We can reject our destiny and
personhood through violence which is self-hatred, through self-maintenance at
all costs, through hedonistic escape from committed love.... We refuse to
accept ourselves as lovable creatures, who are not and need not be God.
Source: Following Christ in a Consumer Society John Francis Kavanaugh as seen on Inward/Outward.org,
When John McCain won enough
delegates to claim the Republican nomination for president, like a lot of
people, I heaved a sigh of relief: he was the least objectionable Republican,
and in fact I, also like a lot of people, felt like the country would be okay,
that whoever won wouldn’t be a disaster.
While he was too conservative, really, for my tastes, I couldn’t imagine
that he would be a disaster. And, also
like a lot of people, I kind of liked him. Or the him I thought he was.
Now it’s like he’s become someone
else entirely. But he can’t have. And he
hasn’t. You can’t predict how people will react to particular circumstances,
but who they are: that doesn’t really change, barring some kind of brain
trauma (including the dementia of age).
We are, at the core, fairly consistently ourselves. We may become more or less caring, more or
less conservative, more or less anxious or depressed, but we don’t change into
someone else.
So the someone else McCain seems to
have become is really the same old John McCain only worse.
The good: He is a man with an iron
will and great courage and endurance. He
has championed some good causes. He professes a of literature and
history.
The rest: He is heavily invested in being a hero and believes he should be ours.
He is his own best authority. And he knows he’s what’s good for the rest of
us. He views life as a series of battles, if not wars. He does not see himself as distinct from the country he talks of defending. His
wars are not only with foreign countries but against people whom he perceives attacking not simply the country but himself and his honor. He lives much of his life reactively, always on the alert
against such attacks.
Possibly the only time his perceptions completely fit reality was during his time as a
POW in North Vietnam, and this is the only time he was a true hero. Being a POW who survives doesn't make for a hero; it makes for a survivor which is not to minimize suffering or horror. But McCain was a hero because, in spite of the hideous punishment visited upon him, he rallied his fellow prisoners, gave them courage, struggled to hold onto his values and stuck it to his captors repeatedly in spite of the terrible consequences. He was full of life, he could not be extinguished.
McCain’s role models are romantic heroes: people who brave real danger, who
stand up to the rest of the world and don’t give in. They are people who take
up a cause and fight for it against all odds and all opposition, are
willing to endure punishment, who see through the fakery and stupidity and venality of other leaders, of
“the way things have always been done.” The more the world is against a hero, McCain
seems to think, the nobler the hero is.
McCain often cites Teddy Roosevelt as one of his heroes as well as his model
president. Some writers have pointed out
that there are major differences in the political beliefs and actions of the
two men. But I would argue that it is
Teddy Roosevelt the hero, not the politician, Roosevelt the Rough Rider and
Trust Buster that McCain so
admires. I am not sure he is even aware
that Roosevelt fought the very sort of people now under attack for bringing
about our current financial woes, people whom, until recently at least, McCain supported. Here is Wikipedia’s summation of who Teddy
Roosevelt was: professional historian, naturalist, explorer, hunter, author and soldier…most
famous for his personality: his energy, his vast range of interests and
achievements, his model of masculinity, and his "cowboy" personality.
Another McCain favorite is Robert Jordan, the
fictional hero of Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the book he says he
likes best. (You could write a pretty good paper on John McCain in the context of this hero and this novel alone.)
The setting of the novel is Spain at the end of the Spanish Revolution of
the 1930’s. Jordan is fighting with the rebels, the defenders of democracy, pretty
much a lost cause. Jordan grows
disillusioned with them as he sees their
corruption, their sloppiness, their sometimes lack of devotion to the cause,
their lack of seriousness, their cruelty. He finds he has to decide whom he can
trust not on the basis of whether or not they are all on the same side, but on the basis his own experience
with each one of them. In war, he concludes, there are only two kinds of people:
those you can trust and those you can’t.
Even for him, even fighting on the side of good, involves what he can recognize as dishonorable
behavior. "If a thing was right fundamentally, the lying was not supposed
to matter. There was a lot of lying though. He did not care for the lying at
first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an
insider but it was a very corrupting business." So McCain is in good
company in his lying and his shady dealings.
If he even admits to himself that’s what he does, he can say that heroes do it as part of putting “country first.”
Just as Jordan knew that the people he defended were anything but perfect,
McCain learned well that those whom he was brought up by and trained to defend
weren’t, either. The authority he flouted was often clearly worthy of scorn. The rules and rituals at the Naval Academy was pretty strange fare for training a
man to be an honorable, brave, self-sacrificing officer. During the Vietnam
War, Robert McNamara, et. al., were deserving of McCain’s heavy criticism for
their management of the war. The
Republican Party of today in which he is embedded is riddled with examples of
the unapologetic mockery of what most would consider honorable behavior. Yet this is what he is bound
to be loyal to, to fight for: a country and its customs worthy of being mocked.,
but worthy of defending, too.
McCain’s and Robert Jordan’s reactions to what they have to do in war mark them as very different from each other.As McCain, and I suspect most who are in war
can, Jordan knows and practices the coldness necessary to be able to continue
fighting. He can resist reacting to
tragedy. “Such things happen in war,” he
says. But Jordan has self-doubts and has
to work at continuing as a soldier. He
knows he takes a human life when he kills.
He has doubts about the rightness of his actions. McCain seems close to impervious. I wonder if he is aware of this difference with his hero and what he would say about it.
Before he was a POW, McCain was a bomber pilot based on the USS
Forestal. As Robert Timberg describes it,in "John McCain: American Encounter," there
were, as well as fear, “exhilaration and excitement” in flying bombing missions. "McCain [flew] carrier-based combat missions that
rarely lasted more than hour from takeoff to landing, sixty minutes of gut-wrenching,
scrotum-shrinking frenzy. Then [he was]
back….cooling out with [his] buddies, telling war stories, lying about women."
One day, as he sat in his plane loaded with bombs,
rockets and hundreds of gallons of fuel on a deck crammed with
similarly loaded planes, a Zuni rocket accidentally launched, resulting in
total disaster. Flames and exploding bombs and bursting aircraft maimed,
mutilated, burned hundreds of sailors, killing 134. Although caught in the midst of it, McCain survived relatively unscathed. At first he saw the connection
between the horror on the Forrestal and the devastation he visited upon the Vietnamese with his bombs and said he wasn't at all sure he wanted to keep inflicting it. He wondered, too, as he did after other close calls and after being a POW, if God had spared
him for a reason, a not uncommon reaction among survivors. But McCain seems to have answered no higher calling. In the break after the Forrestal tragedy and before he was reassigned, he took his wife and
kids to Cannes where the kids saw the sights, and McCain and wife “enjoyed the
nightlife.”
Later, when he was shot down
over Hanoi, he was bombing the center of the city. Even if his mission was to
hit infrastructure, he was surely and knowingly blowing up civilians as
he had done in his twenty two previous missions, apparently without a second
thought. In fact, he expressed puzzlement at the violent rage
one of his rescuers/attackers let loose on him.
McCain seems curiously detached. It’s not that he can’t intellectually
recognize suffering, but rather that he can see it and then leave it. He is capable of apologizing for some of his own misdeeds, but the apologies seem superficial, aimed at fixing a blemish in his own character rather than making amends to someone else. He seems
to lack empathy. His hero, Robert Jordan is different: Jordan perceives that he inflicts damage on others and he also can empathize deeply. In combat, McCain sees his enemies as cardboard stereotypes. At least in certain contexts non-combat
situations, McCain’s sees people who don’t agree with him the same way.
His famous anger explodes when he perceives that he has been insulted, that his honor has been impugned, that his position is threatened. He must feel these as if they were emotional gun shots to his psyche. The media are littered with examples of McCain’s explosions and they and his general air of superiority diminished his popularity as time went on. His charm was no longer so effective as it had been at covering his flaws. Timberg gives a
good summary of some reactions to McCain by people not in his thrall. He says, "Although his standing had grown, there had developed by then an
undercurrent of dislike for McCain in some quarters on capital hill and
elsewhere. The animus, morover seemed to
go beyond philosophical conflicts, relating to what some saw as a
self-righteous quality, others as a refusal to even consider the possibility
that he might have been off-base. ‘John’s
problem is that he takes [differences] not as an attack on an issue but as an
attack on him.’ Said….David Keene in late 1997. “
Often McCain sets up a pattern in his life (and the lives of others) that
reflects a man who sees himself as the hero standing up against the enemy. He takes on the job of criticizing –
lambasting, mocking, taunting, subverting – authority. He gathers a gang of supporters around him
who tend to be worshipful, who find him charming and who, without even thinking,
excuse his behavior, whether it be hovering around the line of legal as it did in
Annapolis, or whether it be an explosion of temper, or whether it be subverting
superiors when he thinks he is right. The members of the media used to be such a gang of
worshippers and he worked hard to keep them that way. But when they started
questioning him, he turned on them. Today, he is embedded in a campaign staff
and accompanied by a vice presidential nominee who are his yesmen to the
extent that he doesn’t appear to know that his standing and that of Palin is
falling. Mark Salter is a one-man worshipful gang. One might even see his cross-party-lines legislative work in the same
light. Whatever your affiliation, if you agree with him, you're his friend. (It’s important to note here that he hasn’t consistently defended his
initially praiseworthy positions which led him to make these alliances, but has
abandoned them. Noteworthy examples:
campaign financing, torture, Bush tax cuts, Roe v. Wade)
McCain can change positions quite dramatically, and sometimes for good
cause. When Bill Clinton moved to open
up relations with Vietnam, McCain supported him. But he seems to expect others to change with
him, and if they don’t he can be furious. When he sat on the Senate Select Committee on MIAs/POWs where he worked to close the
books on military still not found, he actually turned on the MIA/POW families. He drove one woman to tears for what he perceived
as her insulting him and others During the same hearings, he warmly embraced the man who had been in charge
of his captors in Viet Nam and was similarly able to visit the sites of his
imprisonment with equanimity and humor. His former POW/MIA alllies started wondering out loud if he was a "Manchurian candidate."
For McCain, the notion of honor is central to his image of himself as
hero. He said that at Annapolis “we learned to dread dishonor
above all other temptations.” But he besmirches his own honor at times. It was expedient for him, as a Republican, to vote for the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about Monica Lewinsky. He had been on good terms with Clinton, his friend in the negotiations to recognize Vietnam. But when it came to Clinton's impeachment McCain framed the issue as as a betrayal of honor. He gave an utterly self-righteous, self-serving and pompous
speech in which he said, among other things, “I do not hold the president to
the same standard that I hold military officers to. I hold him to a higher standard. Although I may admit to failures in private
life, I have at all times, and to the best of my ability kept faith with every
oath I have sworn to this country. I cannot--not in deference to public opinion, or for political considerations, or for the sake of comity and friendship--I cannot agree to expect less from the president."
Notice how McCain makes it all about himself. Notice, too, that he has never even whispered the slightest suggestion that perhaps members of the Bush Administration have not lived up to the standards McCain supposedly holds them to, at least not until this campaign for president.
Honor is of course in the eyes of McCain.
Actions other people would consider dishonorable he regards as
honorable: his sneaky subversion of the expressed positions of his superiors in
a Congressional battle over a new carrier, for example.
In fact McCain has often led anything but a highly honorable life, from
letting friends at Annapolis take the rap for his misdeeds to his partying
before he went to Vietnam to sleeping around after he had lost interest in his
first wife but was still married to her, to hanging out with the rich and
glamorous to the extent that his behavior was questioned in the Keating Five
scandal (where it is thought his office if not he leaked information to save him) to current involvement with the
Indian gaming industry.
In choosing a political career, McCain never returned to the notion of having been saved for a purpose. Not that he should have. But what is noteworthy at least in Timberger's book is that he never really talked about the idea of service when he decided to run for Congress from Arizona (where he was a carpetbagger). Rather, his experience as the Navy liaison to the Senate seemed to excite his ambition.
And why does he want to be president? “I didn’t decide to run for president to
start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a
campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be
president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth,
I’d had the ambition for a long time.” McCain's main cause is McCain.
The contrast between McCain and Robert Jordan is now complete. Hemingway painted Jordan as increasingly compassionate, loving, Christlike. McCain, impulsive, his anger barely under control, continues to act the heroic soldier, both in real wars and in politics. He sees the country threatened from all sides; he sees himself threatened from all sides. He would tend to use aggressive weapons in both cases. Ultimately, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was passionately antiwar. McCain sees and fights wars all around him.
I know that many politicians are corruptible, human, sometimes pretty sleazy, just like the rest of us. I vote for some of them knowing this is how they are. I hope most of them have a line they won't cross. The ones I am really wary of, though, are those who can't bear to see flaws in themselves, let alone have others point them out, those whose first concern is protecting their own "honor," those who feel entitled to the office they are running for and perceive political opponents as enemies. These politicians can't imagine they'd ever reach a line they shouldn't cross. They are capable of justifying to themselves everything they do. People like this, people like John McCain,should not be president. We just came through almost eight years of someone like this. We can't afford more.
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By the way, he suspended the big announcement festivities planned for his
2000 presidential run when three Americans
were captured by the Serbs during the war in Kosovo. “It is not appropriate to
launch a political campaign,” he said, since the nation was at war. That campaign suspension was praised to the
skies. And it got him tons of favorable
publicity. I wonder if he had this success in mind when he called off his campaign last week because of the financial crisis.
***********************
UPDATE: Rolling Stone has a long and damning article on McCain here. I think I was too gentle.
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