http://www.atimes.com/article/a-funeral-for-a-world-that-never-was/
Senator John McCain’s grand funeral was also a chance for the Establishment to take one step closer to its grave.
Funeral services are not for the benefit of the defunct, who is beyond our praise or condemnation, but for the living, who know before long that they will follow the honored dead into a cold grave.
Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.
The eulogies for the Arizona senator, to be sure, were a convenient occasion for the Establishment to show its dudgeon at “the pointedly un-invited President Trump,” as the New Yorker noted, calling the event “the biggest resistance meeting yet.”
McCain’s daughter Meghan contrasted what she called her father’s “real greatness” with the “cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice,” a reference to Trump. Politics, though, were less important than the American elite’s collective exercise in self-consolation after the catastrophic failure of its policies and its repudiation by the voters in the 2016 election.
Senator McCain served his country and suffered on its behalf as a prisoner of war, and deserves respect on the occasion of his passing. But the unctuous sea of self-congratulatory declarations of virtue embedded in his obsequies were enough to make the portraits in the Capitol rotunda puke.
Here, for example, is the Chicago Tribune: “Ringing through Washington National Cathedral on a dreary morning were paeans to bipartisanship, compromise and civility of the sort that seem to be under daily assault from all corners of the country, especially from the White House … A common decency. A shared identity and values that transcend ideology, class or race. A toughness that shows itself in battle and service to nation rather than on Twitter. Each of these was touted as a key element of McCain’s epic life.”
