1 Boring Old Man

Something else stuck in my mind from McCain’s speech yesterday. It was a sensible point, sort of. I’ll just say it the way I recall it. He said we can’t deal with people the way we want them to be. We have to deal with the way they are. We can’t just look for the good in people, he said. He was making a point about the anti-war forces in our country. I don’t disagree with what he is saying at a fundamental level.

I recall thinking about that back in the sixties when the hippies were saying "No War," "Peace," "Drugs, Sex, and Rock and Roll." "No War" sounded naive to me. It was a great idea, but about as realistic as "Drugs, Sex, and Rock and Roll" – a dream. It was irresponsible – a way of saying "Screw You" to the generation that came before, but hardly a political program. I thought a lot about that back then. I was opposed to the Viet Nam War. My friends killed there died for nothing that seemed to justify their deaths. So, I didn’t much care for War in general. But I saw it as marking the limits of man’s tolerance – sort of like I saw spanking children. My daughter has said she was never spanked. That’s not at all true. The whack when she was out of control was there whenever needed. But she was never spanked in the sense of, "Just you wait until your father gets home." War is like that to me, when all else fails – it’s what you do to manage out of control people.

But McCain was implying that the anti-War forces in this country are talking "hippie talk." I’m opposed to the Iraq War too. It was ill-conceived. It is a war of aggression. By any parameter, it was a mistake. I think if we look at the Iraqi people and how they’ve acted, it was George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld that were naive, looking for only the good in people. They are the ones who said the Iraqis would greet us as liberators and embrace Democracy. They are the ones that didn’t deal with "how people really are." When McCain says we "owe it to the Iraqi people," he’s ignoring the actions of the Iraqi people. When he talks about winning in Iraq, he’s hoping for a peace there. If there has ever been a peace in Iraq that’s not imposed by force, I don’t know about it.