Every Good Morning

 

John McCain is dead and I miss him.

We probably disagreed about 90% of the time on substantive issues, but I still miss him.

He sacrificed his body for his fellow POW’s. After he refused to accept release, knowing it would be a propaganda victory for the North Vietnamese, and because he would not abandon his fellow prisoners, they went to work on him with beatings and rope torture.

In the 2008 election, he stood up for Barack Obama’s humanity and decency as a human being.

In 2017 he voted against ending health care for millions of Americans.

Everything I’ve read indicates that he bore his cancer with fortitude and humor.

He was a mensch.

Donald Trump, that human cesspool of corruption, cowardice and deceit hated him. One more reason to like the man. In this moment a comparison with Trump is inescapable. All politics eventually becomes personal.

Think about Trump and his coterie of bootlickers and fellow liars: when they opened the Artic National Wildlife Refuge to oil companies, when they proposed rules allowing the killing of wolves and grizzlies in their dens, pups and cubs included, when they stripped critical protections from the Migratory Bird Act, when they allowed the dumping of toxic waste into wetlands and rivers, when they supported coal barons and make continuing attempts to gut protections for clean air and water, when they rip apart Monuments in Utah, when they go after the Endangered Species Act, when he pardons the Bundy’s after their occupation of the Malheur Bird Refuge, when they dismiss inconvenient science as mere opinion, when they separate parents from children, when they choose the NRA over children, when they make refugees into devils, when they consort with and approve of white supremacists, when everything they touch rots, then yes, it becomes personal.

It was always personal with McCain too. Except that what I will most remember about him was his humanity. He could laugh, tell a joke, get along with people with whom he disagreed. He always gave me the impression of someone who did not hate, this in spite of undergoing suffering few of us can imagine. If you want to know about that suffering pick up Robert Timberg’s book The Nightingale’s Song. Its chapters on McCain’s imprisonment are sobering.

The man was a reader and his favorite book was Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of a dozen volumes I’d pitch in the back of the car if the zombies were coming and we had to get out. Every time I reread it, I think of McCain, his face sometimes shifting onto Robert Jordan’s body. The man walked through the fire and stayed human.

John McCain is dead and I miss him.