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 