GoodEnglishbutLousyContent

THE McCAIN SYNDROME 

julien nguyen 

This article was published in The Asian Reporter,  May 9-15, 2000

       For months, I, a damned Gook-American infatuated with the theatre of the absurd, have been watching the entire McCain semi-baroque semi-surrealist tragicomedy with an amalgam of curiosity, amusement, and annoyance. I predicted that, after all, it won’t end happily as required by the genre and expected by the rhapsodic hero. Several times, indeed, when I saw him gesticulate in rapture under salvos of hullabaloos from an hysterical audience, I couldn’t but think of Cervantes’s character, the other warrior who, like him, is armed with big dreams, sets out to fight for reform, and challenges evil wherever he may find it in his sacrosanct crusade. Both look angry and terribly serious. Both, victims of delusion, go around tilting at windmills. Both have eventually failed. One difference: While Don Quixote went on his way quasi solitary on a broken-down horse, our modern knight was riding in a luxurious “Straight Talk Express,” escorted by a brigade of whippersnappers, neo-Sanchos, called to-day news and television reporters, deep-thinkers, commentators, journalists, paparazzi, whose near-orgasmic delirium over their master’s New Hampshire win has surpassed the bounds of phantasmagoria and ridiculousness.

      The game is now over. Yet, I wish I could hear fewer abracadabras from McCain and his people. I wish I could see McCain the Wild Fighter, after having ruthlessly bombarded his opponents from all camps, including his old Vietnamese prison guards, with first-at-mouth street epithets, metamorphose into a gentleman, better mannered, if not better civilized, and less insolent, who would have understood the rules of the game, so as to bow out graciously as did the other runner-up, Bill Bradley. 

      In a contest, when you lose, you sit down, no matter how great you think you are, were, will be, or would have been. And shut up. For good and all. Had he done so, then I might have shed some tears upon his misfortune, though still disturbed by his racial slur. But no, the guy and the press continue to spit out tons of nonsenses, to brag more, to become more defiant. Out of anger, bitterness, fiasco, maybe, or face-saving ultimate attempt? In a sense I think Don Quixote’s conduct is better: indeed, realizing the errors of his ways, he returns to his village and forsakes his knight-errantry even at the cost of falling sick afterwards. 

      On the contrary, after their favorite’s Super Tuesday enormous drubbings, some brainy analysts from the media race were even saying that McCain the Loser is still the best (how come he didn’t win?) who would have a better chance of beating Al Gore “like a trump” in the fall election. And the loser himself was making it clear that he just “suspended” his campaign and threatening to fight to the end, in the name of ... but in the name of what, exactly? His trademark campaign finance reform, which has failed three times in the Senate, suddenly resurrects from his dead agenda just as a wishy-washy and futile leitmotiv and another political maneuver, among many, aimed at duping his supporters who are always irate with the status quo and hankering after reform, any reform, even the term “reform” itself. 

    To raise or not to raise soft money, that’s not a do-or-die deal for the majority of average citizens burdened by monthly bills and daily needs. Instead, that question may interest only the unlucky candidates who couldn’t legally get as much money as their archrival, George W. Bush, and who whined about it.

      McCain must blame himself for his own mishap. His gravest mistake is having sold his soul, in imitation of Faust, to a different kind of Mephistopheles, super-sophisticated, hence more perfidious –the mainstream, liberal media, with no slightest suspicion that he was going to give up all hope of redemption, unlike Goethe’s hero. 

      In his ecstasy, he forgot that those people simply exploited him for their love of melodrama and need of entertaining a public blasé with tedious daily routine and avid of hot sensation, eccentricity, even pseudoheroism. In exchange for ephemeral glory and “national phenomenon” title, he had to speak their language, carry their agenda, adopt their tactics, believe they are mighty gods and king-makers, thereby courting and pleasing them at all costs. But sooner or later, they will certainly abandon him for new preys, new stars, since entertainment, like phony love, needs change, or, in their vocabulary, reform.  

     Meanwhile, short of appealing ideas, our naive candidate was forced to sell out his curriculum vitae, come what may, with the media’s deafening fanfare, although private life is no one’s business –a litany we had heard over and over from the very journalists during the Clintonimpeachment process. Well, a biography and character on-sale product, that’s very cheap, isn’t it? Prisoner of media above all, he sank irrevocably into the most grotesque narcissism, or egotropic, I had ever seen (did you notice on the background of his ad poster the portrait of himself in a handsome Navy pilot’s outfit?).  Saint John McCain says this, says that. Saint John McCain’s the Prophet, the Crusader, the Martyr, blah blah blah... So he be! But McCain, a war hero? Give me a break. The Vietnam War, decried years ago by a band of draft dodgers and traitors as a dark and shameful chapter in American history, all of a sudden resurges fresh and glittery from its ashes, such as a phoenix, to become a “heroic” memory America should cherish, and be proud of, thanks to McCain’s candidacy. Isn’t that bizarre? I myself, after the fall of Saigon, had enough jinx to spend, like my fellow officers, eight years in the North Vietnamese hellish concentration camps, worse than all Gulag Archipelagos and Hanoi Hiltons combined, drinking the cup of sorrow to the dregs; therefore I know. I know that to survive you must, like the rest of mortals, observe the prison rules, obey the guards’ orders, bow your head before them, confess that you are criminal, etc., which is blameless, perfectly normal, ergo non-heroic. I know that the true war heroes are those who are lying somewhere in the fields, at Arlington, who never returned. Heroism is as dear and sacred as life itself. Abusing the term would profane their immense sacrifice. Indeed, besides “organizing plays and recounting movie plots” (The Oregonian, 3/3/00, A12), what exploit had McCain ever achieved at the Hanoi Hilton, I wonder, which could have promoted him to the rank of war hero, unless “hero” is otherwise defined (i.e being POW becomes ipso facto hero)? The media always enjoys this anecdote: McCain, son of an admiral, had rejected his captors’ offer of premature release in order to deter their propaganda plan. Amazing! A prisoner there can choose to stay or to leave? The reality is that the stubborn and illiterate Vietnamese Communists are too proud of their proletarian origin to be intimidated at all by your ID, genealogical tree, or blue blood. At their mercy you have absolutely no right to accept or to refuse. You must obey, or die. Period. Moreover, such  “premature release,” a mere jest after all, was wilily proposed to all prisoners, sons of admirals or not, as part of the very common carrot-and-stick stratagem, in return for information, confession, or even collaboration the crooked badly needed. Upon our first days in the camps, we were also offered, overtly or in private, the same vain promise. So, in McCain’s case, he might have taken them too much at their word, and consequently imagined he was a VIP; otherwise, if they really wanted to release him, what in the world could prevent them from using force, kicking him out of his cell, and sending him back to his illustrious papa? I suggest that McCain and his fans read the veracious book I’m No Hero by Charlie Plumb (Independence Press, 1973), another shot-down pilot, who spent six years in Vietnamese prisons, and learn the meanings of “heroism” and “honesty”. Plumb wrote, for instance: “The truth of the matter is I don’t even know how to define “hero”, but I certainly don’t feel that I am one. I’m very fortunate.” (p.18). McCain is just very fortunate, like any survivor, like myself.

      As for the myth on McCain’s character, I don’t buy it. How would I believe in and vote for a presidential candidate who, as a POW, had attempted suicide twice in his prison cell out of despair and depression, who back home cheated on his disabled wife while still living with her, by aggressively pursuing “a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich” (The Oregonian, 3/3/00, A13), and who can’t control his permanently overheated temper?  Private matters?  Of course. But that’s precisely your fault, media, because you let him run on biography and past tense, and you made a fool of me with your McCainmania and fiction about his character. Besides, in a great democracy like America, a man of honor doesn’t use any sordid means to reach his political end. The “low road” and the cynical path belong to only shameless opportunists and Machiavelli’s or Nietzsche’s impudent disciples. What bothers me the most in McCain’s tactics is the total lack of integrity and scruples. During the campaign, he proclaimed himself Republican, but at the same time didn’t hesitate to blast his own party establishment as “the death star”, to Al Gore’s delight, for the purpose of dividing Republicans, luring independents, and thus, trying to keep both “le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (the butter and the money of the butter), after the French expression used to characterize Princess Diana and all other tricksters. Isn’t that the peak of ignominy? Finally, how would I respect so mean a candidate who has declared, after three decades, that he still hates his ancient prison guards and “will continue to hate them” as long as he lives, while locking up his mouth on his brokerage missions to Vietnam during the normalization procedure? That man is, I dare say, the supreme incarnation of stinginess, hypocrisy, and vulgarity, for the real object of his hatred must be the regime leaders, sole bête noire responsible for his misery and deserving his malediction, not those petty imbecile guards who had to carry out their superiors’ orders just in the way he did as a pilot bombing their country. Furthermore, dropping bombs, destroying buildings and killing innocent people, then being shot down, captured, beaten and tortured, isn’t that a dramatic scenario reflecting perfectly the fair rules of a war game which one is obligated to accept stoically as a hero would do?  By actually holding a grudge, snarling rancour against the coarse guards, raising Cain about their brutal treatment, McCain only has revealed to the public his naked plebeian personality, thus heavily damaging his candidacy for both “hero” and “president” posts.              

      It’s now time to get rid of the loser (our Vietnamese tradition prohibits from “hitting a man fallen from his horse”). But I will not stop without this little personal note: McCain’s anti-gookism. His derogatory terminology is so obnoxious that I, a Gook from head to foot, can’t get up in the morning without some sort of nausea. I was first, like many from the ten-million-plus Asian American population, shocked, scandalized and outraged, particularly when he declined a timely apology. I hardly believed he was that sick. But in the end, out of magnanimity, I tried to play the Devil’s advocate, convincing myself that such a silly word ejected by the uncontrollable candidate did mean his prison guards, as he defended himself, merely because he did not know well his lexicon. He may not be racist. He just lacks education. However, on that issue, what infuriated me much is the media’s muteness, or near-muteness, and cover-up about their protégé’s blatant racial aspersion, and that’s unpardonable. They all think that Asians are playing a minirole in the American political life, so they don’t care. They are dead wrong. Asian-Americans, usually quiet and peaceful, know when to stand up in time. Their silence speaks more eloquently than McCain did with his most vociferous speeches, and they have long memories.                                                

      I understand well the American people’s leadership crisis and their craving for heroism, as they are day in day out surrounded by and tired of the mediocre and the cynic. McCain was then rising as their lone star. But, it did not take them long to discover the ravaging symptoms of hallucinosis –a disease associated with the McCain syndrome and striking a large number of McCainmaniacs– for which I see no efficacious therapy but doing away with the most pernicious pathogen: the biased mainstream media. 

 

Portland, April 30, 2000