Pilfered Cross in the Dirt?
(posted by Daniel Koffler)
This could be big.
By this time tomorrow most people following the campaign are likely to have read the Daily Kos diary about the story John McCain recounted last night of one of his Vietnamese captors drawing a cross in the dirt of the Hanoi Hilton on Christmas Day — an experience, according to this McCain campaign ad from late last year, Team Maverick believes constitutes an argument for a McCain presidency without further elaboration. Flagging the DKos diary, Andrew Sullivan notes that he has heard McCain tell the cross-in-the-dirt story “countless times.” Problem is, unless prison guards who oversee torture and abuse have a strange and heretofore undocumented habit of drawing crosses in the dirt (in which case, I’ll be the first to apologize and correct), it would appear that McCain blatantly and shamelessly stole the anecdote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Nor does McCain’s evident admiration and familiarity with Solzhenitsyn’s life and works (would that it were slightly more complete) paint him in cherubic hues. Nor, for that matter, does the fact that as a citizen of a historically Orthodox Christian state, a prison guard in Soviet Russia could reasonably expect to be able to connect his own experiences to a prisoner’s by means of Christian iconography; whereas Christians are only 8% of the Vietnamese population today, and with most of them concentrated in the south around Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City (where European missionary activity was centered), there were probably not all that many guards and soldiers in the North Vietnamese army for whom a cross in the dirt would be a useful way of sharing a moment of humanity with an American prisoner. In other words, it looks really, really bad for McCain.
Now, presumably, we’ll shortly be hearing about how liberals and Democrats are smearing McCain’s war record by making an issue of his (apparent) theft of an item of Solzhenitsyn’s biography. And soon after that, that McCain is a hero who was tortured in the defense of his country and how dare anyone question anything he has to say about his time in the Hanoi Hilton. (I particularly can’t wait to watch the fake-but-accurate defense take shape.) And as always, McCain has a fellatory press as a trump card; given that the Cohens and Brodereseses and Ignatii of the world [wow, the Washington Post has some really bad columnists] deem McCain’s fundamental honor and decency as intact and healthy as ever since he apparently furrows his brow and winks and flashes the Captain Midnight signal to them in the course of launching his stunningly mendacious, loathsome, and intelligence-insulting campaign tactics, it’s hard to imagine just what McCain would have to do cram doubts about his righteousness into the folds of their grey matter. On the other hand, he’s lost Joe Klein, and if he’s lost Joe Klein, he can lose other once-infatuated MSMers.
Worst of all for the Maverick, there is a very relevant precedent — both for the act of pilfering and for its consequences. Future Vice President Joe Biden famously torpedoed his 1988 presidential campaign by plagiarizing a speech of then UK Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. However, what really sank Biden wasn’t the plagiarism per se, but claims that Kinnock’s formative personal qualities and experiences, like a working-class coal-mining heritage, were his own. If indeed McCain fraudulently imported into his own biography not just general features of Solzhenitsyn’s background, but very specifically one of the most emotionally fraught moments of Solzhenitsyn’s captivity, the offense is orders of magnitude worse than what Biden did (not to mention Hillary Clinton’s tall tale about ducking and strafing to avoid gunfire in Bosnia, which would have cost her even more than it did if, unlike John McCain, she didn’t have a reputation as a prevaricator preceding her).
In the past, perhaps, the press might have failed to do anything with a story like this about its favorite son. But presumably liberal blogs are too loud and numerous to allow for that anymore. So on the assumption that the stolen anecdote charge takes off (and also, as looks likely, that it’s borne out), could someone give me a stepwise explanation of how McCain survives it? That is, I’m beyond any optimism that he’ll ever be held accountable for anything, but his offense in this case is so grievous — not just (or maybe not at all) on sound independent grounds, but according to the rules of the ridiculous carnival by which our electoral system is governed — that I at least just don’t have the creativity to MacGyver him a way out of this mess.
UPDATE: Okay, I’ve been cogitating and I think I see the escape hatch. The general subject matter — torture — is just too raw and uncomfortable for the press to want to get anywhere near (cf. coverage of the Bush administration’s torture archipelago). The specific subject matter — John McCain’s POW experience — is too firmly entrenched as a sacrosanct third rail of journalism for any minimally critical scrutiny of anything tangentially connected to it to be sustained. A few journos will ask McCain about it, he’ll insist the story is genuine, and there will be no follow up questions. It also occurs to me now, contra my first impressions, that what McCain did is really despicable — not run-of-the-mill lying, but con-artistry trading on people’s most deep-seated beliefs, an effort to win votes by manipulating voters’ faith and emotion. Nor can it be waved off as a momentary lapse, since, as Sullivan testifies, he’s been telling the story he pinched over and over, and even recorded it for a campaign commercial. In other words, it’s premeditated.
Tags: McCain
August 17th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Daniel. Daniel. Get a grip. I read this story early today and blew it of. He is St. McCAin, and one dare not question a word of his time as a POW. Sure he likely pilfered it from Solzhenitsyn. But hey, they are fungible, doncha know.
August 17th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Kinda reminds me of my own tortured adolescence, that time I was so hungry I was reduced to digging raw vegetables out of an abandoned garden with my bare hands and then, filled with grim resolve, I stood up, my slim but plucky frame silhouetted against the sunset, and cried out “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!”
August 17th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Hey I share your sense of doom about getting even real dirt to stick to McCain, but I do see a good (maybe) TV attack ad.
It goes like this:
—–
In 195x the great Russian disident Alexander Solzynitsen (sp) wrote these words… (quote cross story.)
In 1973(?) John McCain described his POW experiences and never mentioned a cross in the dirt, but he later told people how much he admired Solzynitsen (sp)
Courting Christian voters in 2000, John McCain told a story for the first time that sounds a lot like Solzynitsen’s story. (quote McCain’s cross story.)
Isn’t that remarkable?
I’m Barak Obama, and I approved this ad because as it says in (insert appropriate biblical passage…I’m no Christian scholar) truth telling is essential.
—–
You get the idea. It’s deadly, probably too sharp, but I think there is something to work with in this story if it has legs.
I still think every day that Barack is doomed. I can’t even watch. It’s like a slow motion train wreck.
August 17th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Jennifer wins all-time best AoTP comment so far.
August 18th, 2008 at 6:08 am
No biggie if McCain lies on the stump. I just want Cindy’s cell–hot babe, free beer!!!
August 18th, 2008 at 11:17 am
of COURSE, no one EVER thought, in 2000 years, to scratch the symbol of a cross in the dirt to indicate that they are Christians-at least, not before solzhenytsin…did he think to get a copyright?
August 18th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Did the cells at the Hanoi Hilton have dirt floors?
August 18th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
of COURSE, no one EVER thought, in 2000 years, to scratch the symbol of a cross in the dirt to indicate that they are Christians-at least, not before solzhenytsin
And McCain never thought, in the 30-odd years since his release from the POW camp, to share this touching and inspirational story with others, until he started running for President and thought he might somehow score some points with the voters.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
By purest coincidence, I also had the same experience that Jennifer described. I just never bothered relating it to anybody before today.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I don’t blame you, Thoreau. No offense, but you just don’t have the right figure to look good in a hoopskirt.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
of COURSE, no one EVER thought, in 2000 years, to scratch the symbol of a cross in the dirt to indicate that they are Christians-at least, not before solzhenytsin…did he think to get a copyright?
Yeah. I’m thinking that McCain may actually be lifting material from the Anthony Quinn cross-and-gladiator schlockfest Barabbas — specifically, the Ernest Borgnine character!
August 18th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
This strikes me as sleaziness on the same level as John Edwards’. Anyone remember seeing that story about how, prefacing his remarks with “I’ve never told this to anybody before,” he told Kerry a story about crawling up on the slab with his dead son’s body and promising to dedicate his life to helping people? Kerry said that Edwards had, in fact, told the same story the first time he met him, and simply forgotten about it.
I also recall reading a story (forget the author) about some future dystopia, in which a teacher told her class to put their heads down on their desks and pray to God for candy. When they raised their heads and saw nothing, she told them to try praying to the state. This time, when they raised their heads, there was a piece of candy on every desk. A few years afterward, Pat Robertson had a couple of supposed “Russian emigres” on the 700 Club (about as believable as Twain’s King and Duke), who repeated the exact same story (but replacing “state” with “Party”). They also told a story, supposedly set in the Brezhnev era, when a Party official ordered an entire class to line up and spit on a Bible, and then shot the one Christian child who picked it up and kissed it. I’m sorry–the Soviet regime in the ’70s was surely no sugar candy mountain of civil liberties, but I simply don’t believe something like that would have happened openly, in an ordinary school classroom, in the Brezhnev era.
I believe McCain, like these people, vaguely recalled reading an anecdote somewhere about a prison experience involving a cross drawn in the dirt, figured that the original literary source was probably too obscure for him to be found out, and decided it was a nice edifying story for his audiences. No harm done.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:40 am
The man who told this story was an ageing, out-of-touch celebrity whose reputation as a maverick, willing to go against his country’s entrenched political culture, had long ceased to be supported by his actual conduct; in fact, he had become a faithful and vociferous supporter of his country’s aggressive and illiberal policies under its current leader, who was first elected at the turn of the century and has embarked on several aggressive wars and a foreign policy largely driven by consideration of oil and gas interests.
Still not sure whether it was McCain or Solzhenitsyn, though.
August 19th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Jennifer still deserves the “Top AoTP Comment” trophy, but I’d like to nominate ajay for runner-up.
August 20th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
The story does not appear in any of Solzhenitsyn’s published writings:
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/08/solzhenitsyn_biographer_crossi.php
August 20th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Indeed, apparently Chuck Colson made it up and it became part of the Solzhenitsyn mythology. Sorta perfect that McCain ripped off a myth about Solzhenitsyn.