In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy. … At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said ‘You’re getting a little thin up there.’ McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, ‘At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c—.’
This article, Head of State, comes from an unexpected source – the October 20 issue of The American Conservative. The thrust of the article is that John McCain could possibly be a victim of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The author, Jim Pittaway, is a licensed psychotherapist (practicing in Missoula) who has worked for a decade in a multidisciplinary rehabilitation program for victims of TBI.
I have a hard time in my mind casting John McCain as a victim. Indeed he acted in service to his country when he bombed the North Vietnamese, but said service was disreputable. We were a technologically superior society unleashing the totality of our killing machine on an agrarian country. John McCain was shot down while under cover of official duty, but his actions are rightly seen as crimes when stripped of the official cover of military necessity. He was captured, imprisoned, and, if he is telling us the truth, tortured. The torture was of a low-tech variety, where he was beaten and repeatedly went in to states of unconsciousness, only to be revived and beaten again. It was truly inhuman – what he did, and what was done to him.
Pittaway maintains that an individual cannot undergo such trauma without long-lasting effects, and that McCain has never been treated for these effects – is in fact in denial that such treatment could have affected him at all. As a result, he is a walking bomb, and man who Phoenix mayor Paul Johnson says is “in the area of being unstable.”
Pittaway says “He is always angry at someone, or he is looking for something to be angry about.” He should be consigned to blogging, and leave public office to the more stable types.
Interesting background on the effects of blunt head trauma on international affairs:
Under the Plantagenets, the long-suffering people of England were stuck with nearly 300 years of virtually continuous, ruinous, and fruitless wars of almost no conceivable purpose beyond demonstrating that they were boss in France. (It turned out they weren’t.) Similarly, McCain buys unconditionally into the idea that a diverse world—particularly the Islam-believing, oil-producing component—must recognize that the president of the United States is in charge.
It’s one thing to believe something like that. The question is how much violence you are willing to expend in pursuit of such a notion. The Plantagenet answer was simple: we will use all the blood and treasure we can extort from the people we control in pursuit of power over people who resist us. John McCain gives the same answer, without ambiguity or qualification.
From the time of Henry II until very recently, it was assumed that the peculiar Plantagenet temperament was inherited rather than acquired—they were called “Devil’s spawn,” and their rages and obsessions were Shakespearian in intensity. But insights derived from modern understanding of concussions, coma, strokes, sepsis, and the damage they do to brain tissue—and the effects these incidents have on human emotions and behavior—casts these particular rulers in a very different light.
Coming of age in Plantagenet times involved putting an iron bucket over your head and flailing about with broadswords, clubs, maces, and an assortment of heavy objects in the direction of other young men similarly accessorized, until you or your opponent broke major bones or lost consciousness. Then, with everybody revived—except those who were dead, fractured, or in a coma—the practice was to put the iron bucket back on your head, get on your horse, and charge at each other with maximum velocity until someone was unhorsed, generally landing on his head, which was still encased in that iron bucket.
We know enough about the damage blows can do to heads encased in high-tech football helmets or struck frequently with padded gloves. Imagine the brain damage a prince had to acquire before he was deemed fit to be king.
So, those games we used to play as a kid, where my brothers would put a bucket over my head and hit it with a baseball bat – those games were not so innocent after all. I should have known.
In the Tudor case of Henry VIII, we have an individual whose life has been chronicled in such tedious detail that we can identify with specificity what clinicians call “precipitating events.” We know that, in addition to any damage done in training, he was unhorsed in a tournament trying to impress Anne Boleyn. This left him unconscious, probably in a coma, for several days, as did another fall from a horse while riding in the country, shortly before he had Boleyn beheaded. Although this man was afflicted by numerous ailments, a recent publication by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons maintains that his remarkable cognitive and emotional degeneration was substantially due to progressively more severe organic brain damage incurred during the course of his violent life.
George W. Bush presents as a shallow man, incurious and seemingly indifferent to the suffering of others. He undertook impulsive actions with dire long-term consequences. He didn’t realize the fury of the force he was unleashing – he didn’t think it through. (But Cheney did – that is more worrisome.) He’s a lesson in why the guy you want to have a beer with is not necessarily the guy you want to be president.
McCain is something worse, if that is possible – a man who knows first-hand that war is hell, who suffers from “unregulated anger, impulsivity, inability to tolerate ambiguity”. Who is more dangerous? Hopefully, we won’t have to find out.
Piece of Mindful 
That is a fascinating article. However, I recall reading that McCain as a child threw violent tantrums and his parents forced him into baths of ice water in an effort to control him. (That may, in itself, be considered torture, so maybe McCain’s problem is genetic, and is exacerbated by his reinforcing experiences in life). Nonetheless, I am not a psychologist, but it is more than obvious, and has been for a long time, that McCain is decidedly unstable, and in no way should be entrusted with the presidency of the U.S.
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Wasn’t the Plantagenet reign mainly concerned with civil war?
John McCain is fine. Under modern psychology, even normal behavior can get classified as clinical.
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Mark, I follow some of your rantings about McCain, and I just have to say that the fact that you diminish his time in capture or question if he were really tortured or not really comes off as left-wing, bat shit crazy talk.
Now, I don’t disagree with your sentiments upon McCain’s stability or your thoughts of him as a presidental candidate… but the rest of the malarky… is nutter talk. Yes, he bombed the North Vietnames. But, giving him the blame for that seems childish, when the governemt of our country deserved the blame, not the soilder. Sure, he might have believed in the bombing, but who gives a shit. He likely wouldn’t have been there to do it withough being enrolled in our military.
Anyhow, just drop the bullshit about if McCain was really tortured or not, or how he was a war criminal for participating in bombings. Guess what? A lot of Americans were over there bombing – all veterans. Who may or may not have thought they were doing the right thing at the time.
Yes, McCain is unstable. Concentrate on that. This other bullshit you encite only diminishes the quality of your blog.
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Fair enough Drylander.
Part of the base coat of paint we are all given in this country is that our soldiers only fight fair and for freedom, and that our enemies are evil. I reject that narrative, and am careful not to let it creep in here. McCain is no hero, hte North Vietnamese (and South) were victims. If tht puts me outside the bounds of proper society, so be it.
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I think that McCain’s propensity for misogeny, on top of a fiery temperament and hard drinking past – even before being shot down – do make his claims to be the right man for the job rather questionable. I like the way Obama rises above it all though, and leaves McCain wallowing in his own foul detritus.
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>>>>and that our enemies are evil. I reject that narrative
It is fair enough if you want to be a “citizen of the World” and view it all with objectivity from a distance, but it seems to me you make the same mistake by adopting the propaganda of the other side as some sort of dialectic counterbalance.
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fifthdecade: McCain has lived a much more public life than Obama, so we have more to hold against McCain. By design and temperament, Obama’s proclivities are more hidden. Apparently his undergraduate years were a drug-dabbling ennui, so I’m not sure we would be getting a better product.
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We don’t know anything about Obama but …
If we make shit up, it must be true …
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>>>>If we make shit up, it must be true …
Pretty well covers the attitude toward McCain and Palin.
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