A DECENT MAN

I have just heard the news that many have been expecting for months let alone the last few days, that Senator John McCain has died at age 81.

I am not a Republiscum nor am I a conservative. I am not of the alt-right neo-Fascist bent that now overwhelms the "Party of Lincoln". I'm not even a nice person much of the time. I have long paraphrased General Phillip Sheridan's horrible dictum about Native Americans by asserting that the only good Republican is a dead Republican. There are, after all, a lot of good, dead Republicans: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick, Elliott Richardson and now John McCain. Even as I was being horrid in saying and writing that, I knew that William Ruckelshaus and Pete McCloskey are still with us, good men both. I also could be pressed to say that there may well be good Republicans hidden amongst the neo-Fascists here and there in Red States, even in Texas. It is the shame of our nation that few if any of them have made it to public office. Tonight, however, I want to mourn a bit for a decent man who was also a Republican and a good Republican even in life, John McCain.

For most people John McCain's heroism centres around his captivity in a North Vietnamese prison fifty years ago. What makes McCain a hero to me is his deciding vote to save the Affordable Health Care Act. In that moment McCain rose above party, ideology and those who buy and sell politicians like they were pot roasts. With his thumbs down gesture he did his best to be a senator for all Americans, to save health care for millions of our people.

I don't believe in gods or devils. I don't believe in heaven or hell or a purgatory between. Having been brought up in a Methodist Church, I believe that the injunctions to care for one another, even the least of my brothers and sisters, in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Book of Matthew represent the best way to live. But this night this old atheist, in reference to Senator McCain, finds himself recalling the story of the old woman and the onion in The Brothers Karamazov.

In that story a poor woman, starving, hollow-eyed comes upon the gate before the garden of a mean, pusillanimous old woman who's never been known to have a kind word for or show generosity to anyone. The poor beggar woman asks for food from the old householder who uncharacteristically relents and gives the beggar a small, shriveled, partly rotten onion. At length both the mean old woman and the blameless, poor beggar die. When the beggar woman arrives in heaven she stands before god and looks around for the old woman who gave her the onion that prolonged her life a little. God tells the beggar that the old woman is suffering in hell's lake of fire. The beggar pleads that the good act of giving her the onion should redeem the old woman. After considering this a moment god produces the very onion the beggar received long before. God then instructs the beggar woman to journey down to hell and drag the old woman up to heaven using the onion, the material symbol of that one good act. When the beggar woman reaches the shores of the lake in which all the damned are burning she holds out the onion to the old woman who grasps it. The beggar woman then begins her journey back to heaven drawing after her the old woman. When the rest of the damned see this they grab onto the old woman and to each other. Ultimately the beggar woman and her onion are dragging out of hell every damned soul ever condemned. Salvation looms for all sinners but at the last minute the old woman yells, "Get of! It's my onion!" In that instant the onion breaks apart and all the damned, including the old woman, fall back into their lake of fire.

I'm not sure who John McCain represents in that story. Perhaps he's both the beggar and the old woman but if this I am certain, that John McCain, at the critical moment for the American people, understood that it was not just his onion but that it belonged to us all. He thereby brought many of us a kind of salvation. John McCain was a decent man, a good man who has joined those many dead, good Republicans leaving us all the poorer for his passing and worse for those of his party that remain behind.