RIP, I guess

By Freakshow, via Freaking News.

Reporters in the era when McCain flourished saw themselves as sitting between parties, creatures of neither, equal opportunity cynics, un-ideological, in possession of the most awesome crap-detectors in politics. They also loved him because he reflected this image back to them. 3

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 26, 2018

Jay Rosen's Proustian theory of McCain ("Proustian" doesn't mean it's a joke; it's pretty good) https://t.co/33bmjzkrR9

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2018

I had in mind one of a number of passages like this one, from À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, as cited in this quotes compendium:

Very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourself, the lover.

The press loved McCain so much, especially in the 2000 campaign, because the person they created in their minds to represent him, and wrote about in their reports, was so much the person they wanted to see in themselves: that high-risk truth-teller, that insouciant gamesman, that nonpartisan prankster, with no particular beliefs except in the honor of the game as he played it.

In fact, I think, the real man was intensely partisan, though not very "ideological" (Twitter invited us to imagine today what America would be like under a McCain presidency, policy-wise, and basically nobody took up the question, because there really wasn't anything to work with, except send more troops)—deeply caught up in a sense of Republican identity, whatever that is, contempt for poverty, I guess, and what he saw as lack of initiative among the poor, and expressing that kind of military patriotism some Republicans have been doing since 1968 (except when Bob Dole inveighed against "Democrat wars"), and the ownership claim on this sacred cow. But he wore it very lightly, spread his sarcasm cheerfully on both sides, and had no appetite for pretending he believed it would make a huge difference which party was in power, which was a sentiment he absolutely had in common with the press—in his case you could say it was practically a mark of patriotism, an unshakable confidence that the Union would be fine no matter what, whereas the journalists' cynicism was of an uglier type, perhaps, of believing government doesn't matter at all.

But he did take the game seriously, as the political journalists did, and passionately wanted to win, though to be honest he always had a side bet on the Republicans, in the form of being rich, so that whenever they managed to pass one of those big tax cuts he was going to benefit from it. But that's making it sound a bit nastier than I meant it. McCain as politician was a sports hero, a great interview, a generous winner, and a good-natured loser, too, and the political journalists loved him because he wanted to the be hero of the story they wanted to write.

A lot of people are saying McCain ought to be condemned for his enthusiastic support for war, for the disasters in Afghanistan and especially Iraq, and for that horrible moment in the 2008 campaign where he announced his desire to "Bomb Iran, bomb bomb Iran..." I'd like to take the opportunity to make a point I've been wanting to make, about pacifism: which is that the absolute rejection of war is a little like the absolute rejection of abortion (in purely schematic terms, hear me out, I'm not about to come out in favor of war).

Namely: I believe that the anti-abortion fanatic who believes that every abortion procedure amounts to an act of murder needs to come to grips with the fact that most Americans really don't think so, at least at the moment, and there are just different cultural views on the subject, among which the abortion fanatic's view is that of a distinct minority, and they need to just give up on that line of argument; it's OK to talk about ways of making abortion rarer, for example by preventing unwanted pregnancy, but they need to realize that the one out of three American women who will have an abortion at some point in their lives are not evil people, but people with a slightly different moral code from their own who they will need to work with if they want to reduce the number of abortions, and they should stop putting so much energy into denouncing it and trying to stop it "by any means necessary".

In the same way, those of us who believe that war is intrinsically evil should understand that most people really haven't learned to care about this in any effective way; that is, they're not intrinsically evil people, just a bit less enlightened than we are, who we need to work with if we want to reduce the devastations of war. And I don't mean by that that there was any hope of persuading McCain that the Iraq War was a bad idea, or that he should stop meddling with the Syria situation in a way that was likely to promote more death, torture, and displacement, just that ignorance was his problem, not wickedness. Where some of the people involved (yes, I'm thinking of Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and some other choice specimens) were wicked indeed and in the latter two cases dumb too.

I don't even know where I want to go with this. I don't seem able to give McCain a proper eulogy. I haven't said anything about the things I more or less approve of, the McCain bipartisan moments that went somewhere (the work on campaign finance reform with Russ Feingold, for what it's worth, or his fight against the Bush administration torture policy, which was worth a lot, and that last great vote against the "skinny repeal" proposal for destroying the Affordable Care Act in July 2017) or almost went somewhere (his work in favor of comprehensive immigration reform). I want to finish reading this classic piece on McCain in the 2000 campaign by David Foster Wallace for Rolling Stone, and I advise everybody else to read it too.