Was it more than nostalgia?
by Tom Sullivan
Was Sen. John McCain’s memorial resistance or nostalgia?
“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness,” Meghan McCain said, holding back tears. “The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”
The missing man in this formation was not John McCain but Donald Trump. In case Meghan McCain’s first salvo was too subtle for a president not known for it, she continued, “the America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.” A cathedral filled with generals, politicians, and former presidents from both parties senators burst into applause, although probably not all.
As Digby observed, the speeches yesterday at the Washington National Cathedral unnerved the right. While the sitting president’s name went unmentioned, the vacuum of stewardship or statesmanship in the White House formed the subtext to eulogies by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Charlie Pierce suggests the entire enterprise was a formal trolling of the uninvited sitting president:
It was said almost immediately after the conclusion of the funeral ceremonies on Saturday that, for a few hours anyway, we were back in a familiar country with familiar customs and manners and norms, a country with institutions built to last. That may well be true. I felt it, too. But in back of that is the realization that all of us, including the deceased, had taken those customs, manners, norms, and institutions terribly for granted. We thought they could withstand anything, even a renegade president* in the pocket of a distant authoritarian goon. We let the customs, manners, norms and institutions weaken through neglect and now we are in open conflict with an elected president and, make no mistake about it, John McCain’s funeral was a council of war, and it was a council of war because that’s what John McCain meant it to be.
Both former presidents included jabs that in the context of the day aimed squarely at Trump. Bush’s reference to McCain despising “bigots and swaggering despots” was unmistakable, but fleeting. Obama took his time:
“So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.”
“Heads nodded, writes The New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser:
Democratic heads and Republican ones alike. For a moment, at least, they still lived in the America where Obama and Bush and Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney could all sit in the same pew, in the same church, and sing the same words to the patriotic hymns that made them all teary-eyed at the same time.
But was it any more than that? Or only, as the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe and Philip Rucker wrote, merely “a melancholy last hurrah for the sort of global leadership that the nation once took for granted,” as Pierce wrote.
McCain helped plan his own memorial. If he indeed meant it to be a war council, it was well-orchestrated. All offered paeans to McCain’s decades of service. Partisan divides subsided as mourners lost themselves in reverie and remembrance. From Paul Ryan to Elizabeth Warren, McCain’s death brought together official Washington under a flag-draped banner of truce. Knowing how many ears his memorial would reach, perhaps even after death McCain was not done doing the country a service. Having fought two presidents and lost, the crusty warrior would go to his grave battling a third.
It is difficult to muster the faith that the comity will last. Will a listing America right itself, find a star to steer by, and return to a true course, even as it tacks left and right getting there against history’s headwinds? I claim no higher purpose to my own efforts than it feeling more empowering to be in the fight than to feel like political roadkill. Obama acknowledged that in citing Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech:
Most of you know it, Roosevelt speaks of those who strive, who dare to do great things, who sometimes win and sometimes come up short but always relish a good fight. A contrast to those cold, timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Isn’t that the spirit we celebrate this week? That striving to be better, to do better, to be worthy of the great inheritance that our founders bestowed.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear. (Matthew 11:15)
We return you now to our regularly scheduled fight for America’s soul. With luck and determination, that fight — your fight — will turn Make America Great Again into the coda for this presidency, not its prelude.
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