paul simon

The book is Carson McCullers' 1940 Southern Gothic tome, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The story is about a deaf-mute man named John Singer who loses his companion and suddenly shows up in a small Southern town, except that the story is even more about the reactions of the various characters -- a young woman coming of age, a black doctor angry about racism, the "town drunk," and others -- who pour out their heart and soul and project their own dreams and fears onto McCullers' protagonist, who cannot hear them or speak back.

In 2018, the American heart is the loneliest hunter of all, and so an increasingly lost and disillusioned nation turned its lonely eyes toward McCain. The late senator's 81-plus years on Planet Earth embodied so many contradictions -- the military man of honor and stoic POW who also took free trips from a sleazeball savings-and-loan multi-millionaire and cheated on his first wife after she'd been injured in a car wreck, the political "maverick" who nonetheless enabled the modern GOP's turn toward authoritarianism with the vast majority of his votes -- that Americans of every ideology and every psychological state could project onto him their own vision of what this country ought to, or our despair over what it's become. The story isn't really about who was John McCain, now no longer able to hear our plaintive appeals. The story is really about our anxiety over who we are.

In death, it was the John McCain legend -- the myth that a public so desperately craves when vainglorious "Individual-1" and his sweaty 1 a.m. Twitter fingers is keeping the lights on in the White House -- that landed on America's front doorstep Sunday morning.

The truth is that had there not been a John McCain to shoehorn into a broader myth -- a POW who endured years of torture for his brothers-in-arms and the doomed war effort and then entered politics as a public service, a "maverick" who did the right thing in a time of knee-jerk polarization, the last defender of true American values who rode off into the sunset -- America would likely have invented just such a character.

And let's be clear, it's impossible to write about McCain's passing without acknowledging the many places where the man and the myth overlapped, without expressing gratitude for the sacrifices and awe at the pain he endured during the "Hanoi Hilton" years, and without expressing deep sympathy to all those who loved him. But in the end, McCain the man was very much just like the rest of us flawed mortals -- with no novelistic plot line pointing to some grand moral climax, just the normal blend of human contradiction.

McCain the man, after all, tended to only be a "maverick" when it didn't matter. Yes, he became the leading Republican advocate for campaign finance reform -- but only after he was caught red-handed in the cookie jar with future S&L felon Charles Keating, with official favors and lavish free trips that are almost identical to the bad behavior that got his later Senate colleague Bob Menendez indicted. Yes, his experiences in Hanoi led McCain to become a moral beacon on the torture issue, but his nightmarish Vietnam experiences (including some real-time regret over his bombing and napalm runs) didn't stop him from advocating for more immoral Vietnam-style military actions around the globe. Yes, his 3 a.m. vote saved Obamacare, which saved lives. but just a few months later he voted to end the Obamacare individual mandate, which will ultimately price many middle-class Americans out of the health market. Yes, he was a man from a bygone era of honor on U.S. politics -- except for that time he told an ugly and beyond misogynistic joke about Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno.