virginia’s influential commonwealth assembly that would have allowed “the most promising sons of poor parents [to] be selected to continue their education through college at public expense.” Jefferson’s proposal wouldn’t have been egalitarian by 21st century standards, yet would have planted the seeds of a federally-administered system of public education similar to those in Europe. During the early 19th century conflicts among religious factions and more generally between secularists and advocates of faith-based schooling had settled into an uneasy quid pro quo. Taxpayers supported public schools; municipalities enjoyed local control.
“Local autonomy and the reliance on local property taxes for the support of schools ensured the continuation of the grave inequities that have never ceased to affect learning in America,” Jacoby argues. “By the 1830s, it was already clear that urban areas would have better schools than rural areas, that wealthy communities and states would have better schools than poor ones, and that the most literate, best educated citizens would finance better schools for their children than their less literate and educated fellow citizens. Above all, it was clear that the North would have better schools than the South.” Red states, meet your blue state betters.
Jacoby is snotty, which is to be expected of someone who takes the time to write a book dedicated to convincing most of its readers that they’re morons. It may be an inherent flaw in the anti-anti-intellectualism category that the unpleasantness required to produce such a polemic is a turn-off. “Here’s an idea for parents who want to encourage their sons to read more; forget about brain wiring and place a limit of one hour a day on video gaming,” she schoolmarms at the conclusion of an otherwise interesting passage lamenting the decline of logical reasoning. You know she thinks video games are worthless. She can’t hide it. Why not say so—especially since she’s right?
She ain’t crazy about rock ‘n’ roll, which is kind of funny considering that so few people remember what the fuss used to be about. After a stint in the Soviet Union, Jacoby returned to the U.S. in 1971. There, “with the poetry of Akhmatova and Brodsky in my mind and heart, I found myself ill at ease in a cultural milieu where Paul Simon and Bob Dylan were being lionized as true poets, with Dylan sometimes being compared to Milton, Byron, Donne, and Keats.” Quelle horreur!
The visual cacophony of Internet, television, and video games are all hastening, in Jacoby’s view, for the coarsening of our culture and ever-shortening attention spans. “All mass entertainment media, and the expanding body of educational media based on the entertainment model, emphasize ‘stand alone’ programming that does not require a prior body of knowledge.”
Can anything be done? “We want to counter the anti-intellectual thread that runs across higher education, even [at] the best schools,” says Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland. His solution: cheerleaders for the chess team. Jacoby’s conclusion: “It is possible that nothing will help.”
Once again, she’s trying too hard to be nice. These are desperate times for sentient beings.
© 2008 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.
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“Quit Your Job, Work is a Sham,” Might Magazine, June 1995
Frédéric’s blog has taken the trouble to transcribe my famous 1995 essay for Might Magazine. He made quite a few typos, but it’s difficult if not impossible to find this online. (There’s a different version of it in “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.”)
Rereading it 12 years later reminds me what a great editor I had in the person of Dave Eggers, who has since become known as a memoirist and founder of a literary journal named McSweeney’s. He questioned everything, suggested important changes, and helped make my voice more articulate. Now that I do some editing, I know how difficult that can be.
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Greg Palast on “Silk Road to Ruin”
Author and kick-ass investigative reporter Greg Palast writes about “Silk Road to Ruin”. Stay tuned for a coming comics journalism mash-up between Greg and yours truly.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: There Should Be Blood
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Liberal Democrats Left Out in the Cold
“The truly undecided voter is rare, say those who study the psychology of voting,” Joe Garofoli wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle. “Since neuroscientists say 90 percent of thought is unconscious, an undecided voter may have already decided–he just hasn’t revealed his pick to himself yet.”
Whether I’m a rare bird or a typical victim of self-denial, I didn’t know how I was going to vote until election day–or, to be more precise, a election minute. Roughly 15 to 20 percent of 2008 primary voters have had similar trouble getting their unconscious to talk to them.
Most of the electoral procrastinators are conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats–party loyalists whose influence has been diluted by independents who vote in their primaries. As has been widely discussed, conservatives were unhappy with the entire field of Republican presidential contenders. Less noted but no less significant has been the effect of John Edwards’ departure from the Democratic field.
Lefties don’t have a candidate.
Like most hardcore liberals, I had planned to vote for Edwards. I’m a registered Democrat. I live in New York, a “closed primary” state. That left Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
I studied the printed grid inside my mechanical voting machine, a steel beast from the 1950s. New York keeps threatening to replace the classic booths. I hope they keep them forever. Old-school machines have a feature I treasure: you flip a switch to make an “X” appear next to your choice. You’re not committed until you pull the lever to open the curtain; you can flip the switch back and go with someone else instead.
I moved the switch to Hillary, to see how it looked. Hillary. Ted Rall votes for Hillary. I asked myself my usual test question: If she won, and I watched her being sworn in next January, how would I feel?
Bored. And slightly depressed.
I thought about the experience issue, her biggest advantage. “I am offering 35 years of experience making change,” she says. Though way overstated–35 years of what? being a lawyer?–living in the White House has to have left her with some insights. Unlike Obama, Hillary wouldn’t lose her way searching for the restroom. But political dynasties suck. Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would be a sad statement. A nation of 300 million people shouldn’t keep turning to the same few families for leadership.
A woman president is a couple of centuries overdue. But issues matter more than affirmative action. I couldn’t overlook Clinton’s votes to go to war and to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on the never-ending horror show of Iraq. Thousands of people are dead because of her.
Hillary Clinton didn’t think Iraq had WMDs. No one smart did. The polls were running for the war, and so was she. She pandered. It was disgusting. But I was even more appalled by her lousy political skills. It ought to have been evident, even then, that (a) the war wouldn’t go well, (b) Americans would turn against it, and (c) this would occur before she was up for reelection in 2006. It was obvious to even me at the time, and it took me ten years to get a bachelor’s degree.
She was wrong. She had bad judgment. And her September 2007 vote for possible war against Iran proves she still does. I moved the lever left. The “X” disappeared from Clinton’s box.
I made an “X” pop up next to Obama’s name. “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of…” I wasn’t feeling it.
For what will soon have been eight long years, I reflected, left-of-center Americans have endured an illegitimate administration of morons, thieves and bullies. “[The press secretary’s] job is to help explain my decisions to the American people,” Bush once said, describing how he interacts with people who disagree with him. Bush stacked the Supreme Court by appointing right-wing extremists to replace moderates. Compromise was an alien concept to the Bushies. They did whatever they wanted–wars, torture, tax cuts for the superrich, tapping political dissidents’ phones–and Democrats did nothing to stop them, even after they regained control of both houses of Congress.
After 9/11 Republicans repeatedly screamed that liberals were pro-Islamist, anti-American traitors. Right-wing opinion mongers–Ann Coulter, Andrew Sullivan, James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard (and now The New York Times) accused me of treason. (Hey, I’m not the one trying to get rid of the Bill of Rights.)
Former GOP presidential candidate Alan Keyes suggested that I be imprisoned or shot. And “mainstream” Republicans indicated their tacit agreement with cricket-chirping silence. Not once did a Republican Congressman demand that their neo-McCarthyite allies apologize for their statements. Not once did a Republican opinion columnist take issue with equating the Democratic Party with anti-Americanism. Not once. Compare that to the Democratic practice of “Sister Souljah-ing” lefties who annoy the conservative hyenas.
I can’t forget the last eight years. Here’s why: they will happen again. Whenever Republicans control the White House and Congress and too many media outlets–as occurred under Eisenhower/McCarthy in the 1950s, Nixon in the 1970s, Reagan in the 1980s–they spew the same disgusting crap about the left. Lord knows Democrats have their flaws, but they don’t say that their opponents belong in concentration camps.
“I want the Republicans to feel the way I did in 2004,” an Iowa Democrat told The New York Times. So do I. I want them to watch everything they care about disassembled. Take Reagan and Bush’s names off the airports, nationalize major corporations, demolish Gitmo, gay marriage–anything that pisses them off.
I want revenge. Obama preaches reconciliation. “I will create a working majority because I won’t demonize my opponents,” says Obama. The Illinois senator is an interesting politician and might make a good leader. But not yet. Give me eight years of Democratic rule as ruthless and extreme and uncompromising as the last eight years of Bush. Then we can have some bipartisanship.
Obama’s let’s-tiptoe-through-the-tulips-with-the-GOP shtick amounts to bargaining with yourself. If a vendor at a flea market offers to sell you a lamp for $10 and you’re willing to pay $8, you don’t offer $8. Demonize, Barack, demonize!
Oh, and Obama says he wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq War. I say he’s lying. So do his votes for funding the war since he joined the Senate. His voting record on Iraq is the same as Hillary’s.
Hillary, no. Obama? Nobama. What to do?
“Hundreds of thousands of Democrats and independents who were motivated enough to go and vote on February 5 did so for Edwards, knowing full well that he was out of the running,” reports The Nation. I was one of them.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
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A Special Thank You
posted by TheDon
Thank you, Congress, for giving Chimpy his “surge”. One year ago, after Democrats swept into power, a debate was raging on just how quickly troops could come home from Iraq (although withdrawal from Afghanistan was not seriously considered). Instead, legislation was passed giving the “president” more money for more troops, but just for a temporary “surge” to allow Democracy to bloom and Freedom to be given by God to every Iraqi.
During the six-month long “surge”, eighteen different benchmarks would be met, and the “war” part of the “war” would be concluded. A year later, almost none of the benchmarks have been met (or ever will be met), and the surge will end with a whimper, having killed almost a thousand more of our soldiers and a large, but obscured and unknowable number of Iraqis. The number of troops will be basically the same as before the “surge”, and the military has announced that they won’t withdraw any more troops.
The current administration has successfully extended their occupation of Iraq until the end of their term, at the highest level of troops possible.
Heckuva job, Demmies!
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Subscription Service Reminder
I’m about the close the door on this year’s Ted Rall Subscription Service. Here’s the deal again: get my cartoons, columns, and assorted freelance goodies delivered directly to your email box, in many cases days before they go online or appear in print. The cost is $25/year, which goes to support this website.
If you’re interested, contact chet@rall.com and let me know whether you would prefer to pay by PayPal or check/money order.
Thanks!
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Integrity Lite
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Puffing Up John McCain, POW
“A proven leader, and a man of integrity,” the New York Post called John McCain in its editorial endorsement. “A naval aviator shot down over North Vietnam and held as a POW, McCain knew that freedom was his for the taking. All he had to do was denounce his country. He refused–and, as a consequence, suffered years of unrelenting torture.”
This standard summary of McCain’s five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton, repeated in thousands of media accounts during his 2000 campaign and again this election year, is the founding myth of his political career. The tale of John McCain, War Hero prompts a lot of people turned off by his politics–liberals and traditional conservatives alike–to support him. Who cares that he “doesn’t really understand economics”? He’s got a great story to tell.
Scratch the surface of McCain’s captivity narrative, however, and a funny thing happens: his heroism blows away like the rust from a vintage POW bracelet.
In the fall of 1967 McCain was flying bombing runs over North Vietnam from the U.S.S. Oriskany, an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. On October 26, the 31-year-old pilot was part of a 20-plane squadron assigned to destroy infrastructure in the North Vietnamese capital. He flew his A-4 Skyhawk over downtown Hanoi toward his target, a power plant. As he pulled up after releasing his bombs, his fighter jet was hit by a surface-to-air missile. A wing came off. McCain’s plane plunged into Truc Bach Lake.
Mai Van On, a 50-year-old resident of Hanoi, watch the crash and left the safety of his air-raid shelter to rescue him. Other Vietnamese tried to stop him. “Why do you want to go out and rescue our enemy?” they yelled. Ignoring his countrymen, On grabbed a pole and swam to the spot where McCain’s plane had gone down in 16 feet of water. McCain had managed to free himself from the wrecked plane but was stuck underwater, ensnared by his parachute. On used his pole to untangle the ropes and pull the semi-conscious pilot to the surface. McCain was in bad shape, having broken his arm and a leg in several places.
McCain is lucky the locals didn’t finish him off. U.S. bombs had killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, many in Hanoi. Ultimately between one and two million innocents would be shredded, impaled, blown to bits and dissolved by American bombs. Now that one of their tormentors had fallen into their hands, they had a rare chance to get even. “About 40 people were standing there,” On later recalled. “They were about to rush him with their fists and stones. I asked them not to kill him. He was beaten for a while before I could stop them.” He was turned over to local policemen, who transferred him to the military.
What if one of the hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center had somehow crash-landed in the Hudson River? How long would he have lasted? Would anyone have risked his life to rescue him?
An impolite question: If a war is immoral, can those who fight in it–even those who demonstrate courage–be heroes? If the answer is yes, was Reagan wrong to honor the SS buried at Bitburg? No less than Iraq, Vietnam was an undeclared, illegal war of aggression that did nothing to keep America safe. Tens of millions of Americans felt that way. Millions marched against the war; tens of thousands of young men fled the country to avoid the draft. McCain, on the other hand, volunteered.
McCain knew that what he was doing was wrong. Three months before he fell into that Hanoi lake, he barely survived when his fellow sailors accidentally fired a missile at his plane while it was getting ready to take off from his ship. The blast set off bombs and ordnance across the deck of the aircraft carrier. The conflagration, which took 24 hours to bring under control, killed 132 sailors. A few days later, a shaken McCain told a New York Times reporter in Saigon: “Now that I’ve seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.”
Yet he did.
“I am a war criminal,” McCain said on “60 Minutes” in 1997. “I bombed innocent women and children.” Although it came too late to save the Vietnamese he’d killed 30 years earlier, it was a brave statement. Nevertheless, he smiles agreeably as he hears himself described as a “war hero” as he arrives at rallies in a bus marked “No Surrender.”
McCain’s tragic flaw: He knows the right thing. He often sets out to do the right thing. But he doesn’t follow through. We saw McCain’s weak character in 2000, when the Bush campaign defeated him in the crucial South Carolina primary by smearing his family. Placing his presidential ambitions first, he swallowed his pride, set aside his honor, and campaigned for Bush against Al Gore. It came up again in 2005, when McCain used his POW experience as a POW to convince Congress to pass, and Bush to sign, a law outlawing torture of detainees at Guantánamo and other camps. But when Bush issued one of his infamous “signing statements” giving himself the right to continue torturing–in effect, negating McCain’s law–he remained silent, sucking up to Bush again.
McCain’s North Vietnamese captors demanded that he confess to war crimes. “Every two hours,” according to a 2007 profile in the Arizona Republic, “one guard would hold McCain while two others beat him. They kept it up for four days…His right leg, injured when he was shot down, was horribly swollen. A guard yanked him to his feet and threw him down. His left arm smashed against a bucket and broke again.”
McCain later recalled that he was at the point of suicide. But he was no Jean Moulin, the French Resistance leader who refused to talk under torture, and killed himself. According to “The Nightingale’s Song,” a book by Robert Timberg, “[McCain] looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room.” He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers.” He was too slow. A guard entered and pulled him away from the window.
I’ve never been tortured. I have no idea what I’d do. Of course, I’d like to think that I could resist or at least commit suicide before giving up information. Odds are, however, that I’d crack. Most people do. And so did McCain. “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate,” McCain wrote in his confession. “I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.”
It wasn’t the first time McCain broke under pressure. After his capture, wrote the Republic, “He was placed in a cell and told he would not receive any medical treatment until he gave military information. McCain refused and was beaten unconscious. On the fourth day, two guards entered McCain’s cell. One pulled back the blanket to reveal McCain’s injured knee. ‘It was about the size, shape and color of a football,’ McCain recalled. Fearful of blood poisoning that would lead to death, McCain told his captors he would talk if they took him to a hospital.”
McCain has always been truthful about his behavior as a POW, but he has been more than willing to allow others to lie on his behalf. “A proven leader, and a man of integrity,” The New York Post says, and he’s happy to take it. “All he had to do was denounce his country. He refused…” Not really. He did denounce his country. But he didn’t demand a retraction.
It’s the old tragic flaw: McCain knows what he ought to do. He starts to do the right thing. But John McCain is a weak man who puts his career goals first.
(Ted Rall is the author of the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
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COLUMN: INTEGRITY LITE
Puffing Up John McCain, POW
“A proven leader, and a man of integrity,” the New York Post called John McCain in its editorial endorsement. “A naval aviator shot down over North Vietnam and held as a POW, McCain knew that freedom was his for the taking. All he had to do was denounce his country. He refused–and, as a consequence, suffered years of unrelenting torture.”
This standard summary of McCain’s five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton, repeated in thousands of media accounts during his 2000 campaign and again this election year, is the founding myth of his political career. The tale of John McCain, War Hero prompts a lot of people turned off by his politics–liberals and traditional conservatives alike–to support him. Who cares that he “doesn’t really understand economics”? He’s got a great story to tell.
Scratch the surface of McCain’s captivity narrative, however, and a funny thing happens: his heroism blows away like the rust from a vintage POW bracelet.
In the fall of 1967 McCain was flying bombing runs over North Vietnam from the U.S.S. Oriskany, an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. On October 26, the 31-year-old pilot was part of a 20-plane squadron assigned to destroy infrastructure in the North Vietnamese capital. He flew his A-4 Skyhawk over downtown Hanoi toward his target, a power plant. As he pulled up after releasing his bombs, his fighter jet was hit by a surface-to-air missile. A wing came off. McCain’s plane plunged into Truc Bach Lake.
Mai Van On, a 50-year-old resident of Hanoi, watch the crash and left the safety of his air-raid shelter to rescue him. Other Vietnamese tried to stop him. “Why do you want to go out and rescue our enemy?” they yelled. Ignoring his countrymen, On grabbed a pole and swam to the spot where McCain’s plane had gone down in 16 feet of water. McCain had managed to free himself from the wrecked plane but was stuck underwater, ensnared by his parachute. On used his pole to untangle the ropes and pull the semi-conscious pilot to the surface. McCain was in bad shape, having broken his arm and a leg in several places.
McCain is lucky the locals didn’t finish him off. U.S. bombs had killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, many in Hanoi. Ultimately between one and two million innocents would be shredded, impaled, blown to bits and dissolved by American bombs. Now that one of their tormentors had fallen into their hands, they had a rare chance to get even. “About 40 people were standing there,” On later recalled. “They were about to rush him with their fists and stones. I asked them not to kill him. He was beaten for a while before I could stop them.” He was turned over to local policemen, who transferred him to the military.
What if one of the hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center had somehow crash-landed in the Hudson River? How long would he have lasted? Would anyone have risked his life to rescue him?
An impolite question: If a war is immoral, can those who fight in it–even those who demonstrate courage–be heroes? If the answer is yes, was Reagan wrong to honor the SS buried at Bitburg? No less than Iraq, Vietnam was an undeclared, illegal war of aggression that did nothing to keep America safe. Tens of millions of Americans felt that way. Millions marched against the war; tens of thousands of young men fled the country to avoid the draft. McCain, on the other hand, volunteered.
McCain knew that what he was doing was wrong. Three months before he fell into that Hanoi lake, he barely survived when his fellow sailors accidentally fired a missile at his plane while it was getting ready to take off from his ship. The blast set off bombs and ordnance across the deck of the aircraft carrier. The conflagration, which took 24 hours to bring under control, killed 132 sailors. A few days later, a shaken McCain told a New York Times reporter in Saigon: “Now that I’ve seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.”
Yet he did.
“I am a war criminal,” McCain said on “60 Minutes” in 1997. “I bombed innocent women and children.” Although it came too late to save the Vietnamese he’d killed 30 years earlier, it was a brave statement. Nevertheless, he smiles agreeably as he hears himself described as a “war hero” as he arrives at rallies in a bus marked “No Surrender.”
McCain’s tragic flaw: He knows the right thing. He often sets out to do the right thing. But he doesn’t follow through. We saw McCain’s weak character in 2000, when the Bush campaign defeated him in the crucial South Carolina primary by smearing his family. Placing his presidential ambitions first, he swallowed his pride, set aside his honor, and campaigned for Bush against Al Gore. It came up again in 2005, when McCain used his POW experience as a POW to convince Congress to pass, and Bush to sign, a law outlawing torture of detainees at Guantánamo and other camps. But when Bush issued one of his infamous “signing statements” giving himself the right to continue torturing–in effect, negating McCain’s law–he remained silent, sucking up to Bush again.
McCain’s North Vietnamese captors demanded that he confess to war crimes. “Every two hours,” according to a 2007 profile in the Arizona Republic, “one guard would hold McCain while two others beat him. They kept it up for four days…His right leg, injured when he was shot down, was horribly swollen. A guard yanked him to his feet and threw him down. His left arm smashed against a bucket and broke again.”
McCain later recalled that he was at the point of suicide. But he was no Jean Moulin, the French Resistance leader who refused to talk under torture, and killed himself. According to “The Nightingale’s Song,” a book by Robert Timberg, “[McCain] looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room.” He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers.” He was too slow. A guard entered and pulled him away from the window.
I’ve never been tortured. I have no idea what I’d do. Of course, I’d like to think that I could resist or at least commit suicide before giving up information. Odds are, however, that I’d crack. Most people do. And so did McCain. “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate,” McCain wrote in his confession. “I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.”
It wasn’t the first time McCain broke under pressure. After his capture, wrote the Republic, “He was placed in a cell and told he would not receive any medical treatment until he gave military information. McCain refused and was beaten unconscious. On the fourth day, two guards entered McCain’s cell. One pulled back the blanket to reveal McCain’s injured knee. ‘It was about the size, shape and color of a football,’ McCain recalled. Fearful of blood poisoning that would lead to death, McCain told his captors he would talk if they took him to a hospital.”
McCain has always been truthful about his behavior as a POW, but he has been more than willing to allow others to lie on his behalf. “A proven leader, and a man of integrity,” the New York Post says, and he’s happy to take it. “All he had to do was denounce his country. He refused…” Not really. He did denounce his country. But he didn’t demand a retraction.
It’s the old tragic flaw: McCain knows what he ought to do. He starts to do the right thing. But John McCain is a weak man who puts his career goals first.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
