Conserved Heroism

The right stuff: why McCain has it

PJ O'Rourke | April 22, 2008

LANDING on an aircraft carrier was the most fun I'd ever had with my trousers on. And the 24 hours that I spent aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt - the "Big Stick" - were an equally unalloyed pleasure.

I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn't get any bigger, or more moving, than a US-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that's longer than the Empire State Building and possesses four acres (1.6ha ) of flight deck.

This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth- or sixth-largest air force in the world - 86 fixed-wing aircraft plus helicopters.

The Theodore Roosevelt and its accompanying cruisers, destroyers, and submarines can blow up most of the military of most of the countries on earth. God has given America a special mission. Russia can barely blow up Chechnya. China can blow up Tibet, maybe, and possibly Taiwan. And the EU can't blow up Liechtenstein. But the USA can blow up ... gosh, where to start?

But I didn't visit the Theodore Roosevelt just to gush patriotically - although some patriotic gushing is called for in America at the moment.

Being a reporter, I wasn't there to report on things. I was there to get a journalistic hook for a preconceived idea. I wanted to say something about senator John McCain. And as soon as our visitor group donned "float coats" and ear protection and went to the flight deck and saw F-18s take off and land, I had something to say.

Carrier launches are astonishing events. The jet is unleashed and so is a steam catapult that hurls the plane down the slot, from 0-210km/h in two seconds. And - if all goes well - the plane is airborne.

Carrier landings are more astonishing. We were in heavy seas. Spray was coming over the bow on to the flight deck, 18m above the waterline. As the ship was pitching, 16tonnes of F-18 with a wingspan of about 12m approached at the speed of celebrity sex rumour. Four acres of flight deck has never looked so small. Had it been lawn you'd swear you could do it in 15 minutes with a push mower.

Four arresting cables are stretched across the stern. The pilot drops his tail hook. The hook is supposed to - and somehow usually does - strike the deck between the second and third arresting cables, stopping the plane dead.

Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do - voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's.

I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer.

There's Ms Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess and now a senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns.

And there's the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political creche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: "Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?"

Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honour, duty, valour, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilisation, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based.

Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humour.

Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?

A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and 10 levels up in the tower. But it's full, with about 5500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island.

Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as hall closets. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once below deck, you're sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.

McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government is, and packed with a madding crowd.

It requires organisation, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a doll house of ideology.

And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can't.

Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear colour-coded T-shirts - yellow for flight-directing, purple for fuelling, blue for chocking and tying-down, red for weapon-loading, and so on. These people can't hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can't do that. Really, they communicate by "training telepathy." They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.

These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only 19 or 20. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about 24. The crew is in more danger than the pilots. If an arresting cable breaks - and they do - half a dozen young men and women could be sliced in half. When a plane crashes, a weapon malfunctions, or a fire breaks out, there's no ejection seat for the flight deck crew.

Supposedly the youth vote is all for Obama. But it's John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. These would have been interesting subjects to discuss with the Theodore Roosevelt shipmates, but time was up.

Back to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn shysters - who, put together, don't have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a toilet on the Big Stick - presume to run for president of the United States.

They're not just running against the hero John McCain, they're running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23578176-5013948,00.html