Bucket list postponed…

Yesterday’s visit to the oncologist resolved a dilemma I had been agonizing over for several weeks.  The question I faced was whether I should prepare my “bucket list” or should I renew my magazine subscriptions.  Time and Food Network Magazine will be pleased to learn I am renewing for another year.  I am not so optimistic as to take advantage of their special two-year rates but the spots on my lung and liver have remained benign and the esophageal cancer does not seem to have returned.

I must admit, I did compile certain items for my bucket list just in case.  The top two things I had resolved to do before permanently departing were to finish landscaping my back yard and clean the garage.

               You may find that strange, but when faced with the possibility of actually having to prepare a list of things I wanted to accomplish while still here, nothing particularly dramatic or spectacular came to mind.  I’ve already learned how to fly an airplane and as pilots used to say, “Why would anyone want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?”  So skydiving was out of the question.

               I have traveled to the Orient (complements the U.S. Navy); I’ve lived in Paris, London and Milan as well as in several large American cities and really don’t like travelling any more (thank you airlines), so the Great Wall of China and African safaris are also out.  I’ve had a varied career as a newspaper correspondent, marketing executive and magazine owner/editor and photographer.  Would I change some things if I could?  Sure.  Was is all bad?  Of course not.  So when the oncologist said to me, “See you in six months,” that was good enough for me.

Certainly, age has a lot to do with my attitudes towards preparing for the hereafter.  I’m sure if I were younger I would view approaching mortality much differently and with a considerable degree of sadness.  A young person dealing with cancer still has a long list of things to be hoped for and accomplished but must face the possibility and disappointment that they may never happen.  Parents with children undergoing the horrors of chemotherapy must feel an unimaginable agony.

But at my stage of life--at slightly over three-quarters of a century--hopes and dreams give way to stark reality.  I have reached the point where I have no fear of the inevitable so I have adopted the philosophy expressed by one of my favorite comedians, Red Skelton, who said:  “When I wake up in the morning and I don’t hear organ music and smell roses, it’s going to be a good day.”  

What's in a name?

Like all political discourse in America today, the McCain-hero exchange is a circular discussion.  It goes round and round with everyone producing evidence to support his or her position and it all goes nowhere.  My recent post on the McCain/Trump episode was not so much about whether McCain was or was not a “hero,” but an observation that it is now a political requirement to label everyone who wears a uniform as a “hero.” This "hero" attribution is intended to assuage the collective American conscience and to give politicians a way to demonstrate how patriotic they are.  I am not the only one who looked at the issue from this point of view.  Here is a transcript excerpt from an NPR interview between Robert Seigel and David Greenberg, professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University:

SIEGEL: And we have the John McCain experience - being a POW for more than five years, being tortured by his North Vietnamese captors, a man who literally agonized for his country - an unusual description of the war hero?

GREENBERG: Well, certainly not the conventional one. But I think it's fair to say that we can go back in history and also find examples of people who were taken captive and for that reason are considered heroes. Nathan Hale was the first one that came to mind for me, who famously said he regretted he had but one life to give for his country. He was, of course, a spy for George Washington, going behind enemy lines and was apprehended and executed by the British in the Revolution. So that too has a longer lineage than we might suppose.

SIEGEL: And of course, many medals have been awarded posthumously to people who've died in combat - not been taken captive, but didn't survive the battle.

GREENBERG: Yes, that's exactly right. These are things we recognize as heroism. I think with the Vietnam War though, there is something of a change or a new understanding of heroism. And we have the celebration, if you will, of the POWs and MIAs, who it was assumed were abandoned by our leadership in the Vietnam War. Now, a lot of research has found these claims to be overstated, but it's had a power hold on our imagination because the Vietnam War was such a troubled war for us. And the MIA legends or myths came to embody, I think, a sense that it wasn't our soldiers who let us down. It was we who let them down.

In other words,  the classic definition of “hero,” was modified to include Viet Nam POWs and MIAs and is now applied to all active duty military personnel, which is a guilt reaction not only to the fact that American young people have no obligation whatsoever to serve and to the rotten way Viet Nam veterans were treated. 

At any rate, whether McCain was or was not a “hero” is now a moot point since anybody or anything can be one these days.  Remember the video that went viral of the cat who saved the little boy from a dog attack which was carried repeatedly on national tv news networks?  That cat was called a “hero.” 

To read the full transcript go to:   http://www.wbur.org/npr/424722437/donald-trumps-remarks-on-john-mccain-question-meaning-of-war-hero

Trump was right

Technically speaking, Donald Trump was right, John McCain is not a war “hero.”  Getting shot down and being a POW are not really acts of heroism.  But McCain has exploited that image for years to boost his prosperous political career and to lend credibility to his belief that every foreign policy problem can be solved with military action.  Whether you like Trump or McCain—and I dislike them both—when the Donald called McCain on this (“He got shot down!”) the tiff between them exposed another absurdity in today’s American politics.

The very word “hero” has become so overused and overworked that it has become meaningless:  Now everyone who has ever served in the armed services is a “hero;”  all first-responders—whether at the World Trade Center on 9/11—or in your local fire department are “heroes;” teachers who endured seeing their grade-school students slaughtered are “heroes;” anybody who has had cancer and is still alive is a “hero;” and just about anybody the evening news deems worthy, like someone saving a kitten up a tree or tutoring an underprivileged child is a “hero.”  One of my local tv stations even has a segment called “The Hero Next Door”—it’s kind of your hero du jour.

It is now an absolute requirement for politicians—Republican and Democrat—to proclaim all service personnel are “heroes.”  If they don’t, they are immediately vilified and branded “un-American” or “unpatriotic.” Most of the Republican candidates never served because the draft was abolished for everyone born after 1953 so they are even more emphatic in exalting the "heroes" since they didn't have to become one.

This has led to the practice of people going up to uniformed soldiers in airports and thanking them for their service.  There have been numerous articles and interviews where soldiers themselves have stated how much they despise that.  They know it is insincere and actually means, “I’m glad you’ll get your ass shot off and not my kid.” 

Just consider the fickleness of Americans.  During John McCain’s time in service, if he had walked through an airport in uniform people would have spit on him because that’s what patriotic Americans did to our service people in those days. 

Instead of fostering this artificial hero worship, perhaps our politicians would be better advised to figure out ways to keep our fine young men and women, and they are fine young men and women make no mistake about that, from getting into wars that kill and maim them in the first place.

And perhaps Donald Trump’s rabble rousing might cause the American public to begin insisting that presidential candidates start talking about how they propose to solve our very serious problems.

 (In the interest of full disclosure, I served as an officer in the United States Navy from 1959 to 1962.  I state unequivocally that I was not then, am not now, nor have I ever been a hero.)