John McCain’s Funeral Was Not a Resistance Party

Okay. I’m going to write this. I really don’t want to. It’s Labor Day. I start my college teaching again tomorrow, and I just want my last, sweet day off. It’s getting toward afternoon, and I’m still in my bedroom because it’s cool in here, and I’m alone in the house so there’s no one to go down for.

But labor I must. Posting on Face Book threads just isn’t enough because there’s a widespread psychological malady afoot: McCain worshipitis. My previously sane Hillary allies have gone loony with a celebration of John McCain. Memes are being posted. Tremulous adulation is being expressed. He is being touted as the last exemplar of a great American. It’s okay for Republicans to be doing this, though their lock step support of 45 has them refraining from this chorus, which is mainly composed of McCain’s longtime political adversaries: Democrats.

I admit to feeling horror as each day brings more tributes from staunchly Democratic women and Hillary allies. I’ll tell you why.

I have no personal animus against McCain. I have never met him, nor did I wish him any harm. I would not talk ill of him to his family or close friends. But his political and personal legacy is open to investigation as is the work of anyone. First, as a child of the Vietnam War era who came of age fighting fervently to end that war, I have a knee-jerk reaction to military pomp. I respect those who serve, but not more than I respect those who labor in hospitals, courtrooms, construction crews or classrooms. McCain’s father, also John McCain, rose to the rank of Commander, United States Pacific Command. Now it would be bias on my part to dislike the family for their military achievements, and unlike our current president, I do admire our John McCain’s courage as a prisoner of war. Personal strength teaches us all how to be more successfully human. However, I can’t help but think all those military uniforms lend a glow of a higher morality to the McCains and some attendees at John McCain’s funeral. To that I can only decry the “hocus pocus” as Vonnegut called it, whereby we automatically admire those with power and celebrity. Those white uniforms are meant to have a psychological effect on us, and they do. How did all my fellow antiwar advocates begin to adulate military bearing and the fanfare of trumpets?

Next, McCain’s personal conduct is not above reproach. Neither is mine, but I trust I will not be at the center of a posthumous cult. We almost never hear mention of McCain’s first wife, Carol whose two children he adopted and with whom he had a third. She was waiting for him when we returned from Vietnam. She had suffered severe injuries from a car accident when John returned from war, and was in a wheel chair, four inches shorter, and considerably less willowy. Although her condition did improve, her recovery was imperfect. I certainly am not privy to the details of the breakup of their marriage. I know the complications of my own failed marriage. However, Ross Perot, who paid Carol McCain’s hospital bills and was close to the family at the time, had this to say, “After he came home, he walked with a limp, she [Carol McCain] walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain] and the rest is history.” It might also be relevant that Carol McCain is 80, whereas Cindy McCain, with whom McCain had an affair while he was still married, is 64.

Should we dismiss McCain for his lapses that are no different from many of ours? No. But neither should we forget them when he condemns the same behavior in other political figures. We should apply one standard. By all appearances Cindy McCain has been a wonderful wife and their marriage a success so I am not accusing McCain of being a serial philanderer, and yet when he praises Obama as a “good family man,” one wonders what he’d say about himself. Also, can single men, both straight and gay, not be good men? Why has Carol McCain been erased from the narrative as if his oldest three children sprang from his head, like Athena from Zeus, as a friend of mine said?

He was a man who cynically chose the ill-informed Sarah Palin as a running mate to cynically cash in on disgruntled women still hurting from HRC’s losing the 2008 Democratic nomination. Since she would supplant him in the case of his death, was this a wise, patriotic, or altruistic decision? Again, politicians are human, and usually unusually ambitious, so perhaps we expect this craveness from our leaders. But doesn’t this impact our adulation of his heroism?

To look at all of McCain’s votes and policies that went counter to the values of my cohort would demand too much time in this short piece so I will just look at his most recent positions. First, he supported DJT in the 2016 election, even after the man’s horrible jibes against his wartime torture. He didn’t have to do this. Was it party loyalty? Political ambition? Inertia? Lack of imagination? It certainly wasn’t integrity. Trump’s allegiances and habits were already clear: he admired dictators, despised losers, suspected anyone of color, objectified and used women, and reneged on debts. He silenced enemies with threatened lawsuits. And yet, McCain stood by him. What would it have been like if he behaved like the Bushes and told the world he’d vote for HRC? Would he have risked reelection? Maybe. Would a man of true morality have cared?

And how about his votes? Even after the Senate Armed Services Committee, which McCain chaired, concluded that the Russian government used hacking and leaks to influence the presidential election in January of 2017, McCain continued to support 45. In June of the same year he voted to support Trump’s controversial arms deal with Saudi Arabia. In October of 2017 he praised Trump’s decertification of Iran’s compliance with the Iran nuclear deal and praised Trump’s vision.

It’s true. After his cancer diagnosis he had some kind of deathbed reversal, particularly concerning the ACA. I know about those. My father had one himself. He had been against my opposition to the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island, believing that private industry would always find a way to deal with the spent uranium and the plutonium residue. On the Long Island Expressway? Was his kidding? However, as he lay dying of cancer, he did concede that Long Island was not a place that could be evacuated in the event of nuclear disaster. Should it take cancer to humanize our patriarchs?

Less charitably, did McCain’s diagnosis neutralize his political ambitions and give him permission to give vent to his animus against 45? Because apart from his much needed vote on the ACA, did we see much more than a personal feud played out? Is that why McCain is garnering all these accolades? Is it for being the face of our disapproval of our president and our agent to express our disdain? If so, is that really a political objective deserving of all the elevation he is receiving?

I experience his funeral differently, right down to the orchestrated snub of DJT and his handpicked eulogizers, Presidents Obama and Bush. The New Yorker has referred to this funeral as a meeting of the Resistance. Was it really? The Resistance has been led by women of color, primarily, and there was not a woman of color prominently in sight, unless it was wife, Michelle Obama, who did not speak. To me the funeral was a celebration of all I have come to mistrust: patriarchy, overt Christianity, whiteness (even with Obama’s speech), fulsome celebrations of military service, and power. The one female speaker was Meghan McCain who returned to calling HRC Crooked Hillary by the next day.

I simply can’t understand the reverence my friends are expressing. Have we lowered the bar so far that any decency expressed by a Republican is to be celebrated? Will Bush and Cheney be our heroes next? Have we fallen for the military narrative? If so, where was McCain when John Kerry was being swift boated? Are we longing for a daddy figure in the same way the right does? Do we want a respite from our Resistance work? I have always been allergic to pomp and circumstance, finding in them the seeds of Fascism by wrapping authentic human feelings in a hard-shell, bright-candy sentimentality, an emotional and political M & M. M & M’s are addictive, aren’t they? Beware.