Remember the good old days, when Combat! blog was primarily about me getting angry at Victoria Floethe and other children of privilege masquerading as writers, politicians and intellectuals? That sort of masquerade is for children of the middle class, bitches, and don’t you ever forget it, but I digress. My point is, in our haste to actually address elements of contemporary American society that will be of interest to more than one obsessive man in his eerily unfurnished apartment, we at Combat! blog have forgotten our roots. Those roots are regularly dyed, and they totally look amazing and not trashy at all. They belong to Meghan McCain, the daughter of longtime senator and former candidate for President John McCain, and she is still working away at her weekly column in the Daily Beast, which has nothing to do with her being John McCain’s daughter but was instead awarded to her out of respect for her astute political analysis and talent as a writer, as demonstrated by her bestselling book, My Dad, John McCain. Seriously, that’s the title of her book. According to the New York Observer, she’s also got another book in the works for Hyperion, which contract she secured with the help of “the literary agent she shares with her father, Sterling Lord Literistic president Flip Brophy.” Every time I try to understand that clause, my brain slips out of the socket. If you’re like me, you can’t wait six months for Meghan McCain to write a whole damn book, even if it does cover “topics ranging from what the party needs to do to attract others like her, to the importance of technology in reaching out to younger voters, to what needs to be done to keep young people passionate and involved in politics in the future.” I’m assuming the word “Twitter” appears in this book several hundred times, but until I find out I will have to content myself with her Daily Beast columns, which finally brings us to the topic of today’s blog: Meghan McCain is a rich little fascist who can’t think and would right now be gradually developing a cocaine problem in the the stock room of some ASU college bar had her dad not run for President. Ours is a broken meritocracy. Won’t you join me for lunch at Schadenfreude’s?
McCain’s contribution to American discourse for this week is entitled “Why Does Hollywood Hate Our Troops?” Hollywood has long refused to glorify war, preferring instead to make sober meditations on the futility of violence like Pearl Harbor, 300 and Glory. Me-Mac asks a valid question, which she then goes on to not even consider, much less answer. Instead, she contents herself with statements like, “I don’t care if every producer, director, and screenwriter in Hollywood is against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and presumably most are), what offends me is the portrayal of soldiers as cowards and lunatics—driven to such lengths that they come home and try to kill their families.” First of all, nice comma splice, Columbia graduate and professional writer Meghan McCain. Second of all, those of you who have seen the director’s cut of Saving Private Ryan, in which Tom Hanks returns home and immediately murders his entire family, know that movies relentlessly portray American soldiers as homicidal cowards.
Never mind the McCain is the only person who seems to regard the Tobey Maguire character, who returns to the United States after he is captured by the Taliban and presumed dead, as a “deserter.” Or that she uses the phrase “goes AWOL” to describe the mental breakdown that leads him to try to kill his wife and brother. Just because Meghan McCain grew up in a military family—whose multigenerational commitment to the armed forces shaped, she claims, her entire value system—doesn’t mean she should know the meaning of the most familiar military acronym after ASAP. Meghan McCain’s point is not that Holly wood hates our troops, or that Brothers is even a movie about the war in Afghanistan. It’s that she loves our troops very much, and she thinks that America should win wars, and she hopes we will mistake that for a political position.
It’s not. Everybody in America is rooting for America to win its various wars, and we all support the troops. The difference between you and us, Meghan McCain—besides the millions of dollars and the direct line to the US Senate that you acquired immediately upon successfully being born—is that you think a movie about a crazy guy who comes home from Afghanistan is more important than the reasoning that sent 100,000 sane guys there in the first place. Maybe “support our troops” is your position on the war because “foster the development of a centralized government that will eventually become powerful and profitable enough to have an incentive to stabilize the rural areas of the country” or “attend to the lessons of history in the region” are a little too nuanced for you to understand. It’s almost as if you ascended to a position of national prominence not for your insight into world events, but by an accident of your birth.
It’s totally uncool to make cracks about her weight, though. That’s just not fair.
Give MM some credit. Why, just a few weeks ago, she took a tough position on military strategy, which she obviously knows something about: “President Obama, I am asking you to give this military full support and the troop numbers they are asking for. And anything less than 40,000 is a failure. Let them win, Mr. President.”
Happy 500th post, Combat! And what a way to hit that milestone.
Here’s what she’s NOT up to: enlisting.
That is true, but I bet the draftdodger that wtote the blog never enlisted either
I think that’s actually the hat that pleasantly curvy girls wear. Just saying. Also, I think it would be funny to release a parody book called “John McCain: My Dad?” that calls for a DNA test at the end.