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McCain & The Gook
by Kevin Minh Allen
11/20/06
John McCain the war hero. John McCain the brave American fighter pilot who endured five years in a cell in the “Hanoi Hilton” and was finally released in 1973. John McCain, who as a candidate vying for the presidency in 2000, once referred to his Vietnamese captors as “gooks”. Not “those sons-of-bitches” or “those asshole guards”, mind you, but simply “gooks”.
This irrevocable instance of bigotry has stuck in my craw for the past six years.
It takes a lot of effort for a mealy-mouthed, over-privileged white man to act contrite and offer an apology for his utterance of a racist insult. However, when I analyzed McCain’s apology it appears to be a classic non-apology. This is when the offender instinctively minimizes the fallout precipitated by his thoughtless shitting-on of a whole people by reasoning that if he did offend anyone, then it’s up to everyone, and not just him, to be big about it, forgive and forget, and finally move on.
McCain responded admirably, and predictably, when someone in his election camp scribbled an apology on a notecard for him to shit out in front of the public so it could get a good, hard whiff of his contriteness. I found the following McCain quote on a website called “Quest for the Presidency”, posted on March 1, 2000:
“There’s no reason to. They understand. Many of them were in re-education camps and they were also tortured by some of these people,” he said. “Look, I have very many good friends who are Vietnamese.” He has said he would not use the word again. “I apologize if I offended anyone,” McCain said recently. “But the validity of my statement, as I said, it was applied to a small group of sadists and murderers and the kindest word I could use about them was that. The rest of them (words) are not fit for family reading.”
Let’s break down this faux mea culpa:
