In the last couple of weeks, I can’t turn around without reading about how some prison guard scratched a cross in the dirt while John McCain was a P.O.W., and so that’s proof that he loves crosses and would be a great president. It’s a lovely story. When Sarah first read it, she said, “damn, that’s a good story.” Here’s the basic story, as told to NPR:

John McCain is more reluctant to talk about his own faith. And he has had rocky relations with religious conservatives. But McCain is a believer, and he has a powerful story about the time his own faith was tested — when he was being tortured as a prisoner of war.

One Christmas morning, he was allowed out of his cell for a few moments. As he stood alone in the prison courtyard, one of the Vietnamese guards — who had shown some small kindness to McCain in the past — walked up to him.

“Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt,” McCain said. “We stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away. To me, that was faith: a faith that unites and never divides, a faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. It is the faith that we are all equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is the faith I would die to defend.”

Call me a cynic, but I immediately suspect any story that lovely. Because things like that don’t happen in real life. They happen in Vietnam movies. Why have I never heard this story before now? If a story that amazing ever happened to me, I would tell everyone I met. I’d tell strangers on the street about the incredible time I was a prisoner of war and a kindly prison guard scratched a cross in the dirt in front of me on Christmas morning. What I wouldn’t do is wait 40 years, and then say, “oh, shit, that reminds me …”

Well, according to the conspiracy theorists I choose to listen to, the story is, indeed, totally made up. First of all, the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn told almost the same story about his time in a Soviet labor camp:

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed.

I know what you’re thinking … what the Hell does John McCain know about Alexander Solzhenitsyn? Apparently, enough to write an article in praise of him for the New York Sun:

He was a writer with unusual gifts, utterly devoted to his art, brilliant and exacting, producing work that would stun not just literary worlds but the entire Cold War political world, and he was resigned to being unread until “this secret authorship began to wear me down.”

The first time McCain is known to have told this story is in his 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers. 30 years later, right before he ran for president, McCain suddenly remembered this powerful and life-changing event. An event that just happens to be exactly the same as a story told by his favorite writer. It reminds me of the time I found a golden ticket that invited me on a tour of the most marvelous chocolate factory …

(Thanks Daily Kos, Firedoglake, and Andrew Sullivan!)