#if anyone is evil its macnamara

[chartedrights]

Unpopular opinion but because everybody’s been hating on Jane since like. Day fucking one. I am officially a Jane Stan. I don’t care what she does I’m taking it in, thinking critically about it, and accepting it I haven’t even seen Jane’s A Car she could straight up run over a man and I’d be like “girl power” because somebody has to overcompensate for the complete and utter lack of appreciation for Jane Perkins and her being a flawed and nevertheless worthwhile and possibly good person. Everyone in Hatchetfield gets to be morally grey but I’ve seen people calling Jane all kinds of names and insinuating that her marriage to Tom was unhealthy or abusive or that she was a bad sister or a bad mother before she ever appeared so fuck it. Jane Stan.

#hatchetfield #tgwdlm #nightmare time #black friday #starkid #I just think she deserves to be evil after her death. as a treat. #like there is NO INDICATION that she was bad or evil before her death #and now she’s dead and in a car apparently like are you telling me that woulen’t screw you up? it would screw me up #be nice to Jane #Emma and Tom and Tim cleaely loved her a lot #nobody is ever like gosh... remember how evil jane was.... so why r yall like this #if anyone is evil its macnamara

[ramrodd]

A Child's Christmas in Hanoi: What are your memories of Senator John McCain? His proudest moments in the public eye..

COMMENTARY:

My favorite memory of J. Sidney McCain is Christmas 1967 when I heard his name for the first time. I was a junior in college and home for the holidays and at a friend’s home inside the moat at Ft. Monroe. Sargeant Pepper and Ode to Billy Joe defined the musical milieu in the way Sounds of Silence defined Christmas 1965 and the draft call-ups had changed the mood on campus. Someway powerful forces had been set into motion and the connection to the Zippo Monks to the message of the Sounds of Silence has been like a spreading spiritual oil slick ever since and in Christmas 1967, Tet 68 was still two months away and the civilian community still believed the war could be won.

I knew that we were going to lose the battle but bleed the Soviet Union’s bank account dry in the porcess. I was an ROTC cadet. Plan A of my career path was to get an ROTC commission and end my career at Ft Monroe 30 years later as the Commanding General of Tradoc. I knew when the first Zippo Monk appeared on the CBS Nightly News in 1963 that there wasn’t any hurry getting to Vietnam because whatever the godless commie cocksuckers were going to do, all the Army women and children were out of the country and back in the states and, before the Diem brothers were assassinated, America had a lot of options. After, none at all, And then JFK was killed and the MacNamara Whiz Kids began to spool themselves up for what Vietnam became and, by 1965, before the drafts and the Sounds of Silence, my dad casually explained that the Army’s response to Hanoi’s challenge was to conduct a war of attrition by proxy against the economy of the Soviet Union. The whole thing about body counts was to constantly goad the Soviets to match their material investment in the annexation by force of the Republic of Vietnam by the Soviet’s fellow godless commie cocksukers of Hanor of the moral cost being paid by their fellow fearless and altruistic comrades in the Delta. Our goal was never to attrit Hanoi, a fallacy repeated in the Ken Burns’ Vietnam: they were just the bait in the Great Game and the Soviets had to take it,

And, now, the Soviet Union is no more. In 1967, it never entered my mind that the Soviet Union would ever be no more: it was never really a strategic objective. Our primary objective was for the Soviets to belay their insurgency doctrine and tend to their own domestic welfare. Korea was as close as anyone wanted to come to what a slug-fest between the Red Army and the rest of the world would have looked like. Khrushev’s generation had paid a terrible price to get to the place where they could put up the Sputnik and match our nuclear arsenal. Their ideology required constant violent revolution as the essential economic engine: its the nature of Marxism as an Imperial mechanism. Russian had been transformed by Marxism and crushed an evil foe to forge a new society. In 1967, I wouldn’t have used those words, but that was mey essential grasp of the geopolitical status and the idea that a Marxist would pull the plug on Soviet Marxism EVER never entered my mind. Hanoi proved we couldn’t beat them by attrition and I knew that at Christmas 1967.

The hostess was opining on the “soul” of Bobby Gentry in Ode to Billy Joe which was a typical college dorm room bullshit session and it was nice being home at Christmas and lighting in the living room was defined by the Christmas Tree and she, the hostess, gave me a mission to bring some more crunchy stuff to eat as we settled into the pleasant and snug comfort of ghost stories before the yule log, Dylan Thomas and all that.

So, I went out to the kitchen where the Colonel and Missus were sitting at the table and another couple their rank and age, neighbors, were sitting around enjoying their own Christmas spirits and they were talking about John McCain. Ft Monroe did a lot of business with the Norfolk Naval Base across the James River and just being in that business for close to 30 years, the visiting couple knew McCain’s parents on a social basis as part of the larger professional relationship.

I don’t really think I remembered his name from that encounter and it runs in my mind that he had just surfaced in a French propaganda film of him in the Hanoi hospital. The important thing was that he was alive and a confirmed POW. Then, I took the munchies back to the party.

It is less a memory about him than a bench mark in my own life. I was fully aware of what lay ahead for him and the differences in our circumstances. mine, Epicurian, his, Stoic and, both expressions of Duty. He got shot down doing his duty. Shit happens. I would keep the faith with him in the fullness of time, but there wasn’t any hurry.

As a bench mark, my memory of McCain was the last time I had any real control of Plan A. In 1970, I would abandon Plan A when the moral basis blew up entirely in my face and my first mission was to get out of the Army without being courtmartialed for some act of gross insubordination. I had no Plan B, but, in 1967, Plan A was progressing smoothly and it proved to be a pivotal moment in the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam.

Unlike John Bolton and Trump, I kept the faith with J. Sidney. He and I were both military brats and, like Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm, we all grew up in the same moral atmosphere: Duty, Honor, Country. Becoming a POW is a gateway prospect for thoughts of suicide in a save the last bullet for yourself kind of way and it comes with the territory. To be or not to be.

At Christmas, 1967, I knew that the Army knew that the godless commie cocksukers were going to stage an offensive in the Spring of 1968, with Tet an obvious phase line of some sort. The Army wanted them to come out and play in the sunshine and the MAC-V planners even put Khe Sahn out there as bait to shape the battle field. I wouldn’t know any of that until after the fact and an accumulation of details over time, but I did know there was going to be a big fight coming up.

What I didn’t know was that it was going to end up in Chicago in August. The enchantment of Camelot became complete and the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam has shaped our national dialogue and collective decision making ever since and Donald Trump is a logical outcome. 1967 was the last magical Christmas for me and J. Sidney was a part of that magic.

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#transformingamericafirst