I apologize for employing so much moving visual as of late in these blogs. I am extremely video dependent right now. I also have weeks where I eat the same food everyday (for a couple of weeks it was my version of Salade Nicoise) or invent some new strange ritual (walking down the same block everyday past the same Mexican restaurant) to give shape to my somewhat unmoored existence. I can’t tell if lack of permanent partner and family has liberated me or indentured me to a life of very obscure symbols and meanings that only have significance to me. However, some of you do respond to these blogs so I know I have not completely sunken into myopic middle aged eccentricity.
- PTSD and Senator McCain
As you know, if there’s one thing I know a shit load about, it’s PTSD. Fashion, Patti Smith, and PTSD seem to be my enduring subjects and leitmotivs in my private mythology.
I am sure you saw the bit on the news yesterday where McCain addressed the crowd as his fellow “prisoners”, which maybe an indicator of his existential/spiritual crisis,
dementia, PTSD or all of the above. McCain has been dangerously veering into tragic territory, and finally I think he’s sold the timeshare and bought a villa there.
Mr. McCain comes from an alcoholic family, so he was already unmoored from his own reality, a stranger to himself. That is the major toll you pay when you enter the addict universe. I’ve been to tons of Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings, and one thing you learn when you’re raised by addicts is to not need anything and to construct a reality based on the moods and whims of the addict. Rage and fear bond to the molecules in the air, and you’re swimming in, breathing, eating and shitting them. Soon you are addicted to the huge ups and downs, upheavals of the addict, and you are one too, without ever having to take a drink or a drug. You will go out and look for conflict, make one, to get a fix.
McCain gets his fix from war and gambling, and probably some interesting submissive/dominant acting-out with women. On top of that, he was tortured as a P.O.W.., where his limbs were broken, and he was starved and humiliated.
There were several ways he could have gone after such an experience, but I think he basically settled into a complex Stockholm Syndrome with his own country, and by proxy, his family. Stockholm Syndrome is when you bond with your torturer and perpetrator. It’s sad, but really at its core, it’s a survival mechanism. His patriotism doubled, tripled, maybe more. And he came back and became part of the mechanism of our current wars as we all know.
PTSD and addiction are fueled by the denial of the past. When I was younger I used to be one of those “history doesn’t matter”people. I lived in
Obama is also a fan of forensics. Palin is not – “there you go Joe, going back into the past”, “it doesn’t matter how global warming happened, now we have to fix it”. That sort of shit.
As McCain has not processed his past, he is a prisoner to it. It lives with him everyday and plays in sensuround like a big gory Walt Disney movie on acid. Also as it is unprocessed, anything can trigger it, and he will betray himself or his wiser instincts. A reporter looks at him the wrong way, and that look reminds him of his dad, the v.c., or whomever and he reacts erratically and way out of proportion. McCain won’t look at Obama in the debate, because he's not just his opponent in the election, he’s the scourge trying to ruin his country, he’s the man that beat him with a belt when he was five.
I think this may also explain his personal shifts in policy. Anything that goes untreated gets worse. So by the time he was made the candidate as the 2008 model of the Republican, he was triggered through the roof. As his campaign motto states, it’s “country first”. Not John McCain first or what I really believe first. It’s party first, and to betray that means death. I think it’s why he’s become more ossified and craggy physically, why he can’t raise his hands above his head. He is literally straight-jacketed by his past and his party.
2. I have a crush on Joe BidenI am lucky enough to have a friend who is as obsessed with the current theater of politics as I. When the v..p. nominations came around, we discussed the possibilities, and for several weeks I secretly wanted the v.p. to be Joe Biden.
I accept that most of this election is a movie. As a political casting director, there was no one better to me than Biden to be in Obama’s buddy movie. He looks like Gene Hackman, he’s goofy, strident, and in touch with his emotions. He's fire to Obama’s ice, a perfect Captain Kirk to Obama’s Dr. Spock. Plus he gives great liberal tirade in the spirit of a Frank Capra movie:
I like the fact that he has hair plugs, that he obviously loves and lusts after his wife, and that he asserted to Palin that you don’t need to be a woman to care about your kids, which really was a great moment in feminist history. Plus he’s been touched by awful personal tragedy, which could make anyone an embittered asshole, and he’s been in the senate for aeons which could make anyone pompous, but he can laugh at himself:
