The Searchers is one of those troublesome American films.You want to like it - - you can't help but like parts of it - - but it's so full of racism (and whore-madonna sexism, which gets overshadowed by the blatant racism), that it's hard for a decent person nowadays to accept the movie on its own terms.

The Searchers is the story of racist Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) who spends years searching for his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), who was kidnapped as a little girl by the Indian, Scar (Henry Brandon). Part-Indian Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) accompanies Ethan because he's afraid Ethan just wants to find Debbie to kill her, now that she's been an Indian's “squaw.”

Like the characters in The Searchers, America in 2008 is trying to come to grips with a civil war that split the country in half. Unlike the Civil War that Ethan Edwards never stopped fighting, most of the dying in the Iraq war has been done by innocent civilians, not soldiers.

John McCain will probably try to play John Wayne in this election. He's already talked about how he has seen things few others have. McCain is going to save us, like the hero of the captivity narratives (purportedly true stories about white women kidnapped by Indians) that have titillated Americans for two centuries. As scholars have pointed out, these stories were often inaccurate but always salacious. They were the original torture porn.

But John Wayne isn't our only choice for president.

Martin Pawley is part Indian, with ties to the murderous enemy. Sound familiar?

Even some Democrats (like Fred Hobbs from Tennessee) have said Obama might have ties to terrorists. These people are on Obama's side. Maybe Obama knows how Martin felt while riding in search of Debbie, knowing that Ethan, who hated him, was on a horse behind him with a gun.

Martin insists that he's only “one-eighth Comanch,” as if that would make him human to Ethan. Unlike Martin, Obama has more respect for himself and his parents to pretend to be something he's not, but that still may not be good enough for a lot of Americans.

Is that our choice? An old, racist, woman-hating war veteran (remember McCain's favorite term for Vietnamese people and his so-called joke about Chelsea Clinton?) or an untested young man with a foot in both the racist American past and the hopefully post-racist American future?

I always wondered if Debbie was able to fit in with the white family Ethan and Martin brought her back to. In the biographical captivity narratives, former kidnap victims sometimes returned to the Indians. Did Debbie ever want to cut Uncle Ethan's throat for bringing her back to people who saw her as a “squaw”?

We'd better be careful about turning to John Wayne out of fear. Because we get Debbie too. McCain isn't just Ethan, the “terrible swift sword” of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, who will smite our enemies. He's also Debbie, whose psychology has been formed by captivity, and while his hatred may be understandable, and his attitudes just possibly forgivable in someone of his age and background, if we elect him president we'll get the Republicans and their hatred of the rest of the world and half of America.

When the door closes in the final scene and everything goes black it might be a long time before it ever opens again.