McCain, on Wings and a Prayer

I have a neighbor down the road who used to be a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War. While I have serious reservations about the missions he went on, I have told lots of people how much I admire what it took for him, in the way of mental and physical proficiency, to be able to steer a very fast and highly complicated jet fighter plane off the deck of an aircraft carrier, guide it somewhere hundreds of miles away, and then find his way back to that same boat in the water and land on its deck, and often at night, too! In my mind that's nearly unbelievable.

I have an inkling of what this involves because during the Korean War I was in the Air Force, working on the "line" outside, maintaining radios on both fighters and bombers.

John McCain did exactly the same thing as my neighbor in the same war, and in fact there's a news reel showing him, among others, dashing furiously about on his carrier's deck trying to get planes out of the way when an accident erupted and one or more caught fire.

My neighbor apparently didn't have McCain's affinity for disaster, because he didn't go through a similar event nor was he ever shot down over enemy territory, as was McCain, who however was lucky that he wasn't gunned dead on the ground then and there and instead spent the next six years of his youth in the highly rewarding atmosphere of a North Vietnamese prison camp, the painful experience that most distinguished McCain from the majority of his earlier colleagues, and was most likely the main thing that propelled him into becoming a U.S. senator from Arizona.

Now he has come from behind in the campaigning to win the New Hampshire primaries, and in a sense that makes him the front runner, though most likely not for long.

Despite his win and despite having done one or two good things during his senatorial time, mainly not going along with the Bush Admininstration in its toleration for torture, I think McCain is actually flying these days by the seat of his pants. For all the considerable mental qualities that he showed for being able to pilot an aircraft carrier plane, all those toxic substances that he must've inhaled fighting fires on carrier decks and warming up and flying planes and unleashing munitions into the air and surviving the vapors of a prison camp must've have damaged his thinking abilities, as evidenced by his becoming a Republican politico. And if the youthful fumes aren't the cause, then his genes must be betraying him, because now he seems to be entering an early dotage, and that is shown by the attitudes that he has revealed lately.

I've already posted on how he blamed Hitler's emergence on the U.S. isolation of those years. This idea is absolutely ridiculous, because of many factors that were at work from the 1920's on up to 1941, especially what Americans were drinking or not drinking in those days, and the U.S. could no more have brought the Nazis up short during their rise than Sisyphus could have kept his rock from rolling back down the hill for the umpteenth time.

Then more recently McCain said he would be content to leave American soldiers in Iraq for another hundred years, or a thousand or a million -- on one proviso, that none of them are hurt or killed. He cited the example of Germany.

That's crazy, too, on lots of grounds, among which are that there's a food problem in Iraq, and a women problem in Iraq, and a geography problem in Iraq, and a religious problem in Iraq, and a tunes problem in Iraq, and a heat problem in Iraq, and the list goes on and on.

And just yesterday, after doing something or other in the same room that he used at a similar point when he likewise won in New Hampsire in 2000, he said that there is no superstition in which he won't indulge.

I would think that superstition would be a highly doubtful contributor to deciding what buttons to push and what controls to operate when piloting a vastly outsized Concorde of a nation like the U.S.of A.