The Absence of John McCain
I’ve held for years now that Karl Rove bears the most responsibility of any American for the tragic events of September 11th, 2001. When Ol’ Turd Blossom turned John McCain’s adopted Indonesian daughter into his black bastard child, at least in the minds of the unwashed crackers who decided the 2000 South Carolina primary, that despicable act of ratfuckery set off a chain of events which doomed almost 3,000 Americans to die.
For if noted Navy man John McCain had secured the nomination, rather than the feckless dauphin anointed by the GOP (and by extension the Supreme Court), the bombing of the USS Cole would not have been shrugged off by Bush’s cabal of Saddam-obsessed lunatics. Safely presuming that McCain woulda beaten Gore’s ass like a rented mule, that attack would’ve been avenged with the same relish as the Lusitania or the Maine, to say nothing of the Arizona.
No later than May of 2001, Bin Laden and Zawahiri would’ve been field-dressed and spiked on the White House fence, their mutilated remains displayed to the open vehicle traffic still traveling along Pennsylvania Ave NW, because when it counted, John Sidney McCain III did not play around.
Yes, despite their woefully deficient sense of occasion, Twitter’s woke onanists and backbiting jerks are not wrong that McCain was a warmonger. He took human lives from the air, and he openly professed a belief in violence as a political instrument. He forgave W. for slandering his daughter to support the administration in their march to war in Iraq. As it was for us all, his support was betrayed when those chickenhawk ideologues dismantled Iraq’s civil society for no reason and invaded the entire country with half as many troops as we needed to hold Baghdad. Still, Mack owns the charge for the most catastrophic policy mistake of the postwar era.
Furthermore, when McCain belatedly earned the nomination in ’08, from a Republican Party discredited by the failure of that war and the economic ruin of the world, his response to the impossible odds of that contest didn’t exactly live up to his reputation. In order to win an election whose outcome had already been ordained by God himself, the Senator betrayed his cosmopolitan, internationalist principles for the sake of mouth-breathing Republican primary voters, and fell so far down that redneck rabbit-hole that “Vice President Sarah Palin” actually felt like a wise idea.
Needless to say, it was not, but on the plus side, his horrific miscalculation did launch my career in the film industry. In 2011, HBO’s inexplicable affection for the city of Baltimore brought the adaptation of John Heilemann & [redacted]’s dishy campaign exposé Game Change to my hometown. It was the denouement of the Great Recession, and I had been unemployed since graduating film school in ’09, apart from the 2010 Census, so I was overjoyed when I actually got a call from a real show to work on a big shoot day.
My first day, we filmed McCain’s initial announcement of Palin, with the gym at Coppin State University filling in for Wright State’s. It’s a funny thing about portraying real people and recreating real events: the illusion always makes you feel more of the reality than you’d think, even amidst hundreds of extras and crew. I felt the same sense of awe at the tower of hair jutting off Julianne Moore’s head that the governor’s beehive would have inspired (one assumes it’s the only genuinely impressive thing about her), and when Ed Harris walked onto set dressed as John McCain, I distinctly remember the august presence that instantly filled the room.
It wasn’t that I was starstruck. In the same way that fictional stars in movies never feel believable unless they’re played by real stars of comparable fame and cachet, Ed Harris’s stature as an actor was the thing that qualified him to portray such a legendary figure. Anyone less wouldn’t have been able to carry the weight of what John McCain has meant to this country, or communicate even the faintest sense of how much he’s given in service to it. Every time I saw him on set, there was just something stirring about being around him.
Another day, we were shooting two crowd scenes at Goucher College: first a Palin rally set during daytime, then we’d wait for night and film John McCain’s confrontation with the “Obama is an Arab” Lady in the same place. As I said, the re-creations feel more real than you’d think, and just as much as a made-up Ed Harris made me feel some sense of John McCain’s presence, I spent the entire Palin rally feeling sick to my stomach. I knew we were at a blue-state liberal-arts redoubt where I had once dated a girl who majored in ‘Peace Studies,’ and I knew all the extras yelling “Kill him!” about our then-president were only doing so because we told them to, but there was still a sickening sense of dread in hearing the bloodthirsty chant.
Then we filmed McCain vs. The Lady in Red, and it made me feel a little bit better. Watching the reenactment of his gentle chastisement of hatred, I got that warm-and-fuzzy feeling, and briefly forgot about everything that the Senator had actually been doing since this incident originally happened. This was 2011, at the tail end of the least honorable years of John McCain’s life. Straying from his first wife, his vote against MLK Day, his transgressions as a member of the Keating 5 — all his past sins are marginal compared to the denigration of his office and his legacy that spanned Obama’s first term.
Though he first started selling out to racist right-wing whack jobs (whom he had once rather vocally despised) to win the ’08 nomination, his post-election submission to McConnell’s moral perfidy was nothing short of shameful. The erstwhile Maverick parroted the know-nothing Republican cosmology that all evil in the world began with Barack Obama — immediately after they ruined the nation, no less. The tacit racism of that message and its wild success with ‘Conservatives’ planted the seeds for today’s overtly racist vulgarity.
Given that Bush was a President from his own party, I get why forgiving him came easier to McCain than forgiving Obama, but it’s still not a good look that he bore down so hard on the black guy who beat him with a message of “Hope & Change” after he so easily brushed off Bush’s own deployment of “McCain keeps his mongrel bastard in the Great House with his true children” to assassinate his candidacy in a state that elected noted miscegenator Strom Thurmond to the Senate. Seven times.
Even if Mack really was the only old white guy in America who harbored no racial qualms whatsoever, and he only joined the obstructionist blockade because he resented that Obama deserved the Presidency less than he did (objectively), he nullified his superior qualifications when he threatened to put us one old-ass, post-traumatic heartbeat away from the Dunce of Denali.
Despite that lack of room to complain, McCain became more of a party man than ever at a time when his party had become a cancer on America. He stood sentinel as the House Oversight Committee returned to its Clinton-era kangaroo court frivolity, and as the GOP as a whole actively worked to suppress minority votes and make America less democratic. He bore the standard even as that party whipped itself into a white nationalist mania that would install a traitor in the office which he had worked so hard to achieve.
When I stood on the mall for Obama’s inauguration, even in the midst of those dark days for our world, I felt like a new future was possible. It pains me to think that, at the same moment, Senator McCain’s party was making the choice to cannibalize the American Experiment, to give into our national demons rather than spend a few electoral cycles in the wilderness. He helped them execute this civic betrayal, and I have never been able to think of the man without thinking of how he poisoned the promise of that aborted new beginning for America.
I write all of this, as comprehensive and damning an account of the Senator’s failures as I can manage right now, not to condemn him. This litany of sins is offered for the benefit of anyone who would claim that I mourn a false image of the man, or that I’m rewriting sordid reality into a sanitized hagiography. I knew the man John McCain was well enough, and when he died, I wept.
I wept because there is no failing that can undo the sacrifice that John McCain made for the uniform, nor any shortcoming that could discount the strength of character it took to make that sacrifice. John McCain’s sense of civic duty and the love of country that drove it were something unmistakably genuine in American public life, and something that will be sorely missed. Even after decades upon decades of faithful service, our circumstances still leave us feeling like that service ended too soon.
When hindsight has laid bare the horrifying truth that America’s highest office was usurped by a former Genovese associate and longtime financial front for Russian corruption, racketeering, and drug/human trafficking, we will remember that John McCain defended the American idea until his dying breath. For as long as the disgusting display in Helsinki reverberates in our memory, we will remember the Republican Senator whose final act as a public servant was to give voice to our nation’s shame. For as long as movies and shows are made about this treason, every single one will include the scene of McCain personally handing the Steele Dossier to James Comey.
Yes, he continued to be a Republican throughout it all, much to my chagrin. He once used a racial slur for [the people who brutally tortured him, with whom he later found the grace to work out free trade agreement and establish open diplomatic relations]. Sure, he called himself a deficit hawk, but he voted for that embarrassment of a tax cut. He could be kind of an asshole, as any walking force majeure tends to be, and his hostility to pork has needlessly exacerbated the infrastructure crisis and discouraged legislative compromise. All of these mistakes are dwarfed by the totality of the life he lived, and the warmth, vitality, and humanity with which he lived it.
Though none of the military installations named after Confederates are Naval bases, we should rename the biggest rebel-branded army base Fort McCain, in honor of a tireless champion of the uniformed services. I don’t care if we were going to name the next one the USS Jesus Christ, we have to name a Gerald Ford-class carrier after him. Congress should swiftly enact Chuck Schumer’s plan to replace the name on the Russell Senate Office Building with McCain’s, and consign a segregationist to the ashbin of history in the process.
We need to do these things because that is what a democratic nation does for its heroes after they’re gone. That is our reward for the American definition of greatness, the aspiration of those who do great things in service not of themselves, but of their country and their fellow Americans. John McCain had grander dreams than to see his name in big, gold letters on the side of a building. He wanted his name to be immortalized in the civic imagination (and sure, maybe to see it cast in bronze and chiseled into marble here and there after he died). He has earned that much, and more.
As badly as this bold experiment in self-governance has lost its way, the best of this country still stands for what John McCain stood for, though we all stand less steadily for his absence. It takes a lot to make the death of an 81 year-old man a tragedy, but we just lost a true hero of the republic, at the moment we needed him the most.
I’ll see you at the funeral.