I know. I have never unbalanced myself to this point in discussing the coming elections in America. Everyone seems to have jumped on the wagon cart of the loons dispensing opinions and declarations. No. I am not riding on the Bandwagon with the mad, the delusional and the dreamers. I am going to bite on a bullet and stand by the way side as far away as possible as I can from the many wagons piled high with humanity. I am going to let them ride on and pass me by.
In Asia where I grew up , respect for one's elders is a given. It truly is an effort to with hold my esteem or respect for McCain.
He will be the oldest man who has run for President in the United States. Now in Asia, such as India and China being elderly is a wonderful quality to have, unless one is a mutant or a cretin. Age is revered because one who has lived the vicissitudes of Life - 78 years in McCain's case, must perforce have seen, heard and learned a thing or two to pass on to the next generation and the one after that.
I'm sure hard knocks have pounded some lessons into him. Is that enough to elect him President?
Why is his record in the military still classified? Hardly the transparency one would expect from a man who appears to talk the straight talk.
Soviet agents highly skilled in manipulating the minds and the hearts of those in prison usually interrogated most if not all American POW's. The reasons for this are several. I would venture a more esoteric one. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong considered being in the same room with an American pilot who bombed and ''Phosphored'' his cities, thereby slaughtering civilians a horrid form of contamination. As Buddhists they would be breathing the same air. Buddhists do not believe in killing any living being, not even a bug. But Buddhists also believe in fighting back if one is attacked through no provocation.
Just look at the monks of Chaolin who developed a system of masterful Kung Fu and Wushu Arts many thousands of years ago. The Tibetan monks are not to be trifled with either. But who can fight bombs which rain down more thickly than the monsoon and typhoon rains? At a certain point in the year, the typhoons cease and Vietnam would enter what is known as the dry season. The bombs remained a constant - unrelenting and merciless.
I am not going to seriously consider what former POW's have said. That is tainted. Memories may be implanted, exaggerated, imagined or simply fabricated. I have no doubt that the POW's suffered. No matter how you cut it, slice it, dress it up or down being a prisoner in any country and of anyone is not a piece of honey cake.
The question put by the Media and by Sheeple is ''Did the American prisoners of War collaborate with the Vietnamese?" It's a Dumb and fruitless question. Did the captured German soldiers give information to the Russians and/or the Allies? What of the soldiers and officers serving in the Red Army? Let's not forget the vaunted British upper lip. Did they remain steadfast and keep mum? Etc. Etc. Etc? Are we all living in the Land of Make - Believe? Most certainly!
Of course many prisoners collaborated in some form with their captors! They could not help it. They may ave been tricked, duped,drugged, bribed with medicines and food or quite plainly put - beaten and tortured.
I am not going to waste my time and yours quoting several so-called experts on torture in the West. I am not going to emphasize the fact that some spies undergo special training, which render them less impervious to physical and most importantly psychological pain. Criminy. Most of the prisoners knew as much about what was going on in their Generals's minds as their civilians, which is nada.
Back to my question. Do prisoners of war collaborate in some way, shape or form with their captors? Yes!
I am going to quote Pyotr, a handsome KGB officer who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Rome. His official title was First Secretary of the Embassy.
Allow me to give you some background. When Igor Moiseyev, Director and Creator of the Moiseyev Dance Troupe performed in Florence, he and his entire group of dancers, musicians and acrobats (nearly a hundred souls) attended a dinner I hosted in his honor at the Villa of the Saracen in Bellosguardo.
I paid a call on the Maestro during rehearsals. I could not fail to notice a tall and striking man dressed in Armani. He stood out. He moved gracefully but did not possess the dancer's grace. He had an aura of unmistakeable authority. A perfect physique du Role.
''That has to be the KGB officer in charge of overseeing Maestro Moiseyev and all the members of his troupe.He does not belong with any of them."
Indeed, to come to the Villa, the Maestro had to inform Pyotr of my invitation and obtain his permission. This was in February of 1979, the Soviet Army had occupied Afghanistan since December of 1978, a mere three months earlier. Pyotr became Gorbachev's interpreter/ intelligence Advisor durig Perestojka and Glasnost. He is now Ambassador of Russia to a vitally important country. Of course I will not tell you. This essay is on a need to know basis.
In a separate essay I shall elaborate on my friendship with Pyotr.
''Do you think that POW's wittingly and/or unwittingly collaborate with their captors and their enemies?" I once asked him years after our formal meeting on that wintry night at the Great Hall of the Villa of the Saracen.
''Isabella, no matter how hard a prisoner might try not to collaborate, we have ways of weaving questions and statements so that even a refusal to answer on the part of a prisoner constitutes a reply to our question or questions. Even their behavior in the camps tells us a great deal about the individuals and their various breaking points."
Are we going to hold his collaboration with his captors against poor Senator McCain? As for his borderline mental stability, that should not be an issue. The world has been led and governed by a multitude of despots, tyrants, drunkards, addicts, killers, mass murderers, abusive and negligent men who cared not an iota for their people or their families. The world continued round and round, but was it any better?
What I am attempting to point out is that we are so used to our Leaders coping with the problems of the state and the world in a psychotic manner, no one seems to protest or even comment about it.
Many in the West are stuffed with anti-depressants, manic depressants and pills for every occasion.The individual who is not on something is the weird one. So, what's a little psychosis among us?
Jacquelie Susann, who authored ''The Valley of the Dolls'' could not have been more prescient. In those days only the individuals in the Entertainment Industry had access to those lovely dolls - the pills which made you high or low and gave you the perception that you were a winner instead of a loser. Today, even babies are in a stupor as they crawl in the midst of the Valley of the Dolls.
I reiterate, come November, the American people will vote between the bad and the worst. Who is the bad and who is the worst? Perhaps even the Creator is so nauseated even He does not want to know - but want to or not, we will find out.
Buon giorno, Isabella,
ReplyDeleteVery interesting post, which keeps the reader wondering. I would love to know more about the KGB people who came to your villa in Firenze.
By the way, McCain isn't 78 -- he just became 72 this past August!
I'd like to mention that in the mid-60's when Jackie Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" appeared, entertainment people weren't the only ones who had access to "dolls." I remember that as far back as 1957, a book came out called "The Aspirin Age" which was all about how uppers and downers were widely prevalent in society.
I'd like to see the headline "borderline psycho" aspect of your post expanded. As to the "elderly" part, McCain's age hasn't been an overriding point in the campaign, perhaps because the Obama side realizes to lean too heavily on it would turn off seniors.
A presto,
Jeanne
Buon giorno, Isabella,
ReplyDeleteVery interesting post, which keeps the reader wondering. I would love to know more about the KGB people who came to your villa in Firenze.
By the way, McCain isn't 78 -- he just became 72 this past August!
I'd like to mention that in the mid-60's when Jackie Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" appeared, entertainment people weren't the only ones who had access to "dolls." I remember that as far back as 1957, a book came out called "The Aspirin Age" which was all about how uppers and downers were widely prevalent in society.
I'd like to see the headline "borderline psycho" aspect of your post expanded. As to the "elderly" part, McCain's age hasn't been an overriding point in the campaign, perhaps because the Obama side realizes to lean too heavily on it would turn off seniors.
A presto,
Jeanne
Some Japanese- style "haiku" poems I've jotted down spontaneously in the past few minutes:
ReplyDeleteSarah Palin:
Caribou and Wolf
Are like twins under the sky.
Which one should I shoot?
John McCain:
Many loves have I.
Family values are the Tao,
So I change my wives.
Barak Obama:
Dreams of Africa
Have persuaded me to leave
My poor brother there.
Joe Biden:
By the waters of
Babylon, I lay down and
Kept my AIPAC cash.
Oh and as for leaders who are either "mentally ill" (whatever that is!) and/or users of drugs, a few thoughts:
ReplyDeleteFirst, although I do believe that some kinds of brain disease do exist, that's not what most Americans mean by "mental illness". I agree for the most part with the thesis of Dr Thomas Szasz in his book, "The Myth of Mental Illness", 1960; he says America's culture of "therapy" is mostly about political
thought-control, suppressing creativity and independent thinking. And significantly, that book was published just one year before "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (one of my favourites), set in a mental hospital where most of the inmates were VOLUNTARILY committed and could have walked out any time if they'd had the courage.
And in the 40-odd years since then,
Nurse Ratched has tightened her grip over American minds and, dare I say, American men's balls too.
(I'm lighting a cigarette as I write this, just to piss off Nurse Ratched. Sorry, dear Isabel, I know you'd prefer for your friends to abstain from polluting our bodies, but I'm smoking as an act of POLITICAL REBELLION! ;-) And at least I'm only polluting my lungs, not my mind...)
Was the old Soviet Union so different, really, from today's American regime of so-called "mental health"? The USSR used to say that anyone who didn't believe in Communism was ipso facto "mentally ill". America's equivalent of that, today, is to tell the suffering to "stop whining", and to bruit all kinds of
psychological snake-oil through the ministrations of Oprah and Doctor Phil who propagate the evil old Calvinist heresy that wealth is a reward for virtue, and that poverty and suffering are always well-deserved - the words of the Antichrist.
But now as for leaders who drug themselves, well as the main drug of choice in our civilisation has long been alcohol, here are a few anecdotes:
General Grant of the American Civil War drank like a squid. But he won battles. So when one of Lincoln's puritanical cabinet members complained about Grant's drinking, Lincoln replied, "I wish all of my other generals would drink whatever Grant is drinking!"
(Oh and Lincoln was chronically depressed. Today he would be called "mentally ill", and if antidepressants had existed in 1863, Lincoln probably would never have written the Gettysburg Address.)
America's founders all had pipes on their desks at Independence Hall (in my home city!), and as it was legal to grow hemp back then, some of them probably used marijuana. (By the way, I don't use it because it doesn't agree with me, but I think it should be legalised.) And many of them were half-drunk by noon, at Independence Hall, WHILE they were debating American independence and waging war.
(Yeah well they were all risking being hanged, so can you blame them for drinking?)
William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister during the Napoleonic wars, died in his 40s of liver disease from too much drinking. He went through around three bottles of brandy a day. (Again, can you blame him?)
Most of the Limey sailors of the Royal Navy were drunk when they won the battle of Trafalgar. Same goes for the English Tommies (including my kin, I'm proud to say) at Waterloo - and the only difference between them and the officers was that the officers drank better stuff, and even more of it.
And Jesus and his Apostles enjoyed wine, and I'm inclined to think - and I'd actually LIKE to think - that his apostles got properly drunk on Holy Thursday night.
But Adolf Hitler was a teetotaler and non-smoker, who willfully poisoned his mind and soul in worse ways than any drug could ever do.
I prefer the more modest kinds of poisons like beer and tobacco, over the preternatural kinds of mental and spiritual poisons that otherwise apparently "sober" men like Hitler and Lenin use. I always say, "Never trust a man who has no petty vices", because as a general rule, if a man has no petty vices, then you can bet that probably the BIGGEST vice - the vice of spiritual arrogance, the vice of Lucifer - has taken possession of him.
Lucifer was totally sober when he rebelled against God in full, almost perfectly intelligent and clear, consciousness. Lucifer was totally sane and sober when he condemned himself to Hell.