One of John McCain’s last wishes was that Donald Trump stay away from his funeral. How ironic, then, that the entire affair should revolve entirely around Donald Trump. But then why not? What is every event on the public stage nowadays that attracts large viewership, from the Oscars to the funeral of a Senator, but one more media opportunity for the enemies of Donald Trump to rave and posture? When an Aretha Franklin dies, it’s a chance for some eulogist to call Trump a “foolish fascist.” When an Anthony Bourdain takes his own life, the first thing we hear from the media is that Bourdain said he wanted to cook at the White House just for the chance to poison Donald Trump. Why mourn our dead when we can use them to beat the living?
Trump’s response was restrained. He tweeted his sympathies to McCain’s family. He allowed flags to fly at half-mast past the two days that are its legal and customary limit. He personally authorized the sending Air Force Two to carry McCain’s body to the funeral. At no point did he say that he loved the departed, or appreciated his insults, contempt and obstruction. Trump acted as he normally acts—frankly, authentically, and effectively. Yet how different, how almost elegant a figure he cuts, by contrast to the self-serving eulogists at McCain’s funeral, prostituting a corpse to further a partisan agenda. In 2008 many of them attacked McCain with the same words they now apply to Trump. Now they gush, trusting the media to cover their previous attacks. Why not, when the media does the very same?
Take only one voice from the execratory media chorus, the Huffington Post: in April 2008, the Huffington Post declared Sen. McCain a “white supremacist.” That same month Huffington shared with us a discredited rumor that Sen. McCain called his wife, Cindy, a “c*nt.” In August 2008, the anatomically challenged HuffPo itself called Cindy McCain “a dick.” In September, it speculated whether McCain had Alzheimer’s Disease. In October it claimed cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was supporting Sen. McCain’s candidacy. In November, it accused McCain of “advising death squads,” and described the Senator as “racist,” “misogynist,” and “unhinged.” Nor did HuffPo fail to cite his squalid adulteries.
Now? Now HuffPo calls John McCain lying in state “a bipartisan American hero.”
This sort of two-faced applause not only degrades the funeral of John McCain; it corrupts our appreciation of McCain’s deeply ambiguous place in American history. For though he is dead, yet he lives–as a continuing temptation to Republican and Democrats both to a hard militarism and a globalist, corporate, servility corrupting both parties still.
The high points of McCain’s Senate career were achievements, or non-achievements, that often pleased Democrats more than members of his own party. His major contribution was surely the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, which fellow Republicans passionately opposed. When Republicans threatened to end filibusters in response to Democrats continual use of them to block President Bush’s judicial nominees, McCain joined the a bipartisan group of Senators that fought to preserve it. Yet often his collaborations with Democrats like Ted Kennedy came to nothing, a terminus quite satisfying to Democratic interests, as in the case of their failed joint effort to reform immigration as millions upon millions of illegals rolled in.
But the satisfaction of the Kochs must have paled next to that of the Military-Industrial Complex, on whose insensible gloved hand John McCain perched as fixedly as have few Senatorial hawks. After 9/11, John McCain immediately backed George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq–which had no role in the attacks. During Obama’s presidency, he backed U.S. support for Saudi intervention in Yemen, even slipping into northern Syria to applaud rebels fighting Bashar Assad–both wars, humanitarian disasters. McCain supported the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the Baltic States literally to the Russian border, and favored providing arms to the Ukrainian army to fight pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass. When crowds gathered in the Ukraine to overthrow an elected pro-Russian President, McCain was there, applauding. And as 2008 approached, the wars he had supported had cost the Republican Party both houses of Congress, and would soon cost him the Presidency.
Those disasters might be seen as the fruit of ill-conceived but at least patriotic fervor. But nothing can excuse his part in the DNC-funded Steele Dossier attempt to frame the President, surely his lowest point as a Republican, a Senator, and an American, personally hand-delivering the bogus documents into the hands of James Comey. Even at the end, knowing the documents to be a partisan political hit piece engineered by the opposing party, he wrote in his upcoming memoir, “I would do it again.”
No regrets, no apologies. And even on his deathbed, no reconciliation. We may find it sad that others have used McCain’s passing to take yet another shot at the President. That McCain did so himself is even sadder. And not just the President: Sarah Palin, McCain’s choice of running mate in 2008, and a lifelong admirer and supporter, was asked directly by the family not to attend. Though loyal to the end, she clearly belonged with the unacceptable grassroots working-class groundswell of the Trumpenproletariat. And at McCain’s funeral no Deplorables need apply.
The hagiographic sanctification of John McCain in the media by those who gored him when he was a possible obstruction to Obama is not really a celebration of John McCain or his legacy. Like the funeral itself, it’s merely a gathering together of anti-Trump regulars to commiserate, and to prepare for the latest bombing raid on The Donald. And that’s understandable. The upcoming midterms may well be among the most important midterms in the history of the country, and the blue wave looks more and more like a indigo drip. Trump’s enemies want to whip the True Believers into a voting and funding frenzy.
And yet there’s a kind of defeated quality to their abuse. In some ways it almost feels as if John McCain’s funeral is a symbolic burial of the Deep State itself. All the pee dossiers and insinuations of collusion and accusations of bigotry have been thrown time and time and time again. Years of invective and accusation, years of innuendo and execration, hammer on. And Trump not only remains standing, he stands slightly higher in the polls after each assault. Deep as the wells of liberal hatred are, they are not infinite, and that dim dour awareness may be the main takeaway for attendees: however vast their disdain, even the most venal warriors age and tire and pass away. Where McCain has gone, the Deep State feels itself following slowly—into oblivion.
The passage of John McCain marks the passing away of a certain kind of mutant Republicanism—a Republican mask over the features of a neoconservative party of war, a GOP cloak for a neoliberal party of blind open borders over American nationhood, a conservative imposture concealing the neoliberalism of globalist corporate profits over American jobs. At times John McCain acted as though he never saw a war he didn’t like, or a Democratic spending bill he didn’t support. It was a position that never rose to ideology but often sank to cynicism. Ostensibly conservative, effectively liberal, he was really neither, walking a high and peculiar tightrope. His last hurrah on the Senate floor was typical: after years of struggle against Obamacare in the Congress, and despite a President winning an election in part on the promise of its repeal, it all came down to John McCain, who singlehandedly killed its repeal with a curt thumbs down. It was a vote that stemmed in no small part from his personal dislike of President Trump, and, as with so many opponents of the President, that personal animosity took obsessive center stage. A sad mean end to a colorful, complex and contradictory career.
And yet—we honor McCain and rightly so. His nation called, and he put his life on the line. Greater love hath no man than he give up his life for his homeland. Time tarnishes us all, but young John McCain shone very, very brightly. And even the problematic politics of his later career were a realistic politics of wealth and power–a politics of realism. Let us remember and celebrate his early innocence and his later hardness. And as for those who seek to prostitute his death for petty political gain, let them be forgotten.