Mourning the death of a warrior.  The Greek warriors destroyed Troy and its people. Sound familiar? Homer’s heroes were Western poetry’s first dearly beloved war criminals. Note the shield with the Gorgon head. “Thetis and the Nereids’ lamentation for Achilles.” Hydria decorated by the Damon painter, Corinth, c. 560 BCE, Louvre.  

De mortuis, nil nisi b. s. How many admiring journalists wrote poignant memorials to John McCain? How many newspapers published heartfelt editorials? Many mentioned his 23 missions flying an A-4 Skyhawk over North Vietnam during the Vietnam War and his  two and half years as a prisoner of war, tortured, courageously resisting. But did you read any which asked, who was he bombing? All of them identified with McCain’s suffering and courageous resistance as a prisoner, but did you read any which mentioned that he was dropping bombs in Operation Rolling Thunder, in which American pilots killed an estimated 52,000 civilians?  While we remember his suffering with compassion or his resistance with admiration, let’s remember also the Vietnamese who died; not counting combatants, over 2 million died in the war.

Remembering these Vietnamese had no place among the pieties. In the mainstream media, the U.S. must be a force for good in the world. Officially we don’t  remember feelings widely held at the time, expressed by Martin Luther King Jr when he said, “The United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Such blasphemous thoughts seem even more out of place now that liberals mourn the passing of a Republican senator who openly defied Trump. After all, didn’t he save the Affordable Care Act? Didn’t he oppose Gina Haskel’s nomination as CIA director for her role in waterboarding prisoners? The liberal commentariat seemed to celebrate him even more for planning insults to Trump and family at his funeral.

MINO: Maverick In Name Only

On Democracy Now, Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin reminded listeners McCain was a war criminal who bombed civilians. And there were others who punctured the rest of the McCain myth — the myth of the principled maverick who stood apart from the hypocrites and liars who protect Trump for the sake of tax cuts and deregulation. They point out that McCain voted in line with Trump’s positions 83% of the time (it might have been more, but he was absent and under medical treatment for many votes). He voted for Trump’s extreme right-wing judges, for almost all his cabinet nominees, and for the tax cut. They note the devious hypocrisy of his dramatic vote against repealing Obamacare but later voting to eliminate the individual mandate on which it depends (and other votes supporting the repeal effort).

But wasn’t there that signature, bold act of principle when McCain opposed torture, insisting that all military interrogations follow the army field manual?  Of course, but after the media celebrated his courage for weeks, he then refused to extend that safeguard to CIA interrogations, where most of the waterboarding and other torture was carried out. He even inserted language to protect torturers from prosecution. He did this both in 2005 and then again in 2008, when he called on President Bush to veto Dianne Feinstein’s amendment which again attempted to limit CIA interrogations to the standards of the Army Field Manual.

What about his other signature legislation, the  Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (called “McCain-Feingold”) — that’s his only major legislation from all his years in Congress. It limited donations from corporations and the wealthy to the parties, where donations would have to be disclosed, but that redirected money to outside groups, where their donations could be kept secret.

It was hard for liberals to celebrate him without regrets and excuses for his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in his 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama. It was a racist campaign that used Palin to mobilize the same bigotry and hatred that carried Trump into office, but it’s no good to say the dirt was Palin’s and not McCain’s. The racism was no departure from mainstream Republican politics; it just brought it out in front of the TV cameras.

Loved by journalists … and Democrats too

Some say journalists loved McCain because he made a practice of cultivating them. Reading their sentimental recollections of McCain makes me wonder how many mainstream journalists are suckers for the powerful, if they only deign to show them some respect and affection, or act like regular guys and buy them drinks. But the adulation is more widely shared and goes deep, tied into our culture’s love for the military. The centrality of guns in our culture is a reminder of how our ideas of patriotism, heroism, and masculinity have been shaped by our country’s centuries of war and violence. The myths of U.S. exceptionalism somehow survived the horrors of the Vietnam War, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombing of Libya and support for al-Qaeda and Isis-tied forces in Syria. And the myths continue to survive massive increases to the military budget while we’re told there isn’t money for schools, health care, affordable housing, job programs. And all of this McCain supported, just like the other good Republicans.

Yes, McCain was bipartisan at times, “reaching across the aisle.” Many liberals reach right back; they can’t attack McCain for his worst sin, his militarism, because it is shared by Democratic leaders, who, like Hillary Clinton, supported all those interventions and supported massive war spending — even agreeing we have to limit spending on social programs because we have to balance the budget or at least keep the deficit down. Corporate media and the political class have always treated all this as normal, consensus politics. But people were dying. Lack of health insurance alone was estimated to kill 45,000/year before Obamacare, just more collateral damage in McCain’s and the Republican Party’s war on the poor. Here too, “We don’t do body counts,” as General Tommy Franks said when asked how many the U.S. had killed in Afghanistan.

Some have greatness thrust upon them … and some have it cooked up for them 

The few mainstream voices which focus on McCain’s dark side are drowned out by the incessant references to his heroism and decency. Sincere or not, it was a carefully constructed identity which served McCain well. Boston Globe reporter Sasha Issenberg tells how speechwriter Mark Salter worked with McCain to create a defining narrative out of his Vietnam story. Cleansed of those inconvenient details about the bombs, it became a marker for the military virtues of honor, service, integrity, dedication to America as a “moral beacon” for the free world.

The packaging was ready in time for his presidential run in 2008. It was an image  with appeal for independents and even Democrats, a “moderate,” a politician defined by service, honor, integrity, and the bipartisanship signaled famously by his close friendships with Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden.

Fivethirtyeight tracked his votes over the decades, and Harry Enten concluded:

 You can see that McCain’s transformation on key votes (again measured by the American Conservative Union’s scorecards) matches up with when he began to buck the GOP on party-line votes overall: Just before his first run for the presidency in 2000.

Was he really a “maverick” — or was he a MINO? Enten asked, and summed up McCain’s occasional dramatic departures from Republican orthodoxy:

Perhaps when all the other dogs have solid-colored hair, having one spot makes one just different enough to stand out.

Honoring our heroes

It’s just common sense that you can’t trust politicians — most people think snakes have more character. Maybe that’s why the politicians hire PR firms to construct their image, and it’s usually about their character and the personal narrative that exemplifies it. Military service? Medals? Wounds? Torture? What more do you need to make people overlook your voting record?

Democrats “reached across the aisle” —and not only Joe Biden, who wept at his funeral. Showing how powerful the myths of heroism are, even progressive heroine (still mine too) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dismayed her admirers with a tweet celebrating McCain as an “unparalleled example of human decency and American service.” Thank you, Alexandria, for this helpful lesson in how radical activists start talking pretty as they become socialized into the political class. But let’s give her a pass; if we demand purity in politics, we’d better sit it out.

The heroes from the Vietnam War whom I honor have different stories. Hugh Thompson and his helicopter crew, who risked their lives to stop the mass murders at My Lai, or the many soldiers who told their stories of atrocities and turned against the war at the Winter Soldier Hearings, or the uncounted many men and women who resisted the war from inside the military.

What will it take for Americans to see beyond “heroism” and “character” in political image-making? These concepts play big in the culture of militarism; even liberal critics of imperialism go soft to make excuses for McCain, and Democrats are thrilled to vote for women  veterans, when their ads offer little beyond their war stories to recommend them. If they have no regrets about their time in Iraq and Afghanistan, better watch how they vote for the “defense” budget and our next war.

We can use a reframe on our ideas of heroism — maybe we should be looking for character, heroism, sacrifice in the public school teachers or nurses or social workers who volunteer their time after work to continue helping families in need. But as for the macho warrior heroes, let’s relegate them to movies, TV, and comic books — the more fantastic there, the better to distance them from our reality.
—Paul Elitzik

More reading and listening.
I found only a few mentions of McCain’s Vietnamese victims in print: Medea Benjamin on Democracy Now, Eric Levitz in NY magazine, and Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, aside from the countless tweets and facebook posts.  Many podcasts also, including Unauthorized Disclosure (Sept. 2).

The 52,000 figure for civilian deaths in Operation Rolling Thunder is from Spence C. Tucker, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 358.

The best on-line research on McCain I’ve seen was published at the time of his 2008 presidential campaign. They include Sasha Issenberg’s “Inventing John McCain” in the Boston Globe.

John W. Deane interviewed historian Mary Hershberger on her research into fabrications in McCain’s memoirs and claims about his Vietnam service, which she says even progressive publications rejected. You can read her op-ed in Truthdig and on History News Network here and here.

Martin Luther King Jr’s speech of April 4, 1967, is re-broadcast on Democracy Now.

McCain’s votes aligned with Trump are listed by FiveThirtyEight here.

Also: Glenn Greenwald’s chapter on McCain in “Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics” (Crown, 2008).

A reader alerted me to this take-down of McCain in Black Agenda Report, which has fascinating information about his family background, as well as more about his war-making: Bruce A. Dixon, “The Manufactured McCain.”

Note: Black Agenda Report has been blacklisted by social media platforms, along with Telesur, lumping left voices in with the likes of Alex Jones. (I suggest readers oppose this censorship by subscribing to their email lists and spreading articles they think would interest their friends.) Banning racist hate-speech easily becomes a cover for broader censorship efforts. A line has been crossed, and while many are delighted to see racist hate speech banned, no one should be surprised when anti-imperialist media are banned along with them. Who will be next? My guess is pro-Palestinian voices.