On Lionising McCain to Diss Trump

Lucas Lynch - I finally caught some of the speeches from McCain's...

"I finally caught some of the speeches from McCain's funeral.

People keep talking about how those speaking at the funeral appealed to decency and a sense of transcending party that Trump has supposedly destroyed, painting a nostalgic picture of just how supposedly civil and decent the previous era was, in huge contrast to how crude and barbaric our current era is.

In terms of personalities and personal interactions, I think this has some merit. But I had to think about the war records of some of the people there - Kissinger, Lieberman, Bush, Cheney, the Clintons, McConnell, Boehner, Ryan, Biden, and to a lesser extent, but still worth considering, Obama - and contrast them with Trump, who by comparison has a much less interventionist foreign policy and, thus far, a fraction of the body count. (Of course, keeping in mind that it's still early, and he could very well surpass all of them yet).

The other thing that struck me was when George W. Bush spoke of how McCain 'stood up for the little guy'. I don't see how McCain, Bush, Lieberman, Gore, and the Clintons didn't all buy in wholeheartedly to the economic regime that over the past several decades did nothing but decimate the little guy. The kind of small-town landscape that Trump exploited didn't come from nowhere - it came from a series of conscious economic decisions, from Reagan onward, that saw the weakening of our unions, the outsourcing of jobs, and selling off the heart of our real economy to the lowest bidder. Add in the inevitability of automation - which no party has yet to address in a meaningful way - and you have a perfect cocktail of opioid-fueled despair just waiting for a theatrical demagogue to exploit.

So I do wonder to an extent if our own definitions of civility and decency are warped. Of course the types of petty fights and personal attacks Trump engages in are beneath the office, but they are not the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary dead in Fallujah and Baghdad, Cambodia and Vietnam, and they are not the downfall of communities like Youngstown or Toledo Ohio. Perhaps the indecency has really been with us all along, coming to us with Patriotic faces and draped in the flag. Perhaps Trump is actually just the naked uncovering of this indecency, finally unmasked and honest about itself, not pretending to be virtuous as it adds Twitter feuds and petty insults to its repertoire.

Many in that audience believe themselves above the current fray. I wonder how many of them were actually creating the fray without realizing it, and how much more self reflection is necessary to understand the necessity of contrasting themselves with a monster of their own creation."