Candidate John McCain

flew a bomber over Vietnam killing peasants in a war that my father raised me telling me was wrong. I remember the Pentagon Papers and Bobby Kennedy and MLK, and the Watergate hearings with Senator Sam Ervin. The feeling of topsy turvy ness where the greatest power on earth, the US government, was shown to be wrong (Segregation) and right (Johnson's Civil Rights legislation) and wrong again (water hoses and dogs) when it came to the important, forward-looking matters, and wrong —

wrong as wrong can be —

about it being worthwhile to kill 54,000 Americans and a million anticolonial Vietnamese. Leaving it as a secondary matter how America left Vietnam and what happened thereafter.

McCain missed all that.

None of it left a mark on him. He came back to the west, after his captivity, having missed the entire shift — the changeover from what Tom Brokaw calls "the greatest generation" to the next generation, McCain's (and Clinton's) own.

McCain missed out, in other words, on what Brokaw calls the complexity, the ambiguity, of the 1960s "and thereafter" (on NBC, from Denver, today 8/25/08). There was only chaos since gramps got infirm, according to Brokaw. McCain is not of that generation: he only seems so, because he is unmarked by the interim craziness when the young people like Brokaw took over, impetuous lot, because he was in a Vietnamese POW camp.

So, yes, McCain was a courageous man, and withstood beatings and torture, was tenacious and inspiring. I think highly of him. But let's face it:

John McCain

A. Was on the wrong side of an equation obvious to all sensitive and smart people in 1968 and again in 1972

B. Killed people because of that

C. Thereby skipped a period wise old men like Brokaw call confused, but was really Left-ascendant

D. So to be viewed by the public as a member of the "greatest generation" himself, even though he isn't