John McCain's Parting Gift to His Nation

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/john-mccains-last-gift-to-his-nation/569200/

John McCain’s Parting Gift to His Nation
The senator orchestrated a final ceremony that called his fellow citizens to live up to the greatness of American ideals.
Eliot A. Cohen

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It has been said that the ceremonies attending McCain’s last rites, which the senator orchestrated with exquisite care before his death, were a giant rebuke to the current president. In some ways they were. It said all that needed to be said that while the dignities and the courtesies were being performed, President Donald Trump was spilling bile in tweets and going off to play golf. But members of his own cabinet attended. His chief of staff, looking gaunt and haunted, was there. So, too, was the president’s daughter.

The ceremony was not, however, in the end directed against Trump, and it was not even primarily about John McCain. It was, rather, in a patriot’s last act for his country, about America. All politics is theater, which is why Shakespeare is a better guide for us than equations in learned journals of political science. This was high drama, conceived and conducted as a statement and a gift. It celebrated bipartisanship, service, generosity of spirit, patriotism, moderation, and self-sacrifice. The word “senator” comes directly from the Roman republic, unlike “representative” or “president,” so it is unsurprising the Roman virtues were on display: dignity, gravity, authority, fidelity, family.

McCain’s funeral was intended to remind his fellow citizens, as all the speakers said but as the ceremonies conveyed even more powerfully, that the United States is about the greatness of its ideals; that when it falls short, as it inevitably must do, that should occasion not cynicism but a drive to repair wrongs and build anew; that American patriotism is, as McCain warned us, the very opposite of blood-and-soil nationalism; that when America fails to lead abroad, darker forces gather and gain force, and minorities can be massacred with impunity, and dissidents can be safely strangled in underground chambers.

The mood as the attendees left the cathedral on a warm and soggy Washington summer afternoon was somber but elevated. Crowds had formed outside—tourists, neighbors, passersby—who knew that something powerful had happened. Strangers asked if they could snap images not of the great and famous, but of the program. And now, as McCain would have growled at each of those present, it was time to get back to the work of bringing his beloved and bewildered country back to its best.