A tale of two funerals

“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.” 

-          Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The recent funerals of Republican senator John McCain and the ‘Queen of Soul’ Aretha Franklin, gave us an interesting insight into precisely what is wrong with the political culture of the US.

In dealing with the death of McCain, Donald Trump behaved in extreme poor taste. His tepid tweet upon his death from brain cancer did not even mention senator McCain and he did not offer McCain’s widow a tribute. Perhaps most churlishly and petulantly, Trump’s White House, after lowering the flag to half-mast on Saturday, the day McCain died, was back to full-mast after the minimum two days under law, breaking the long-held tradition that the flag should remain at half-mast until the interment of the deceased. Trump lowered the flag again after wide criticism.

Famously, Trump stated fatuously during the election that he thought McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured. McCain spent more than five years as a POW in a brutal North Vietnamese prison camp, two of those years in solitary confinement. He was regularly tortured, leaving him with permanent disabilities and turning his hair prematurely white. Amazingly, when offered an early release, due to his father being an admiral and the North Vietnamese wanting to use his fame to show the world that they were magnanimous, McCain refused, stating that unless every man taken in before himself was also released, in accordance to Article III of the military Code of Conduct: “I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.”

Whatever differences one might have with McCain politically, it is safe to say that he was a brave officer, a patriot and a man who held himself with dignity. For example, when McCain ran as the Republican nominee against Obama in 2008, he steadfastly and unequivocally shut down a woman who inanely accused Obama of being an ‘Arab’. He also decided to take the highroad and not to attack Obama for his association with Jeremiah Wright, an obvious anti-Semite. For Trump, such petulant and graceless behaviour is utterly disappointing and low even for his lowly standards. He richly deserves all the criticism that’s aimed his way.  

However, whereas Trump's faults are there for all the world to see, as he keeps incessantly thrusting them in our faces, what should be equally and obviously detestable from the other side of the political aisle somehow has eluded most of the media. Trump wasn’t invited to the funeral, but the funeral was revolving around him. The Democrats at McCain’s funeral hijacked the event to praise McCain essentially for his differences with Trump, throwing in a few of their own derisions for Trump to the mix. Though Trump deserves it, to use someone’s funeral as a political stick cheapens the life of a decent man and disgraces those who would do so.

What’s more, one mustn’t forget that during the 2008 election, the same Democrats smeared McCain baselessly as a racist and a warmonger and who was mentally unstable as a result of his time in the POW camp. For example, Obama’s surrogate Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) compared McCain to racist George Wallace, The New York Times, a former newspaper, which has since mutated into essentially a megaphone for the Democrats, ran an unsubstantiated claim that McCain was having an affair with a female lobbyist, only to publish a “note to readers” a year later (after the election), trying to wriggle out of its thinly veiled insinuation. The NYT also ran hit pieces against Cindy McCain, in a most shameless way, going through her laundry basket and dumpster for anything to smear the McCains, while they happily chaperone Obama through his embarrassments and downplay Hilary Clinton’s crimes, though mountains of dirt is apparent for all to see.

Matching Trump’s slur, Obama surrogate General Wesley Clark, said on CBS that “I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president”. Even Gore Vidal, whom you might think would rise above Trumpism, said of McCain in a NYT interview, only marginally more eloquently, that “Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?” Madonna, public intellectual of our time, while urging people to vote for Obama, called McCain Hitler.  Going double-or-nothing, the Democratic blog DailyKos compared McCain to both Hilter and Stalin.

Compare the outpouring of respect, admiration and love from the same sources as the undiluted and insincere vitriol and one comes to the realisation that politics has been dirty and ruthless way before Trump waddled onto the scene. And one might be left aghast that the public memory, or perhaps only that of the media, is so short as not to spot this disgusting double-faced kabuki theatre. Or perhaps it’s all simply a game of cynicism and hypocrisy for those swimming in the political and media pool. Francois de La Rochefoucauld said that “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” A lot of tribute has certainly been paid before the coffin of McCain.

Now, turning our gaze to Aretha Franklin’s funeral and whom do we see sitting on the stage? On a massively Democrat platform sits Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. A man who cheated on his wife in the Oval Office and who is creditably accused of rape by four independent women and who was obviously ogling at Ariana Grande; two professional race hustlers who organised race riots, with Jesse Jackson also a former Democratic presidential candidate in 1984; and a verified vile anti-Semite who supported Jackson’s bid for the White House, and who only earlier this year made another overtly anti-Jewish speech. Counterbalancing the Democratic smearing of McCain as Hitler, they still embrace Farrakhan, who described Hitler as a “very great man”. The radical left, who are so fond of de-platforming people they disagree with and applying guilt-by-associating, seems to have no problem with these charming gentlemen.

The realisation one is forced to come to is that for the mutated version of the ‘left’ in the US today, it’s all about tribalism and partisanship. There is no principles to be used as a yard stick to measure their behaviour. 

For all of Trump’s flaws, he has virtually all of the media against him and a sizeable chunk of the Republican party, who are still ready to denounce their own when they make mistakes. Mutatis mutandis, the same media, the supposed fourth estate, will conveniently look the other way for Democrat and leftist misdemeanours and the left are happy to be pally with anyone for whom they can see utility, even former Republicans they denounced as Hitler or racists who likes Hitler. This shameless hypocrisy curdles public discourse, cheapens politics and undermines the foundations of a Republic. 

The nest of vipers on the far left is far more dangerous than that of Trump. But the Minotaur of Democrats and the media fails to see that it is not as influential as it thinks. The people are not as stupid or gullible as it might suppose. And seeing through this hypocrisy is indeed why a man as petty and neurotic as Trump was able to be elected in the first place.

The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.

-       Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire