Guest post: McCain and Vietnam

From a friend:

I was an undergraduate when John McCain was flying bombing missions over the Vietnamese People (yes there was “collateral damage”). As an anthropology major I was learning about the cross-cultural approach and cultural relativism. And the science of anthropology afforded me a new perspective on foreign relations.
I still have the cassette tape recording of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations investigating the origins of the “Vietnam” War. There was testimony by an OSS officer who was attached to the Việt Minh during WWII, and he said that Ho Chi Minh greatly admired the USA because it had fought for its freedom against the British Empire. The OSS officer continued stating that Ho had hoped that the USA would help the Vietnamese People win their independence from the French Empire after the Japanese Empire had been defeated. But the Senate chambers fell silent when the OSS officer finally said that Ho felt that a big powerful country like America could never become interested in a small country like Vietnam.
The United States of America was the enemy. The People of Vietnam were fighting for their independence from the French Empire, the Japanese Empire, and finally from the American Empire. Most people should now have that horrific image of Kim Phuc burned and scarred for life by American napalm dropped from an airplane on her village.

John McCain (1936-2018)

I have sympathy for his family, and I wished him no suffering, ever. But I still have a hard time with the "war hero" thing. He was bombing brown people in a country that was never a threat to the US (I sense a theme in US history there). He was defending capitalist imperialism (after the French gave up); not "freedom" in any humanistic sense.

The Ongoing Trump Shit-Storm

It's been hard to write about this, because it seems like whenever something happens, and I might be starting to have a coherent thought about it, something else happens before I can put anything together.

There's no need at this point to go through the litany.  It's obvious to any rational person that Trump is his own shit-storm.  It's also pretty obvious that rather than having any actual political philosophy, he simply sees the world and everything happening in it in terms of how it might affect him, personally.  He operates under something that used to be called the Illusion of Central Position.  Babies and very young children have this illusion: the world is there for them, they are at the center of it all.  And this is Trump.  No matter what happens, in his reactions he makes sure we know that it was all about him.