Virgil
10-31-2008, 11:04 AM
Normally I would put the title of the article in the heading, but I don't think the heading would attract as much attention as the heading I used. This is what intellectualism sounds like. Alexander Cockburn happens to be my favorite writer, both for his analysis and his writing style. He is talking about the presidential election. Too bad it cannot make it to television.
http://counterpunch.org/cockburn10312008.html
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October 31, 2008
CounterPunch Diary
Change You Can See
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
It looks as though the game is almost over for John McCain. Though the two are physically dissimilar I’ve taken to thinking of him as a latterday Flashman. Harry Flashman was the bully in Thomas Hughes’ Victorian novel of school life, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In 1969 George MacDonald Fraser brought him back to vibrant life in his novel Flashman as a coward and bounder who, by a series of accidents, became falsely honored as a national hero, awarded the Victoria Cross for supposedly heroic conduct in the first Afghan War.
Fraser wrote a dozen Flashman novels, all of them worth reading for their rich historical detail. They are indeed the sole basis for most Britons’ knowledge of their imperial history, much as my own generation of schoolchildren got their learning from the sagas of G.A.Henty, inherited from their grandparents. For insight into the emotions we relied on the profound works of Enid Blyton, the Marcel Proust of the nursery set.
When he was at Annapolis Naval Academy McCain had enough emotional scars of his own to earn the Flashmanesque nickname of McNasty. By the time he was flying his A-4 off the Forrestal he’d already acquired a somewhat unsavory reputation as a rash flier (three planes damaged or destroyed) and as a relentless party boy.
On July 29, 1967 there was a terrible fire on the flight deck of the Forrestal in which 134 servicemen died. If you believe Mary Hershberger’s unsparing account on the truthdig website – to be fair, there are vigorous and detailed denunciations of her report by McCain’s defenders – imprudent actions by McCain may have started the fire. What seems undisputed is his extremely Flashmanesque behavior in the immediate aftermath of the lethal inferno. McCain promptly quit the stricken ship with the late R.W. “Johny” Apple Jr., of the New York Times, who wrote him up in handsome terms a few weeks later.
Thee flames still smouldering and the body bags barely zipped, McCain bounded into a helicopter and flew to Saigon for, in his own breezy words, “some welcome R&R”, even as somber memorials for his dead shipmates were held aboard the Forrestal. Flashman to the life.
He then raced to London for an important private session with the man who would preside over the inquiry into the Forrestal disaster, the officer in question being his own father, Admiral John McCain, at that time the Navy’s top man in Europe, soon to become overall commander of all forces in Vietnam. Having squared accounts with the pater, he took himself off for a session in the casinos in the French Riviera. Under Admiral McCain’s supervision the investigation into the Forrestal disaster contained no revelations inconvenient to McCain Jr’s reputation.
Redeployed aboard the Oriskany, he was shot down over Hanoi. Numerous accounts cited by Douglas Valentine on this site attest to his less than heroic conduct as a POW, ingratiating himself with his captors just as Harry Flashman would have done. Flashman, gazing down cynically at his own V.C. would certainly have laughed uproariously at the resplendent rows of decorations on McCain’s chest, a medal an hour, for the total of 10 hours and 30 minutes he spent dropping high explosive on civilians in North Vietnam.
McCain returned home to wife Carol who had kept the home fires burning all those years, undergoing the torture of 23 operations after a car accident that left her semi-crippled.
<snipped>
http://counterpunch.org/cockburn10312008.html
===============================
October 31, 2008
CounterPunch Diary
Change You Can See
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
It looks as though the game is almost over for John McCain. Though the two are physically dissimilar I’ve taken to thinking of him as a latterday Flashman. Harry Flashman was the bully in Thomas Hughes’ Victorian novel of school life, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In 1969 George MacDonald Fraser brought him back to vibrant life in his novel Flashman as a coward and bounder who, by a series of accidents, became falsely honored as a national hero, awarded the Victoria Cross for supposedly heroic conduct in the first Afghan War.
Fraser wrote a dozen Flashman novels, all of them worth reading for their rich historical detail. They are indeed the sole basis for most Britons’ knowledge of their imperial history, much as my own generation of schoolchildren got their learning from the sagas of G.A.Henty, inherited from their grandparents. For insight into the emotions we relied on the profound works of Enid Blyton, the Marcel Proust of the nursery set.
When he was at Annapolis Naval Academy McCain had enough emotional scars of his own to earn the Flashmanesque nickname of McNasty. By the time he was flying his A-4 off the Forrestal he’d already acquired a somewhat unsavory reputation as a rash flier (three planes damaged or destroyed) and as a relentless party boy.
On July 29, 1967 there was a terrible fire on the flight deck of the Forrestal in which 134 servicemen died. If you believe Mary Hershberger’s unsparing account on the truthdig website – to be fair, there are vigorous and detailed denunciations of her report by McCain’s defenders – imprudent actions by McCain may have started the fire. What seems undisputed is his extremely Flashmanesque behavior in the immediate aftermath of the lethal inferno. McCain promptly quit the stricken ship with the late R.W. “Johny” Apple Jr., of the New York Times, who wrote him up in handsome terms a few weeks later.
Thee flames still smouldering and the body bags barely zipped, McCain bounded into a helicopter and flew to Saigon for, in his own breezy words, “some welcome R&R”, even as somber memorials for his dead shipmates were held aboard the Forrestal. Flashman to the life.
He then raced to London for an important private session with the man who would preside over the inquiry into the Forrestal disaster, the officer in question being his own father, Admiral John McCain, at that time the Navy’s top man in Europe, soon to become overall commander of all forces in Vietnam. Having squared accounts with the pater, he took himself off for a session in the casinos in the French Riviera. Under Admiral McCain’s supervision the investigation into the Forrestal disaster contained no revelations inconvenient to McCain Jr’s reputation.
Redeployed aboard the Oriskany, he was shot down over Hanoi. Numerous accounts cited by Douglas Valentine on this site attest to his less than heroic conduct as a POW, ingratiating himself with his captors just as Harry Flashman would have done. Flashman, gazing down cynically at his own V.C. would certainly have laughed uproariously at the resplendent rows of decorations on McCain’s chest, a medal an hour, for the total of 10 hours and 30 minutes he spent dropping high explosive on civilians in North Vietnam.
McCain returned home to wife Carol who had kept the home fires burning all those years, undergoing the torture of 23 operations after a car accident that left her semi-crippled.
<snipped>