In the wake of his death, too many fell into the simplistic binary thinking that plagues our country and steamrolls politics
I come not to praise Senator John McCain nor to bury him – plenty of people are taking care those things – but to describe him and our problems with complex people and complex descriptions. I found McCain a fascinating, frustrating character who often expressed high ideals and as often betrayed them. That is something quite different than, say, the ruthlessly mercenary instincts of Mitch McConnell or the transparently self-serving amorality of Paul Ryan. With his death, the last shreds of conscience in his party have gone, though they were often only present in him in flickers of conflicted, contradicted impulses.
McCain seemed to believe in a gallant idea of what a soldier, a politician and an American should be. Though his version was often deeply at odds with mine, it appeared to be a genuine set of ideals. His life was a public performance of his meandering path to and from and around those ideals, and those trajectories were fascinating to watch, with the sense of some Faustian private struggle behind the public drama. He was often called a maverick and embraced the term, which comes from a Mr Maverick of Texas who didn’t brand his calves. The term is now used to mean a dissident, an untamed soul, someone who doesn’t run with the herd, but McCain’s orthodoxies jostled with his unorthodoxies, and he often ended up back in the Republican corral with the rest of the conservative cattle. Or on the other side after all, regretting Sarah Palin, regretting his consent to the Iraq war, which he admitted was a disaster. At this point in political history even the admission of error is an endangered species.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2osbZJt
via
0 Comments