A meme and McSally

The meme was full of nose art borne out of a WWII war aesthetic, when bomber crews would give themselves a lift, so to speak, by adorning their vehicle with pinups. The guy who sent it to me lost a brother to a heart attack not so long ago, a general. The guy who sent it to me was a vet, too.  

The guy who sent it to me didn't create it; he was just passing it along. It was full of what was called nose art, semi-clothed and unclothed young women decorating the noses of an almost endless parade of flying fortresses.

The note held a score of these images, darlingly delightful designs of a gang of guys who didn't think much about political correctness. Just try to get away with this today, that meme warned. Snicker, snicker. You know, political correctness--what we got way too much of today. 

But if you scrolled down far enough, that long meme held some startling statistics about how many bombers were lost in the Second World War, how many crews went down, how many flying fortresses never made it back to base. 

But an eye-watering 43,581 aircraft were lost overseas including 22,948 on combat missions (18,418 against the Western Axis) and 20,633 attributed to non-combat causes overseas. 

In a single 376 plane raid in August 1943, 60 B-17s were shot down. That was a 16 percent loss rate and meant 600 empty bunks in England. In 1942-43 it was statistically impossible for bomber crews to complete a 25-mission tour in Europe.

It was a long meme, and it held more statistics, all of them grim. This was war. These guys were risking death for the rest of us. They were heroes. If they wanted to paint their ships with their sexy delusions of grandeur, let 'em. They're our boys, and a lot of them died. Shit, man, give 'em a break. Just a little dreamin' for pity sake.

I get that. I'm an old guy but still a guy.

And then came Martha McSally, the newly-appointed senator from Arizona, the armed services' very first female combat pilot, a hero too, highly decorated, a woman who just this week held a senate sub-committee spellbound with her story, in part because she'd not before revealed what happened to her: she was raped by a superior officer. In the last year, reports of rape in the military rose by ten percent. 

I couldn't help feeling that long nose art meme and Martha McSally's testimony were related--not that World War II bomber crews were rapists, not that Washington should never have allowed women in the armed forces, not that nose art, dreams in the face of death, were despicably evil. Still, somehow they're related.

The Me-Too movement has outed men from all walks of life, no matter what their politics and popularity, pariahs to priests to presidents. Many have fallen; some still hold office.

I'll say this much. I can't help but think that if "political correctness" keeps bomber crews from nose art on planes today, then political correctness is a good thing, something we can use more of, not less.