Meghan McCain’s eulogy of her father evoked the kind of approving gasps not heard since the Earl of Spencer eulogized his sister, Princess Diana.
She delivered a sustained assault on the petty politics of division and derision, which Senator McCain detested to his core but President Trump practices more and more. And she delivered it with fierce and dramatic indignation, which conjured in my apostate mind images of an Aryan dominatrix whipping a predator priest.
Alas, she bewailed her/our loss for too long. Not least because she evoked all the approving gasp I could possibly muster at the outset with just two sentences, which made the telltale kill shot she delivered near the end seem trite:
We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness. 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 live lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served. …
The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.
(CNN, September 1, 2018)
But if you think anything Meghan or anyone else said today will have any impact on the self-deifying, self-deluding and self-dealing politics of the America of Donald Trump, this should disabuse you of that:
This is why the best way for Meghan and others to honor her father’s memory is to encourage Americans to vote only for candidates who champion his political values. If only half of the voters mourning McCain do that, Trump will lose his bid for re-election in 2020 by the largest margin in US history.
Of course, looming impeachment proceedings could force him to resign long before then … Not to mention that doing so would also see Democrats seize control of both houses of Congress from (Trumpleton) Republicans, and they’d probably hold that control for a generation or two.
Finally, I’d be remiss not to note how out of character it seemed for the purportedly humble McCain to plan a five-day funeral worthy of a British monarch. It seemed no less so that millions of purportedly partisan Americans mourned his passing across party lines – as if he were their beloved hero, respectively.
Given that, I’m inclined to think that the funeral of a more popular and revered public servant like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a.k.a. “the Notorious RBG”) could be even more regal, and the mourning even more bipartisan.
Related commentaries:
John McCain is dead…