This is the story of a young man who decided to create a podcast about politics, technology and everything else. Along the way he stumbled upon the intersection of Hollywood and Washington and decided to describe what he saw.
Present Day, U.S.A.
A McCarthy like senator sits besides the podium waiting to address the Republican National Convention as their nominee for Vice President of the United States. Two army officers frantically search the hall for a ticking bomb. But the bomb has already been set...it’s a man programed to kill by a foreign power and in moments he is about to strike....
The plot from a Hollywood movie from the ‘60s, perhaps the next episode of 24 or something closer to reality. Follow me down the rabbit hole to find out:
Cross posted to The Ruins of Empire
The man in question is the scion of a powerful political family. Served his nation on a foreign land, against the godless communist hordes. He was captured by the enemy and the released and returned home a hero. But then something happened after he came home. He turned against the system, he became a maverick. He had the enemy in his sites and was about to shoot him down once and for all.
In Hollywood’s version his name is Raymond Shaw, Sergeant U.S. Army. The war is Korea and his captors are Chinese. In real life his name is John McCain, naval aviator. The war is Vietnam, his captors, Vietnamese. Their biographies are similar. Both fight the communist hordes in Asia, both are captured and tortured by the enemy and both come home as decorated heroes. There are some differences as well. Shaw has a incestuous relationship with his mother, who is an enemy agent and his controller. McCain love-hate relationship is with America and in particular the press. Their targets are also different. One seeks to shoot down a presidential candidate, the other the Republic.
But it is in their similarities that Hollywood’s vision of mass hysteria and government induced fear meets the reality of today. Inside the words and action of a modern day politician, these two figures collide head on. Shaw was a puppet of his captors and his society, McCain is a slave to his ambition and twisted view of his own nation. The Maverick who once challenged religious conservatives and dirty politics now embraces both with a wink and a nod. A casualty of a misbegotten war ten thousand miles away champions another misguided imperial project. The question is why?
In Shaw’s case its easy to see. He was captured tortured and then brainwashed to kill without fear or remorse. His captors turned his world upside down, right was wrong, good was evil, etc. For McCain, his capture and tortured reinforced his sense that his country was always right and anyone that dared to oppose it was always wrong. The inhumanity of his real life torture created in him a sense of hyper-America. What must be true of both, in the twin worlds of fiction and reality, is that they carry a heavy patrician burden, a noblesse oblige, that forces them to hurl themselves at their enemies. The irony is that while the Robert Shaw, the character, turned out to be a simple assassin, McCain could very well become the Senator on the podium, a modern day McCarthy, destroyer of the very thing he has sacrifice so much for.