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How McCain Got the Last Word Against Trump (archive)
By the time he died on Saturday, Mr. McCain had carefully stage-managed a four-day celebration of his life — but what was also an unmistakable rebuke to President Trump and his agenda. For years, Mr. Trump had used Twitter and the presidential bully pulpit to mock and condemn the senator. In death, Mr. McCain found a way to have the last word, even quietly making it clear through friends that Mr. Trump was not welcome at the services.
“I think it’s fair to say that they have a very different view of this country and what this country means, here and abroad,” said Mark Salter, the senator’s longtime friend and co-author who sat with Mr. McCain — often with a lump in his throat — during the many discussions about his looming death. “His overall message was: ‘It doesn’t have to be this shitty.’”
The series of events honoring Mr. McCain is the kind of grandiose spectacle that is normally reserved for someone who became president, not someone who twice failed to do so. Friends said that Mr. McCain was surprised by the level of interest in his death even as he planned it.
When advisers suggested that his coffin should lie in state at the Arizona Capitol, Mr. McCain said he believed the legislature would never approve such a rare honor for him, recalled Rick Davis, who had been at Mr. McCain’s side for decades and served as his 2008 campaign chairman. “Every inch of the way, he underestimated what he thought this would be about,” Mr. Davis said.
The memorial events this week began in Arizona on Wednesday, when Mr. McCain’s body was taken to the Capitol, and will continue Thursday at a service at North Phoenix Baptist Church. The procession will then shift to the nation’s capital, when Mr. McCain’s coffin will arrive at an air base outside Washington as the president holds one of his raucous campaign-style rallies for supporters in Indiana.
By the weekend, when virtually all of official Washington — Democrats and Republicans alike — gathers at the National Cathedral for a nationally televised farewell, Mr. Trump is expected to have retreated to Camp David, where White House aides hope he will contain his anger at the attention being lavished on Mr. McCain.
[...] Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian activist who survived two poisoning attempts for his opposition to the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, said that Mr. McCain, who was widely seen as one of the Russian leader’s fiercest detractors, had also asked him in April to be a pallbearer. “He spoke the truth regardless of party or political situations,” Mr. Kara-Murza said. “That was his defining characteristic.”
In Washington, a town where Mr. Trump has given Mr. Putin an open invitation to visit, Mr. Kara-Murza said that Mr. McCain’s choice of a Russian pallbearer — one repeatedly brought to the brink of death for challenging his country’s authoritarian brand of politics — was “actually pretty symbolic.”
(Score: 3, Disagree) by requerdanos on Thursday August 30 2018, @08:29PM (3 children)
Thank you for your reasoned reply. My thanks here are, for what it's worth, genuine.
I don't know about absurd, but it's certainly not a universal one, however much it might enjoy majority or plurality, whichever the case may be.
I cite these two over the others because they died during my adult life and within my knowledge. Yes, I would have been interested in attending a respectful funeral for these people. Besides having basic respect for them as humans, I have even visited the home countries of each. However they too may have lacked understanding of human interaction, empathy, and respect for others, and however much damage they may have done within their unfortunately large sphere of influence, they were all still people and despite their overwhelmingly negative actions and the public perception thereof, they still had value as humans which can be recognized with respect even be that unpopular. [This applies to Hitler, Pol Pot, etc. as well.]
If your worldview allows respect for others only as objects that can be beneficial to you or to those you are interested in, or not, then the conclusion that some of them are only worth trash is going to come up a lot more often than just in the case of major political leaders. Most of the seven billion people in the world have never done anything special to benefit you personally or to tickle your notions of goodness. Indeed, most also harbor hatred, strife, and various flavors of evil in their hearts, tagging them as "deserving" of disrespect. But even if people have worked to try to deserve disrespect, I submit that there is a base level at which even the evil-at-core should be respected as being human.
The idea is to "love your neighbors" because they are human, and not based on whether they "deserve" your personal respect of their humanity to be respected or shown common decency.
It's precisely this difference that I came today to have questions about with respect to the President.
I don't say that you necessarily should feel the same way; and certainly, opinions and feelings will vary. But I hope that this approach becomes more and more common, and not less and less. Especially in our leaders.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 31 2018, @02:43AM
Some people are more deserving of respect than others.
One of humanity's most common problems is distinguishing between respect and freindship, or "liking". I've liked a lot of people, who I didn't consider worthy of much respect. I've respected a lot of other people who I didn't like. It's great when you actually like a respectable person. But bottom line - the two words should never be used synonymously.
McCain? There were things I liked about him, and more things that I didn't like. Those likes and dislikes had little influence on my respect for him. He did a few respectable things. He also did a boatload of things that were worthy of disrespect.
I don't fall into the rather small camp of people who hate the man, but I sure as hell can't be part of this posthumous McCain worship.
John McCain is just another man, who like most men, did some really good stuff now and then, and did some really shitty stuff now and then.
As I've pointed out in the past, it's really great to be the grandson of an admiral, and the son of another admiral. Your fuckups are easily covered over, and your smallest achievements are blown into national achievements. Damn, I wish my daddy had been an admiral!!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Joe on Friday August 31 2018, @08:48PM (1 child)
I have a lot of problems understanding your approach. I'll briefly detail mine so you can see the differences:
Start with a base level of care, respect, and trust for humans.
Adjust those base levels, up or down, based on the past actions/inaction of the individual, then correct for outside factors (e.g. difficult upbringing, desperate situation, cultural factors, etc.).
The levels are then further adjusted to account for predicted future behavior.
Finally, the levels determine the overall value of the individual in relation to others.
It seems to me that either you don't adjust from the base level or you have a lower limit for how far you adjust downward. Either way, the lowest level of value you place on a person extends all the way to respecting their dead flesh or the concept of their existence.
Your approach is scope insensitive, weighted by some sort of availability heuristic or salience bias, and that does not adjust for death (extended-self hypothesis).
Time, resources, and emotional energy are all limited and there are billions of people in the world. Even if you believe that something like Hitler's dead body has some positive value that warrants time and respect, it should be so far down the list of priorities that its effective value is negligible.
- Joe
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:26AM
The base respect level is, in the approach I describe, the floor, below which you can't adjust.
Silly example: "Such and such did nothing but cause people grief, murder thousands of children while their parents watched, and tortured kittens, for no reason but just as a hobby out of boredom. The only thing left to respect is their basic humanity and what a waste their time on earth was." == still more valuable than garbage, because they were a person, however evil or misguided, with potential, however unfulfilled, someone's son/brother/etc. who might mourn for them, while in contrast garbage never was that nor could have been.
Their value *to me*? Might be nothing, less than nothing (at least "nothing" is inoffensive), actively harmful. This was their failing, in the case of the kitten-torturer child-murderer above, Hitler, etc. Their failing; I am sorry they made those choices.
While I recognize their failing, I don't use it as an occasion to also fail, and lower my behavior closer to theirs, by not showing basic respect.
A not-so-silly example: When my dad passed away, I called my half-sister in another state to let her know that our father had died. I didn't reach her, but I did reach her mother (who was our dad's ex-wife, divorced for many years from him). When I told her why I was looking for my sister, her reaction was "Well, good! I'm glad *he's* finally dead." She was to my surprise able to pass at least some of this venom on as my sister did not attend our dad's funeral.
Okay, perhaps they had their differences, perhaps in her view he treated her poorly. Whatever. That's still a shitty and cruel thing to say to someone in fresh mourning of a loved one. To her, he was worth garbage. Okay, perhaps so, due to his failings (or hers, or both, or whatever), no problem. But that doesn't account for her being a useless piece of shit in this manner--that's *her* failing.
From my perspective, she subscribes to "your" view, the President probably also does, and I don't.
Not trying to convert you, nor lump your behavior in with hers (far from it), just trying to explain how it looks from over here. respect=due irrespective of actions/decisions. esteem=depends on actions/decisions.
respect != esteem; esteem != respect.