Dirty Fuckin' Hippies...For Real:
Hippies? Really, John McCain, is that the best you can do? Hippies? Is this the 1976 election? The McCain campaign's latest ad, titled, seriously, "Love," opens with scenes of crazy kids gettin' their freak on, maybe even on McCain's lawn, and a deeply-voiced dude saying, "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change, the summer of love." Aw, cool. Free fucking for all. Then, total buzzkill, we switch to 'Nam and "Half a world away, another kind of love, of country: John McCain, shot down, bayoneted, tortured," punctuated by the used-so-much-we-don't-care-anymore photos of injured McCain, where, one assumes, we're supposed to say, "Hey, that old dude was young once."
This is the reduction of the late 60s and early 70s to the same fuckin' chronological diptych that has long suited conservatives: brave, forgotten soldiers fighting in the shit versus the self-indulgent children back home fucking in the mud. We could create all kinds of nonsensical parallels along this line: vicious, raping, infant-burning American soldiers versus righteous protesters trying to end a failed war and bring about rights for blacks and women. And, as ever, we need to remember that John McCain not only joined the military of his own accord, he requested combat duty. And while it doesn't justify McCain's treatment by his captors, well, if you ask to carry an open bucket of acid and you end up getting burned, how much pity do you deserve? And how many of those being tortured at the Hanoi Hilton were forced to fight the war in the first place?
The other thing that the McCain campaign keeps trying to do is to re-cast the Vietnam War as some valiant endeavor that was done in by those very hippies and their wacky tie-dyed t-shirts and marijuana. Well, shit, if you had been stabbed and beaten and forced to make propagandistic statements, if you fought a war that there was no way short of genocide to win, you'd want someone to blame, too. And it's just fuckin' easier to blame Woodstock and Jimi Hendrix.
That part of the ad is then followed by more vague, half sentences of blah-blah bullshit about how splendiferous a man this McCain is, even using the word "maverick." Then we get to the meat of this American stew: "John McCain doesn’t always tell us what we hope to hear. Beautiful words will not make our lives better...Don’t hope for a better life, vote for one." Yeah, motherfuckers, hippies were just blind optimists, not the stark-eyed realist of a man who asked to fight the Vietnam War. That man, he was dead-on right.
What's the point of the ad? To remind us again, to the point of stupor, that McCain got fucked up by the North Vietnamese? McCain's use of his imprisonment is making John Kerry's 2004 campaign look subtle. Maybe McCain's jealous that he was a POW when he could have been banging chicks who were getting ready to read The Joy of Sex. Maybe it's why McCain made up for lost time when he got back and dumped the damaged-goods Mrs.
This is just another of those "Fuck hope, you tools" ads that worked so well for Hillary Clinton. See, those big ass rallies you see for Obama are like Woodstock or protest marches (would that they were) or some such nonsense. It's an ad for shut-ins and idiots. As the New York Times points out, "Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, at whom this spot takes veiled swipes, was turning 6 years old during the 'summer of love,' and cannot be counted as among those who protested or indulged while Mr. McCain suffered (unless playing with building blocks counts)." Maybe Obama was spelling out "Better red than dead" with those blocks.
And while the ad is called "Love," the title is, like the man himself, just a cover for a simmering, unrequited rage at all those who have moved on from Vietnam.
