Credit: Creative Commons
If you have not heard by now, actress Gwyneth Paltrow has been subjected to a Twitter attack by Cindy McCain, wife of Senator John McCain. Paltrow recently made a casual, off the cuff remark about being in the public eye, and dealing with vicious comments from internet commenters. Here’s what Paltrow said:
You come across (Internet comments) about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanizing thing. It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanizing thing, and then something is defined out of it. My hope is, as we get out of it, we’ll reach the next level of conscience.
Yep, that’s it: A stellar American film star, who made a not so stellar, yet totally innocent, comparison between her own emotional experiences and the horrors of war. Yet apparently Cindy McCain, who herself is not enlisted in the U.S. military, has a “zero tolerance policy” for American actresses who employ war analogies to describe their emotional lives, something that millions upon millions of people probably do everyday. Taking to Twitter, McCain wrote about Paltrow:
Gwyneth Paltrow is a joke. Her life is like taking bullets for a soldier. What a joke! My 2 sons serving in the military should talk to her.
Perhaps Gwyneth Paltrow should go out on patrol with some soldiers. Kind of like a Red Carpet in her mind I guess!
Of course, Gwyneth Paltrow seems to be a very peace-oriented person – not the type that would like to go on patrol in Afghanistan; a war that most Americans -likewise -don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole.
If Cindy McCain really and truly believes that the ongoing Afghanistan war – which President Obama has now extended again to 2016 – is both just and necessary, she should give her Twitter account a rest, and perhaps turn down any more opportunities for more glam photo shoots for Vogue magazine – and enlist in the U.S. Army or Marines.
Cindy McCain recently turn 60-years-old. Isn’t that too old to enlist in the nation’s war effort? No, it’s not, as proven by Army Major Steven Hutichison, a Vietnam War vet, who re-enlisted in the Army when he was 58, and who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq when he was 60. Here’s what his brother told the Associated Press upon his death in 2009:
He was very devoted to the service and to his country,” Richard Hutchison said. “I didn’t want him to do it, but he had a mind of his own and that’s what he wanted to do.”
So if this American who believed the post-9/11 wars were just, and who then put his body where his mouth was despite being of non-traditional age for enlistment, why shouldn’t Cindy McCain woman-up and do the same?
There would certainly be more integrity in such an enlistment decision than attacking the freedom of personal expression of an American citizen, Gwyneth Paltrow, who means no harm to anyone.
Then again, folks like Cindy McCain who love to drum up the martial spirit in Americans, especially in young men, even as they themselves never enlist in these pointless wars, don’t have that kind of integrity.
Indeed, it’s the same lack of integrity that permits them to make the utterly outlandish claim that any of these wars are about “defending American freedoms” – freedoms, as evidenced by McCain’s intolerant behavior towards Paltrow, they have no genuine respect for anyway.
She’s got two kids in the service. Your giving her a hard time because she is irritated by Paltrow whining about her difficult life. Come on,
You need to learn how to spell “you’re”, as in “you are”, not the possessive pronoun. Your lack of attention to orthography is indicative of a lack of attention to other things in general.
The Heartist sees the best in a given moment.
We still do not know how the two ladies contributed to the expansion of consciousness.
But they do.
They both attracted the meeting between them.
there is no one to blame.
Just to be present and know what I do not want to do to others.
How I would want to consciously love my neighbor as I love myself.
To see the resentment, judgment, frustration in me and be on top of all, understanding that the higher in the moment is to respect both of their will to be seen for their intentions.
To see the pain in me and transform it to Presence.
thank you ladies for taking me one more step higher.
YoHana – Heartist
Thank you, YoHana-Heartist, for these insights. Perhaps you could commune with Cindy McCain and impress upon her that to encourage and/or validate young adults to go off to wars in the name of an entire country, when the vast majority of adults in that country rightly refuse to partake in such carnage and waste of human life, has nothing whatsoever to do with “loving one’s neighbor as one’s self.”
In fact, it’s the polar opposite of loving one’s neighbor as one’s self: it’s saving one’s own ass while putting up the pretense of a higher love for country.
Again comments about exepcienre and it’s importance or non importance. I have to go with demeur here. Not one president with the exception of one running for a second term has the exepcienre to to be president.We should not be so concerned about how many years these flounders have been hanging on in the parties, their halls of justice or the slums of the various capitol buildings. More years there in my opinion is actually a detriment to being a good president who really intends to lead the “nation” and not do his party’s bidding. We have been so programmed to interpret that time spent in the pursuit of power somehow makes for a good leader. Bullshit. Time spent in the pursuit of sensible solutions is way more important. And from where I sit, the solutions coming out of DC these last 40 years have some serious issues with the sensible factor.I figure that if exerience has given us Viet Nam, Iran Contra, and now Iraq, then maybe it is time to try some inexepcienre. I cannot imagine we will be any worse off. The system does have checks and balances if they are used as they were intended. But then “exepcienred” pols have been working hard for years to circumnavigate those also.
Utterly written content , thanks for selective information .
What a silly article.