Foto fanatics claim that a picture is worth a thousand words and McLuhanesque mediasperts have pushed the picture as the new language. Online publication TheSpoof.com which deals mostly in verbiage with only a few rather old and worn out fotos and not a video in sight has decided to take startling fotos, not show them and then describe them in vivid detail.
The first blockbuster photograph shows President Richard Nixon shaking the hand of John McCain in 1973.
Picture this, Nixon still stands straight and tall as if he has a modicum of moral respectability. He looks with a benign stare upon the newly released POW. Nixon is straight from the Paris Peace Accords that became dissonant soon after the ink on the score dried.
Naval Officer McCain has just arrived in Washington DC after five years of unbearable suffering in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, the ironic name for the North Vietnamese torture chamber. He leans agonizingly forward on wooden crutches. Dressed impecabbly in his Naval Officer's whites, his hair in the black and white photograph seems more like the toe head of his youth than the whiter shock we now see. His face leans toward the Republican President and his mouth appears strangely open as a man reaching for a kiss.
With Nixon on the left and McCain in the center, a third unidentified figure stands on the right. The bespectacled man in dark suit wears a look of disbelief on his face. He appears as if he knows the future of these two complex figures of American history and from his troubled glare, it doesn't look good...
