John McCain seems to be a pretty nice guy. Former Navy fighter pilot, five and a half years as a Prisoner of War during the Vietnam War, and, it’s been amply documented, he throws a mean barbecue.
You would expect all of that from a Southwesterner. They’re tough, like New Englanders, except not quite as seemingly unfriendly as their northeastern brethren, who are used to long winter months in isolation from their neighbors.
First thing after the roads thaw and they can get around with reasonable ease, New Englanders hold a town meeting, complete with a potluck dinner of baked beans and a huge variety of homemade pies. One might think the town meeting is to conduct town business, such as deciding whether to put a door on the town secretary’s office. Actually, the meeting is a chance to see who survived the winter.
Southesterners, such as Arizonans, on the other hand, can hold a barbecue any time they please. And they do. They expend huge amounts of time and treasure fine-tuning their secret recipes, and holding contests to see whose recipe is best, and which hot peppers give it just the right burning sensation.
But I’m getting doggone tired of John McCain prefacing nearly every statement with “My friends.”
I have no real doubt I’d like to be friends with John McCain. We could sit on the porch and watch younger folks brand little doggies and compare the bite from a jar of our most recent barbecue concoction.
But in many parts of this great nation, when someone says, “My friend,” it’s usually the preface to an admonishment that what we’d just done, or were about to do, was, or will be, a stellar example of colossal stupidity, and possibly abject disrespect toward our fellow planetarians.
And then he backs it up with reference to how one day he was flying along in his jet fighter and someone stuck an exploding rocket up his tailpipe and he spent the next five-and-a-half years as the imprisoned guest of some fairly un-nice people.
For which he deserves a lot of credit and our undying thanks — as do thousands of other young men who have gone off to war in our name, and come home missing significant parts of their bodies and minds.
But that doesn’t qualify them to run a war or a country, though it has made some of them sort of forgetful about such fine points as where to find their home, and more than a few of them look for a place to hide when a passing truck backfires.
So, John, stop calling me, “My friend,” unless you plan to stop by for some ribs one evening soon, and stop telling me about being a POW unless you’re ready to show how it has some real bearing on how you’d deal with the world as it is nearly 40 years later.
Because it’s beginning to look as though your only qualifications for the Highest Office in the Land are your abilities to survive what lots of women survive for lots longer than five years, and still make some mighty fine barbecue.
