Post Traumatic Bush Disorder

How John McCain was screwed twice by the 43rd President of the United States

The experts say that the condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) shows up three to seven years after a veteran's return from war. Five-and-a-half years since the beginning of the Iraq War, seven years since the abuses at Enron and the shock of September 11, could the stock market's crash last week and the country's humongous deficit be symptoms of a serious national psychiatric disorder, a dysfunction that happens to a country when its leaders choose to ignore the stress potential of our looming housing and credit crisis? In other words, my friends, our economy - and maybe our entire country - could be suffering from a collective case of PTSD.

We have already stopped listening to the words of calm the president and his minions offer up as as if it were a narcotic salve for our economy's ills. Wall Street itself has begged the administration to just shut the heck up. As the NY Daily News put it in an October 10 report:

"Just as he did on Monday and Tuesday - and three other times last week -Bush told the country he was on top of the growing crisis. Each time,the market tanked."

If the trauma inflicted by George W. Bush has had this kind of effect on us, pity poor John McCain. Bush's shortcut to the White House in 2000 ran right over him, before body checking Al Gore, and systematically dismantling the financial infrastructure of our country for the benefit of his cronies. Now the actions of the lame duck Bush administration have put their Haliburton supplied truck in reverse to run over him again. They must have something against him. I bet that's the way McCain feels.

What must it be like to be locked in a Viet Cong prison more than thirty years after you were physically released? This is an idea that came from one of my friends who does counseling: John McCain suffers from PTSD. Really, it would explain a lot about his legendary rages and his manipulability at the hands of his masters - I mean campaign staff.

Sarah Palin was just another emotional outburst for Johnny Mac. Now that the zealots her rhetoric has inflamed are talking about anger and violence, Senator McCain is doing a little anger management style calming, deflecting their rage as he has learned to deflect his own.

Back in May, 2008, when the McCain campaign released the candidate's medical records, it was only since 2000, and did not "speak directly to the [psychological] effects of his years as a prisoner of war," according to several articles published at the time.

But these accusations are not new to McCain. According to a May 2008 article on salon.com:

"During McCain's first White House run, his unsuccessful battle with George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1999 and 2000, he faced a whispering campaign from rivals that suggested his Vietnam ordeal had permanently damaged his psyche -- specifically, that his famed outbursts of temper might be a sign of something serious, like post-traumatic stress disorder."

While I do not subscribe to a "whispering campaign" tactic, especially one prosecuted by the likes of Karl Rove (whose 2000 "dirty tricks" may have actually contributed to McCain's current condition), there are questions that need to be answered.

It is hard to imagine what McCain's five-and-a-half years of deprivation, torture and broken bones in the Hanoi Hilton may have done to the senator's young mind. It is also hard to imagine that every time he tries to raise his damaged shoulders, he is not reminded of his time in captivity and his two suicide attempts.

The McCain campaign assured the Washington Post that their candidate "has never received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder," even though salon.com points out that "they failed to note that it would have been impossible for McCain to receive such a diagnosis -- since the term 'post-traumatic stress disorder' was not in use until seven years after McCain's release from captivity."

That is something left out of the Washington Post's pre-analysis of McCain's May release of medical records. They cite research from the Robert E. Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, which follows its mission, "to aid, comfort, and ease the repatriation of past and future prisoners of war by means of lessons learned from the evaluation of former prisoners of war." The Post story says that the Pensacola based the Navy research center found that Vietnam fliers were somehow different:

"The naval aviators who were imprisoned in Vietnam are in their 60s and 70s. Both now and in the years immediately after their release, they have seemed unusually resistant to psychological damage from the experience.

"The lifetime prevalence of PTSD in all the Pensacola POW studies [since World War II] is 24 percent. In the naval aviators, however, it was 4 percent from 1979 to 1983, when the disorder was most likely to appear."

They go on to say that the center has found an anomoly in officer POWs as a whole. "Research on World War II prisoners found that officers as a group had far less psychological trauma than enlisted men."

This exception may have been what Cindy McCain was referring to in a recent interview with Fox News reporter Marie Claire. In response to a question about her husband's POW related trauma, whether or not he had "night sweats," the senator's wife said, "The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing."

Other researchers, however, have found that while PTSD may not be prevalent, they were able to "identify something called 'late-onset stress symptomatology' or LOSS, which came to light after 562 combat veterans -- about 300 of them POWs -- answered a long questionnaire. The syndrome involves the return of troubling memories late in life, along with emotional anguish and guilt, often triggered by retirement and friends' deaths."

A 2007 study by Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, and National Center for PTSD at Boston University describes LOSS as:

"a phenomenon observed in aging combat veterans who (a) were exposed to highly stressful combat events in their early adult years, (b) have functioned successfully throughout midlife with no history of chronic stress-related disorders, but (c) begin to register increased combat-related thoughts, feelings, and reminiscences commensurate with the changes and challenges of aging."

So is John McCain suffering from PTSD? It is difficult to say, however it is entirely possible that he has shown, is showing or will show signs that he is suffering from LOSS as he ages and encounters "the challenges of aging." Perhaps his scrapes with the politics and policies of George W. Bush present the Republican nominee wityh just such a challenge.

One can only hope that when we are a lifetime away from this presidency, that we are further along in our recovery than the soldiers who have been traumatized by the wars they fought when they were young.

-PBG

Comparing Healthcare

This is a link to Kaiser's comparison charts for the '08 presidential candidates' healthcare programs. I haven't had a chance to evaluate each candidate's stand myself, but this is an interesting tool.

http://www.health08.org/sidebyside.cfm

Many Rivers to Cross - A Boomer's Remorse

Leadership, the River and the Promised Land

Somewhere we got the idea that an age of fulfilled promise and hope is beyond our grasp. How many opportunities do we have in a lifetime to change the direction of a government? How many times do we have in a lifetime to impose the will of fair, honest policy, of truly new vision, on an awkwardly political and corrupt system?

In 1968, when passion moved both reverends and radicals to march together to change the outcome of failing social and political processes, we had Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden to radicalize us, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy to point out the way and Eugene McCarthy to take us down the road. We looked to them as agents we could count on to force change.

For forty years we have wandered in the wilderness of post industrialism, replacing the carefree excesses of free love with the careless excesses of conspicuous consumption. It's as if the will to fight for our dreams died on a motel balcony in Memphis, or in a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, or behind a cloud of teargas, billy-clubs and bayonets on the streets of Chicago.

When we had opportunities to grow, we shrank back; when we had opportunities to move forward, we shuffled in place; when we had opportunities to apply the wisdom of organization, of raising consciousness, of being in action to create change, we remained in ignorant bliss, watching MTV, buying PDAs and and investing in the dot-com boom.

Well now I wonder. Our Moses has "been to the mountaintop" and "seen the promised land," and while many believe that was the end of it, it was not over. We actually have the ability to move forward across the Jordan.

(Please indulge me this biblical exploration, my friends. I've only a little more to go.)

Yes, we elected a new congress, one that we thought would lead us in a new direction. But they were like the ten doubtful spies that returned after exploring the Promised Land. Their minds were hardened by the old ways of Egypt, that even after all we have witnessed in the past forty years, even the battles of the last seven years, they doubt the strength of the faithful. They bow instead to the establishment, to the milquetoast centrism preached by the priests of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Yet some do know. I believe that, like Joshua and Caleb, Barack Obama and Dennis Kucinich can lead us away from those who would sacrifice principles for the purse. But it does not have to be them. In fact, there is no them without us. We the people inherit the land. We the people create the change. Once more, we must wade into the river. Once more, we must be faithful that the water will abate until we are safely across. Once more, into the breach.

Who would have thought we would have another opportunity to overcome? Let's not let this one pass.

-PBG

Something New Comes Along

Just when I think there is nothing left to be old, something new comes along.

I wonder what creates a memory. When I wake in the morning, and there is nothing left to hold, nothing new to see, to comprehend, to learn, when there is nothing left to remember about time, will I really be awake or will I actually be dead? Is that the final samadhi I see before me, or just another aimless hallway lined with the disposable images of a past I watched while in repose in front of my television?

I spent the past week in the DC area, and went to the National Portrait Gallery one day. There we saw portraits of presidents, Civil War personalities and other American icons, like Jimi Hendrix and Gore Vidal, Jackie O. and Josephine Baker, Angela Davis and Katherine Hepburn. I remember a lot of the individuals, captured in paint pigment and photo emulsion, from my own lifetime. Here they are with the legends of a young nation, captured in time as if they too were cornerstones of proud nationalism and not temporary soda pop bubbles rendered into Styrofoam pylons supporting an age of plastic time. How Warholian!


So this is how history is written now. As 2007 slips into 2008, I guess we all need to pay better attention. The dimly lit Chinese restaurant on the neighborhood street corner, or the half-moon hanging over the leafless-tree that grows from the broken concrete stoop of a run down tenement, are all images I carry with me that - in some future context - could hold historical value, and those are only a couple of the ones my mind captured in the last 48 hours!

That anything from our living past can become grist for the historical mill is both ridiculous and overwhelming. For example, one could say it is ridiculous that 2007 could be remembered as a the year when a well run football team's glory will overshadow the glaring mismanagement of a poorly run nation. Likewise, it is overwhelming that tragic events, from Darfur to Pakistan, can crack the shell of our otherwise oblivious Humpty Dumpty lives, so that by the time we muster our horses and men, we will have fallen off the wall, leaving the hungry inconsolably weak, the weak uncontrollably desperate, and the desperate unalterably dangerous.

I'm sorry. It's hard not to be cynical. There's a lot of possibility for 2008, though. I don't know if hope alone is enough, or experience, or justice, but I do believe that we can move to heal the inconsolable, the uncontrollable, the unalterable, if we first resolve to heal ourselves.

Revolution only succeeds through resolution. The only way to create a new story is to commit to being a force for changing the current story.

Look at a recent picture of your family. Is there anything you could do to change the current story of your relationship to them?

Look at your bank statement. Is there anything you can commit to, to change the story of your relationship to money?

Look at your front lawn. Is there anything you can choose to do that will change your relationship to landscaping?

If you resolve to create change in your life in those or any small, personal area, then you can choose to play bigger in your next commitment. The new revolves when the old resolves. Rather than revering the past for its own sake, maybe we should venerate it only as the source for what we have become, are becoming, can become.

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of a notable year of joy and horror, it is appropriate to quote Bobby K. (also in the National Gallery) in his famous call to action, as a way to help us add context to history, "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were and ask why not."

Happy New Year! Why not make it a historical one?

-PBG

Voting in the Shampoo Aisle

"Political marketing is a fairly pure analog to commercial marketing. I'm looking at a package of shampoo the same way I'm looking at my next leader."
- David Remer, chairman of Lucid Systems, from a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Perhaps Mr. Remer can be forgiven for his glibness. His company is trying to sell a program that tracks certain biological responses of people to the stump speeches and debates of the 2008 presidential candidates. According to the WSJ article, several of the campaigns are using this kind of uber-focus group technology to try to hone the scope and delivery of their message.

It's like turning trial balloons into biometric reporting weather balloons.

It seems that we just want to feel good about our candidates. It's not just a candidate. It also cleans your hair. My scalp is all tingly just thinking about it.

Russ Feingold's Presidential Homesick Blues

If you cannot play the video from here, click here.

Barack in Atlanta: Real Deal vs. Real Ideal

There are many among us for whom political rhetoric is like a tampon commercial. We groan at the grossness and change the channel. Just like a tampon, the parties push their elite politicians on us whenever a new cycle comes around. They hope that we will buy into the promise of a worry free life, where pain, stain and embarrassment are things of the past. It's our rights as Americans not to have to worry, and, by God and George Washington (and Alfred E. Newman) the uncandid candidates insist that if we elect them, our concerns about money and health, war and education, will abate.

Then there's Barack Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois whose rhetoric seems to be on an entire other level. He doesn't tell us not to worry. He doesn't tell us everything is going to be OK once we elect him.

This past Saturday, Barack Obama took his message to my backyard, and spoke in front of a crowd of over 20,000 people at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Whether he is, as his campaign claims "the real deal," I don't know. What I do get is that his ideals are in the right place. This is not some Pollyanna politico. This is someone who understands that change doesn't start when we "hold our noses" at the voting booth, as he put it. He understands that change comes through action.

"Change happens when people come together," he told the crowd. He said that politically, "we have a tradition that says we are united as a people," and that we have "mutual responsibilities to each other."

This is where I am turned on. The present administration, and many of the candidates in the 2008 Presidential race (including some popular Democrats), say that our responsibility is to support them, and their agenda, and believe they will take care of everything. But then they fail and they spin the failures. "And when we don't believe the spin," Obama said, they "blame it on gay people, on immigrants, on Democrats."

"I am ready to lead this country and take responsibility for the challenges we face," he said.

The funny thing is, when he got to the typical, "but I can't do it alone" pitch, Barack Obama did not ask for money or time. He wanted us to understand that "all of us have a stake in a better America."

"When ordinary people stand up and do extraordinary things," he said, "We create American history." Sure, a cynic could see his rhetoric in describing the results of historic action as affecting all Americans (not just African Americans, or Native Americans, or Asian Americans, or European Americans), as an appeal to the historic moment his possible election portends. But it's equally true that we haven't had a leader this committed to change probably since Lincoln.

Make no mistake. The change is not that we would have our first ever African American president, though that's a huge thing. The change is that we could have a president that believes in activism in the way the Kenndeys did. There really is potential here for a new vision of being an American.

I've said in many recent posts that we need an activist candidate, and Barack Obama certainly has that credential, at least in his past. The cool thing is he is inviting all of us to be a cause for change, to take responsibility, whether we support him or not. That speaks to me.

"It's time," he said, "for us to kick off our bedroom slippers and put on our marching shoes."

Well, I'm letting my fingers do the marching for now. I hope, dear readers, that you are at least as motivated as I am.

One more thing: despite how impressed I was with the Senator's appeal, I am not necessarily ready to endorse him. HOWEVER, the beauty of the size of the field and the time until the election is that I can support the message of many candidates with the purpose of empowering them to reach as many ears and eyes and hearts as possible.

Endorsements get closed in a campaign's steamer trunk to show off along the trail. An empowered candidate gives back because they know that people like them and what they have to say. It's like a beautiful circle, where we acknowledge the possibility of their vision and they acknowledge the viability of a vision that has such broad support. They keep giving voice to it and we keep talking about it. It's ideal!

-PBG

Integrity Wanted: Voter in Search of an Activist Politician

Hillary Clinton would be the USA's first woman president; Barack Obama, the first African-American. A declared desire to lead is relegated by the media to the politics of context that potential leaders can't wave off with a turned head and polite "p'shaw". By what means do politicians ink their names on history's pages? Being political pioneers is just the hook, but all the typical trade tools still come into play: running a smart campaign, raising more money and getting the most good press.

What if the way to get elected was to actually show some leadership? I don't care if the president has people who can raise a lot of money. I care if he or she can lead. Leadership is not only an accountability for the actions of those to whom authority is delegated. We also expect a sense of responsibility that would move them to act with wisdom and foresight. Otherwise, we are electing people because we think they deserve a really nice government pension.

The problem is that while the declared candidates are in campaign mode, they tend to play it safe, pandering enough to the party faithful to keep their names forward, and not doing anything that conventional wisdom declares as "politically risky" between now and the primaries.

But all one has to do is to look at the fervor around the move to draft Al Gore to run again to see evidence that even political risk has its rewards. Taking a stand shouldn't be risky if it's something in which you believe. Here is where things can change.

There are a lot of members of Congress in the 2008 prez race. They are lawmakers, not outsiders. If they would take some of those campaign promises to the House or Senate floor, they would be demonstrating that they believe in what they are saying today, and just maybe create some credibility based on action rather than charisma or electability. Why wait until after '08 to start a bill about real universal health care? If it's a critical enough issue to talk about now, it really can't wait until a new president takes office 2 years from now!!!

Those who currently hold no office, like Senator Edwards, can demonstrate their commitment to a healthy, clean and peaceful planet by being more active in those causes.

Health care your thing? Meet with drug manufacturers and the AMA to talk about health care. Find forums to bring America's "medical industrial complex" leaders together with those from countries where universal health care is available. Making a profit is an American right, but that doesn't mean another child has to die because his mother can't afford it.

World Peace your bag? Mediate a conflict. Stage a march. I know that's an oversimplification, but at least you will show a commitment to what you believe.

Anyway, you get the idea. We need leadership NOW. America's President Albatross has become a lame duck. There are no leaders left in the White House. We are starved for real leadership. That's why we changed congress. Please step up and lead. Take a chance that you might stand out. Some of us would appreciate it.

After all, we are the ones who must choose the names this nation's history books will remember, and I want to cast my vote for a person of action. I've had enough promises. Time for you to act.

-PBG