Finally somebody says it.
Read this.
I just happened to stumble onto this brilliant piece. Read it and weep, or nod your head -- or get pissed off if you're one of the remaining clueless propaganda-suckers. Either way.
I happened to comment on it there somewhere, and here's what I had to say:
FINALLY somebody says what I've been thinking all these years.
Throughout the '08 Prez campaign my ears were bleeding from hearing 'John McCain: War Hero' every five minutes. OK, so let me get this straight: Vietnam was a misguided fiasco at best, an immoral mass murder at worst, and here you have a guy who could barely keep a plane in the air during training, who flies a zillion feet over jungles and rice paddies and stone age villages indiscriminately and amorally carpet-bombing whatever happens to be alive down there and, since he's an incompetent pilot, gets shot down and captured. So, um, he's a HERO?
It is often said that history is written by the victors, so a similar Luftwaffe pilot who murdered a hundred London children before getting downed and captured would have been called a hero if the Nazis won WW2, right?
Except that we didn't 'win' Vietnam; we simply gave up on a very lost and very questionable cause -- so among those Americans who can't accept that we screwed up, they live in denial and create their own version of history, an alternate reality in which a murderous loser like McCain gets to play the 'hero'.
Until this sort of glorification of violence is uprooted from our national ethos (the way it was forcibly in Germany), we will never be anything but glorified self-congratulatory Prozac-addled Vikings.
Let's hope it doesn't have to happen the way it happened to Germany.
* * *
I just happened to stumble onto this brilliant piece. Read it and weep, or nod your head -- or get pissed off if you're one of the remaining clueless propaganda-suckers. Either way.
I happened to comment on it there somewhere, and here's what I had to say:
FINALLY somebody says what I've been thinking all these years.
Throughout the '08 Prez campaign my ears were bleeding from hearing 'John McCain: War Hero' every five minutes. OK, so let me get this straight: Vietnam was a misguided fiasco at best, an immoral mass murder at worst, and here you have a guy who could barely keep a plane in the air during training, who flies a zillion feet over jungles and rice paddies and stone age villages indiscriminately and amorally carpet-bombing whatever happens to be alive down there and, since he's an incompetent pilot, gets shot down and captured. So, um, he's a HERO?
It is often said that history is written by the victors, so a similar Luftwaffe pilot who murdered a hundred London children before getting downed and captured would have been called a hero if the Nazis won WW2, right?
Except that we didn't 'win' Vietnam; we simply gave up on a very lost and very questionable cause -- so among those Americans who can't accept that we screwed up, they live in denial and create their own version of history, an alternate reality in which a murderous loser like McCain gets to play the 'hero'.
Until this sort of glorification of violence is uprooted from our national ethos (the way it was forcibly in Germany), we will never be anything but glorified self-congratulatory Prozac-addled Vikings.
Let's hope it doesn't have to happen the way it happened to Germany.
* * *
posted by brioSphere at 4:11 PM
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