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That's interesting, because I started doing the same thing. I look around a little before I leap into some threads on impulse with a quick opinion.
On the other hand, when I am high believing my own bullshit, I often don't care if it is flat out wrong. I go back and forth on this issue. I don't usually mind being wrong, as long as I get corrected without too much distain and derision. Sometimes the fool isn't such a bad place to be. In fact, sometimes I think is worth the risk of being a fool, in order to learn.
Anyway, getting back to the McCain thing. I was very tempted to jump in and side with Marvin, because I remember vaguely that McCain's disabling injuries were from his plane crash and not at the hands of the NVA. As I read the wiki article, it turns out both sides were sort of true. Withholding medical treatment is a form of torture. On the other hand the NVA did save him from drowning and did eventually treat his injuries whatever their motives.
Then going back, it seems to me both the US and North Vietnamese were always accusing each other of failure to follow Geneva Conventions on handling POWs. I believed them both. They were not in fact, mutually exclusive claims.
So then it seems quite hypocritical of McCain to support current US policies that openly and directly violate the UN accords, when in the past he said he resisted as best he could the NVA interrogations claiming his right to do so under the same accords. He eventually capitulated giving torture as the motivation. In other words, his claim to heroism, depends on the same accords he now renounces.
But then the whole war was a fabricated atrocity, since the North Vietnamese had no intention of getting in their sampans and invading the US... The idea they were a threat was pure bullshit in the first place. The whole war era was crazy.
I thought about advocating a rumor mill with an anonymously placed ad, a la the swift boat veterans to the effect that McCain ratted out his fellow prisoners and his country in exchange for better treatment---just as he plans to rat out the poor in the name of his rich masters now. He sort of did this by default in confessing to committing war crimes in an NV video tape staged for propaganda and distributed through the Japanese media (I think) that was later shown on US tv at the time. On the other hand killing non-combatant civilians enmass is a war crime. So where are we here?
Depicting McCain as Hanoi Hannah wouldn't be exactly a lie, but it would certainly miss reality by a wide mark. But who cares in this viciously stupid war and political climate today? My mind wondered off to trying to figure out some catch phrase that tapped the Tokyo Rose or Hanoi Hannah theme. Big mistake in the case of Tokyo Rose.
I read up on the real Tokyo Rose and realized she was in fact a counter argument. She was a US citizen, trapped in Japan at the beginning of the war. The Japanese arrested her, ask her to renounce US citizenship and become a citizen of Japan. When she refused, they declared her an enemy alien and refused her a war ration card. The one thing the Japanese didn't do was intern her, which would have been a certainty if they had released her to the US through some intermediary. The Japanese would have had their best revenge, if they had returned her! After the war in the US she became a victim of a rightwing propaganda smear we are all familiar with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iva_Toguri_D%27Aquino
In the end, I am glad I just followed the McCain thread loosely and didn't jump in with any `bright' ideas.
After Obama ratted out Wright, I don't think any of these people know what honor is, since they don't seem to display any.
My mind is spinning with these themes of honor, shameful acts, lies, denouncements, power and tragic consequences from three movies I rented this weekend: Michael Clayton, Atonement, and The Kite Runner. It was complete coincidence I picked these three. I wanted to watch a good, tightly woven law crime action thriller, and a couple of well done dramas of some sort.
It was interesting to me that Kite Runner seems to have the most mixed reviews. Evidently some critics get it and others don't. In terms of cinematography, I would have done something more with the eerie and stark landscape of light and shadow, walking alone in such vast places near sunset when the cold is rising out of the earth. It is in fact a very dark and lonely feeling to be in such desolate mountainous places at dusk---judging from similar experiences in the Sierras above the tree line by myself. These damned people of the book and their deserts. Their whole world of spirit arises out these empty and lonely places. Such shots could have been used to reflect Amir's fall. A little boy against the shadows of nightfall.
I didn't think the symmetry of Hassan's son's fate was necessary(?) to compel the grown up Amir's attempt at redemption. But then I remind myself that all of the visual Islamic arts use extraordinarily complex symmetries in their designs. Maybe these symmetries naturally fit a particular style of telling stories, re-inscriptions as cycles of fate endlessly revisited--making redemption perhaps impossible... What was once done can not be undone, only worked into the next cycle perhaps to a different outcome, or perhaps simply forgotten as other cycles of histories write over it.
Of the three, I least enjoyed Atonement, with the exception of the acting of the young Briony (Saoirse Ronan) and of course the old, Vanessa Redgrave. Wow can Redgrave turn a talking head shot into a miracle narrative taking on the full weight of a two hour story, in a two or three minute coda.
CG