John McCain: Hero? or Terrorist?

      Living in a foreign country often puts a different slant on what is happening in the United States. 
 
     January 28, 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after takeoff.  Six astronauts and a teacher died.  In the United States, the television networks not only spent hours of time covering the event, but I was told it remained in the news for weeks.
     In the Venezuelan barrio where I was living, the reaction was different.  While I was waiting for public transportation one day, a young neighbor commented (as best as I recall), “I can’t believe you gringos.  You spend millions of dollars building a space craft and then it doesn’t work.”
     Yes, seven people died.  But almost that number were dying hourly in automobile accidents in the United States.  Emotionally the media took advantage of the event.  But from a purely historical perspective, the barrio youth was more in tune with reality than the TV networks in the U.S.
 
     On another occasion I was with a group of citizens from the United States when they were meeting with an official of the Venezuelan electoral commission.  At the end of his presentation and the questions that followed, he asked permission to pose a question to the group.  It was, “Can you explain to me how it is possible in the United States that the presidential candidate who gets the most votes, loses the election?”  No one could answer adequately.  Then he asked, “Are you trying to change that?”  The answer was negative.  Yes, things look different--indeed often strange--from outside the fifty states.
 
     Reflecting on current U.S. historical events, a recent editorial in a Venezuelan newspaper raised the question about what defines an “American (referring to the United States) hero.”  John McCain has received enough medals to prove that he falls in that category according to U.S. government criteria.  After all, he did spend several years in a North Vietnamese prison.  But is anybody asking the question, why was he in prison?  Mr. McCain was shot down during his 23rd air mission, in a bombing run over Hanoi.  That may be enough to merit medals in the U.S., but it is not necessarily seen as a noble act outside the country.
     Look at this event from a foreign perspective.  Here was a member of the U.S. military who had been in the air bombing--and quite probably killing innocent people--23 times.  Whatever his motives might have been, and however righteous his government might have seen his acts, doesn’t this sound like the work of a terrorist?  Is anyone in the United States today raising this question?  Unfortunately, our patriotic myopia and timidity keep us from seeing ourselves as others see us and from confronting the possibility that we erred.
     Now the McCain campaign is trying to link Barack Obama with a “terrorist.”  William Ayers, whom Obama knows, set off some bombs in public places including the Pentagon in the ‘60s and early ‘70s when Obama was simply a child.  No one died in these acts, as far as I can determine.  But what about Mr. McCain’s acts in the ‘60s?  Some estimates say that as many as four million Vietnamese civilians died in the war.  Can anyone verify that John McCain was not responsible for any of these deaths?
 
     Harry Belafonte once said that he considered George W. Bush to be the greatest terrorist in the world.  He later retracted the statement by saying that maybe he was wrong, but that if Mr. Bush were not the greatest he would certainly be in competition for the title.
      Whoever should be elected the next president of the United States, he too can enter the competition.  For some people in the world, John McCain already did--back in 1967.
 
(Charles Hardy is author of ­Cowboy in Caracas:  A North American’s Memoir of Venezuela’s Democratic Revolution, published by Curbstone Press (www.curbstone.org/bookdetail2.cfm?BookID=193&view=BL).  Other essays by Hardy can be found on his personal blog www.cowboyincaracas.com .  You may write him at cowboyincaracas@yahoo.com.)