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John McCain, the last great active American political figure of the 20th century, has lost his battle with cancer at age 81.For both good and ill, McCain helped shape the purpose and application of Washington's considerable power for nearly half a century. Partly because of that mixed track record, his passing leaves as an open question what kind of future that McCain-style politics—with its robust, moralistic interventionism both at home but especially abroad—has in a political party and country that elected his rhetorical tormentor, Donald Trump . . .. . . The unexpectedly easy military successes in the Gulf War and Yugoslavia, plus Europe's abdication of post-Cold War global leadership, led the senator to re-embrace the Teddy Roosevelt-style belief in comparatively benevolent U.S. military supremacy that his family had rallied behind for a century. Vietnam, particularly after he helped spearhead the normalization of relations with his former captors, could be filed away as an aberration . . .. . . The senator had a distinctly martial view of citizenship, in which individualism should be subsumed to the greater good. His longest war was against "corrosive cynicism," so anything creating more of the stuff—from steroids in professional baseball to political advertising on Facebook—was in his crosshairs. That same sense of high moral dudgeon could also take him to better places, such as his opposition to torture, defense of the post-World War II trading order of mutual tariff-reduction, and his annual attacks on Pentagon waste.The notion of sacrificing for the greater good is fundamental not only to military culture but to the way religion and other private association informs our choices. But when attached to government force, it can easily result in explicitly anti-libertarian statecraft . . .. . . Like the journalistic class singing his praises this week, McCain was not overly reflective about the gap between aspiration and execution, between an expressed goodwill toward your fellow man and the real-world effects of America thumbing the scale. Since one of the senator's most endearing qualities was self-effacement and the recognition of human frailty, let us all submit to the lesson he could not quite bring himself to face: It is never enough to simply wish for the best then press the big red button marked "Do something."Farewell, John McCain.
John McCain was many things, good or not so good, depending on one's perspective.Yet the Hero in history was defined as one who achieved outstanding feats on behalf of plain people for the the common good of all. So why is McCain a Hero?????
His military service and, particularly, his endurance and survival as a prisoner of war.
