James Wolcott delivers some prose:
‘I love the guy,” professed New York Times columnist David Brooks one Sunday on The Chris Matthews Show, that church service of chipmunk chatter. The lucky guy on the receiving end of Brooks’s blown kiss was John McCain, the rare politician with the magical property to make otherwise finicky journalists go misty and let drop the chastity belt of objectivity. As MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough wisecracked about the reporters on the campaign beat this season, “I think every last one of them would move to Massachusetts and marry John McCain if they could.” A silver fox with an even more silvery, foxier wife, McCain is the Sinatra of the congressional hallways and campaign highways, the Chairman of the Bored whose Rat Pack is the traveling press corps, which laughs and groans at his old gags like a collective Ed McMahon…
Sometimes you admire the writing and sometimes you admire the ideas and sometimes you admire both.
There is clearly something generational going on not just with the press’s Man-Crush on John McCain, but with this entire election campaign. In many senses, we can already see this election as a passing of the torch. We’ve already seen the retirements of Trent Lott, Dennis Hastert, and Bill Frist, opening the way for new leadership within the Grand Old Party. The retirements of old hands like Sens. John Warner, Larry Craig, Pete Domenici, and Chuck Hagel only bolsters the feeling that a new day is at hand. The serious health issues of the two longest serving senators, Teddy Kennedy and Robert Byrd, as well as the looming retirements (or electoral defeats) of senatorial lions Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens, are yet more signals of the end of an era.
Of course, nothing signals change like the demise of the two leading political dynasties of the last quarter century: the Bushes and the Clintons. I suppose people’s reactions to these developments depend a lot on their age. When I got back from my little blogging break I had an ungodly amount of unread email, especially from some of the listservs that I belong to. One of those listservs had a lengthy discussion about whether Barack Obama should bring back the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). I’ll be honest…with so much unread email, I didn’t even open the discussion to see what arguments were being made on either side. But I did have a visceral reaction to the topic heading. It seemed totally inappropriate, as if one generation was attempting to hijack our little mini-revolution and rekindle the unresolved Culture Wars of the Boomer Generation. It was just a gut reaction…totally unrelated to the merits of the ERA. But I think my reaction is kind of indicative of the reason people my age are repulsed by the sensitivities of the David Brooks, Richard Cohens, and David Broders of the world, and their Man-Crushes on John McCain.
In my generation, people didn’t really get credit for serving in Vietnam. Or, to be more accurate, people did get credit, but not necessarily more credit than the people that took a principled stand against serving in Vietnam. Our heroes were as or more likely to be Marvin Gaye, Mohammed Ali, or James Fallows, as William Westmoreland or any decorated war veteran. Veterans that returned to protest the war, like Ron Kovic and John Kerry, earned as much respect as those that did their duty silently. Moreover, our generation suffered none of the guilt that our Boomer Uncles and Aunts felt about sitting out a war that cost 58,000 citizens their lives. We were not conflicted about the morality of the Vietnam War. It was an unambiguously bad war, and no one lost bonus points for a failure to participate in it.
But the older generation carries deep scars from the era, and John McCain has an iconic ability to conjure up that buried inner conflict. As the son of an admiral, he doesn’t seem perfectly suited for the role. It seems to me as if central casting should have chosen the son of a grunt as the lasting symbol of Duty, Honor, and Country. But, then, John McCain isn’t so much a symbol of Vietnam, as an even earlier generation. John McCain summons up a time before the Culture Wars, when our generals and admirals were admired unquestioningly for their leadership in beating back the Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany. John McCain speaks to the Boomer press as their fathers and grandfathers spoke to them. McCain is more Leave it to Beaver than I Spy.
None of which speaks very loudly to my generation or any of the generations that have followed. Wolcott speaks for us when he calls McCain the ‘Chairman of the Bored’. We may like the Oceans Eleven remakes, but the original is like a timepiece frozen in amber. The Rat Pack was the last dying gasp of ‘hip’ before the hippies took over. And whatever metaphorical power that battle has for the older generation, the outcome is pretty much settled law in our worlds. We have a new notion of Duty, Honor, and Country, and nothing about John McCain speaks to it. His mere existence is not a silent reproach, nor does his suffering at the hands of the North Vietnamese conjure anything more than sympathy.
Wolcott analyzes this strange relationship between the press and John McCain from the perspective of the Man Crush, and uses different historical examples of the phenomenon. But there simply is not much in common between a sportsfan’s infatuation with Tom Brady or an aspiring writer’s fascination with John Updike, and the aging press corp’s Man Love for Saint John McCain. Simply put, the aging press corp opted out of the Vietnam War and never found a substitute national cause to rival their fathers’ existential battle against the Axis Powers. The Cold War was…well…cold. And the War on Terrorism has been a dud. Although, perhaps, seen in this context, we can better understand the gusto with which the aging press corp took to Bush’s Wilsonian rhetoric about ridding the world of terrorism.
John McCain represents something to a generation of draft evaders in much the same way that Hillary Clinton came to represent something to the same generation of working women. There is no more than a superficial logic to it, but that doesn’t diminish the terrible symbolic power of the thing. And younger generations are left shaking their collective heads, neither truly comprehending nor having any desire to go back and rewage old battles. Fairly or not, younger generations see those old battles as something between boring and trite. And, for this reason, we can come off as overly dismissive of the accomplishments and struggles of the Boomer Generation. Perhaps it would be a fine idea to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, but it’s hard to get in the mood for such battles. We have environmental and health crises to tackle. Yet, we should stop and listen to the veterans of the Culture Wars. We should listen, even if we find much of what they have to say, like John McCain, impossibly anachronistic and, frankly, painfully boring.