Freedom costs a Buck Oh Five

Pity John McCain. The nobler portion of his Vietnam experience has been reworked into a Passion-of-the-POW/Rapture-of-the-Rightwing mythology with everything implausible going for it except aliens. Adding insult to injury, the fable was penned by the hands of the very conservative commissars he has ostensibly loathed for just this manner of Machiavellian douchebaggery in the past, and all for the transparent benefit of the same Jesus-encrusted nutbags he most despises/has extended the office of vice presidency to. The narrative, to the degree comprehensible, goes something like as follows...

Imagine you are being digested alive in the Vietnamese equivalent of the Great Pit of Carkoon's Sarlacc, with nary a thread of patriotic zeal woven into your entire freedomless, "me-first" corporeality to help bide the time. You thought you were a whole person, self-starting and independent of mind, but only through generous application of the southeast Asian digestive enzyme were you disabused of your natural human impulses and veritably abused with the transcendental promise of the particular nation-state whose particular domestic rulers thought it wise for you to kill and/or be killed (and/or permanently molested) in their place and on their behalf; and, as it would transpire in this case, all for jack. Forty years later you have arrived on the national stage, prepared to complete this circle of life as it was revealed to you in the viscous bas-relief of your own dysentery.

That's the story, anyway -- doubtless as much a surprise to the conductor of the Straight Talk Express as it is to anyone with the cognitive wherewithal to resist chanting "USA, USA" in response to varied external stimuli. Now it is left to him to pimp the perpetual farce, perpetrate the proverbial fraud, and pummel the already impoverished perspicacity of his world-weary fellow American lest the fantasy come undone. All things he, at one point or another in his esteemed career, might have frowned upon in principle, but which the wages of great power now demand; a rigorous shaking of the geriatric "money-maker," as it were. Or as the Catholic school bully of my formative years once remarked, "The time has come to pay the piper."