*John McCain and America’s Decline into Senescence

John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran, a “real gentleman”, and “an American hero”, was laid to rest on Saturday.  Since he passed away a week ago the previous Saturday, the media has been awash with eulogies and celebrations of his life.  In a ‘bitterly divided Washington’—an argument sensible only to those who are strongly of the view that Democrats and Republicans are from different planets, or at least have very little in common, never mind their shared love for unvarnished capitalism, gun culture, military prowess, and much else—what the Americans call “bipartisanship” has always been spoken of as some desirable objective, and the adulatory tone that has been adopted throughout the last few days in writing about McCain owes much to the fact that he spoke, or is alleged to have spoken, to those across the aisle.  Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times’ headline read, “Farewell to John McCain transcends partisanship.”  “A Rare Moment of Unity Inside the Capital”, noted the New York Times as it recounted the “dignity, seriousness and respect” with which the deceased senior senator from Arizona was remembered in the Capitol at a time when these qualities are “so lacking in American politics.”  The same newspaper described him as a “towering statesman”, though the article in question offers barely any hint of what made him either “towering” or even a “statesman”. One hopes that the definition of a statesman in the United States of America has not been reduced to “a public figure who is quite unlike President Donald J. Trump.”

It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that John McCain was in private life everything he has been described:  a devoted husband, a father who got along famously well with his children, a man who remembered his friends and was generous in spirit, and someone who acted with civility most if not all of the time.  These are all doubtless admirable qualities and one presumes that McCain will be remembered with affection and fond memories among those who knew him.  He would not be the first person, however, to be in the possession of such qualities.  It is instructive to remember that the hundreds of thousands of German men implicated in the work of the Nazi regime were perfectly good fathers:  in fact, most of them came back after a hard day’s work to share food, prayer, and Christian thoughts with their family at the dinner table.  Since McCain was an eminently political figure with a long history of public service and is among a few dozen people in the history of the US who has been honored with what is a state funeral, it behooves us to ask what it implies for a man such as him to have been practically raised to the level of a saint.  McCain has been buried; but if the United States, still a young country (if the oldest constitutional democracy), hopes to arrest its precipitous decline into senescence, it would be best if it digs up a few questions, sooner rather than later, about him.

I shall not call this article “The John McCain you never knew”.  Everything I have to say is a matter of public record; one need not search for state secrets, or resort to the Freedom of Information Act.  It is important to state as well that this critique shares absolutely nothing in common with the remarks against McCain by the trolls who form part of Mr. Trump’s “base”.  It is well and good that McCain stood up to Trump, though here again this argument is only a profound testament to the fact that the bar for any kind of ethical political life has shrunk so low that even the remotest resemblance to anything that might be called ‘decency’ or ‘civility’ is supposed to signal ‘virtue’.  I can barely think of anything that endears McCain, a public figure, to me; but I can think of a great many things that make the present spectacle of the celebration of a ‘great American life’ nauseating.

It was a life full of shenanigans, but here are a thoughts.  First, it is an indisputable fact that McCain, in common with the preponderant number of his soulmates in the US Senate, was relentlessly hostile to the working class.  By the standards of this country, where a ‘socialist’ is in many places something akin to the Black Death, McCain may not have been a die-hard conservative of the Storm Thurmond or Barry Goldwater variety, but it cannot be doubted where his sympathies lay.  He waffled for many years on the question of abortion, but did nothing to put into question the position he finally adopted in 2007 when he said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.” He then supported a constitutional amendment that would bar abortion except in cases of risk to mother’s life, incest, and rape.  His conservative credentials were never in doubt; however, it is his persistent efforts to overturn the federal minimum wage that point to his disdain for the ‘common American’ whom he supposedly championed.  McCain voted on 24 January 2007 to support legislation that would allow employers to pay less than the federal minimum wage if a state set a lower minimum.  Similarly, McCain joined the filibuster to prevent the federal minimum wage being increased from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour.  Throughout, he remained a foe of the federal minimum wage—and we can imagine what he would have thought of the idea of minimum livable wage, or the notion of Universal Basic Income.

Secondly, it should be recalled that McCain was consistently opposed to the idea of federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., and he went so far as to support the Governor of Arizona when he decided to rescind the holiday in his state in 1987.  McCain would, in time, come to repent of his decision and eventually called for both a state and a federal holiday to mark the life of one of the greatest figures in American history.  He issued this apology in 2008, “I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona. We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing.”  I have written elsewhere, and on many occasions, on this wonderful expedient of a belated apology that has characterized white civilization’s attitude to the other races:  say you’re sorry, and then throw another bomb to civilize the savages or bring them the blessings of democracy.  We may perhaps infer McCain’s sentiments on this question from his refusal to call for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina Statehouse when he was campaigning for the state’s Republican presidential primary against George W. Bush.  He called the flag “a symbol of heritage” and objected to Federal encroachment on states’ rights in these matters.  McCain lost the primary, and what does one suppose he did thereafter?  He apologized, what else: stating that he had equivocated on the flag issue, McCain said:  “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth.”

Thirdly, among those who served in either house of the Congress over decades, John McCain must be counted among those who were hawkish in the extreme.  He was, needless to say, an ardent advocate of the war on Iraq, a war-monger who turned to the neo-cons Robert Kagan and William Kristol for advice on American military intervention.  It is not an accident that the mammoth $716 billion defense appropriations bill that Trump signed into law barely three weeks ago is formally named the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019.  McCain’s acolytes and admirers trumpet the fact that, in signing the bill, Trump refused to mention it by its formal name.  Trump’s meanness is thus established, but of course we are to think nothing of the fact that McCain took pride in having the bill named after him.  With single-minded intent, McCain for decades advocated for one, and only one, position—namely, that the United States should continue to remain unrivaled as a military power.  It would never have occurred to him that no one country should have such power:  if circumstances should turn China into such a power, then one would be duty bound to oppose China.  This view would have struck McCain as implausible since he had neither the intellect, nor the capacity for self-reflection, to adopt a critical perspective on the course of American history.

Finally, McCain’s admirers and all those who now swear by him, often for no other reason that he was (to return to an earlier argument) not Donald Trump, should ask what role McCain played in bringing his nemesis to power.  It is a curious but pertinent fact that his running mate during the Presidential race in 2008, Sarah Palin, was also not invited to the funeral ceremonies which McCain had himself planned in meticulous detail.  (Narcissist would seem to be the operative word to describe one who had decided upon a magisterial state funeral for himself, notwithstanding his unenviable record of constantly striving for, but never achieving, the highest office of the land, but I fear that the followers of neither Trump nor McCain will tolerate this comparison.) That McCain should not have invited his vice-presidential pick, more so when he congratulated himself for anointing a woman to fill the second highest office in the country, for his funeral ceremonies is puzzling if not astounding.  McCain had gone on record in recent months, expressing “regret”—no surprise, since McCain’s entire life can be written in this vein—that he had picked Palin, rather than Joe Lieberman, for his running mate.  McCain doesn’t specify exactly why he regretted his decision, but it had to do with more than the fact that Palin was not even remotely an asset for him.  Perhaps McCain had come to the realization, quite late in his life—yes, here again that pattern of late recognition, long after others had reached some degree of enlightenment—that in legitimizing the Tea Party—and Palin was nothing if not the Tea Party—and the lunatics who have come to dominate American politics, he had played a substantial role in birthing the political rise of Trump.

John McCain believed profoundly in American exceptionalism.  The best that can be said for him is that, as a member of the US Congress over several decades, he led a life of exceptional mediocrity and mendacity.

 

*The Rust Belt, Cow Belt, and Chastity Belt: Sizing Up the US Elections

Annals of the President-elect Trump Regime V

(Being, a gentle reminder to the reader, a cornucopia of assertions, satire, commentary, interpretation, Trump-comedy, and much else, but always grounded in at least some facts.)

The Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, Ohio, founded and shuttered in 1977 on September 19, a remembered in the area as “Black Monday”. Source: http://postindustrialrustbelt.blogspot.com/2014/10/rust-belt.html

Few phrases have done the round as much in this election cycle in the United States as the “Rust Belt”. On Washington’s Beltway, jubilant Republicans and morose Democrats will doubtless be talking about the Rust Belt for a long time, indeed until such time as rust begins to acquire around the idea of the Rust Belt and, like all others phrases that have done their time, this one too becomes a hazy memory. Contrary to received opinion, the phrase “Rust Belt” is not of recent vintage, dating, as is commonly imagined, to around 20-30 years ago, a period which witnessed both NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and the emergence of China as a global economic powerhouse.  This is when jobs began leaving the United States, corporations started taking recourse to outsourcing, and the industrial heartland in the Midwest—and especially the area around Pittsburgh and other steel-producing towns—went into decline.

The Rust Belt of the United States. Source: https://unitedstateshistorylsa.wikispaces.com/Sunbelt+and+Rustbelt

The veracity of this claim is not my concern at this juncture.  However, what is interesting is that though the term “Rust Belt” began to acquire popularity around the late 1980s, similar uses of the term can be dated back much earlier.  The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that the phrase “Rust Belt” was used as early as 1869, when the San Francisco Bulletin stated that “a foreign demand for wheat and barley would set a good many farmers on their pins . . . The demand will not, of course, help those who rented lands within the rust belt.”  More tellingly, a good decade before NAFTA entered into force, well before, as Trump and common wisdom would have it, Mexico, China, India, and other countries began swallowing up well-paying jobs that had sustained decent American families, an Associated Press story, published on 30 November 1982, stated that “unemployment is extremely high in many areas of the so-called ‘Rust Belt’, the heavy industry areas of the Midwest and parts of the Northeast.”  For all the tens of thousands of economists—the anointed ‘queens’ of the social sciences—writing on this subject, the claim that unemployment in the Rust Belt surged following the enactment of NAFTA and the packaging of jobs to China remains largely unexamined.  The rust on the Rust Belt has a longer history than is commonly imagined.

Decay in the American Rust Belt. Source: http://nypost.com/2014/04/24/haunting-pictures-of-decay-from-the-american-rust-belt

There is a consensus among commentators or “pundits”—proud Indians will doubtless have taken note of this, pointing to it as one of myriad signs of how Indian words have now become normalized in English—that the Rust Belt states won Trump his Presidency.  It is Hillary Clinton’s neglect of these states, and her presumption that the working-class was in her pocket, that is supposed to have sunk her bid for the presidency.  Of course, as scholars in particular are wont to say, such a claim is “problematic”, since even many outside the Rust Belt voted for Trump.  A majority of white women, 53% to be precise, appear to have voted for Trump, notwithstanding the fact that well over a dozen white women stepped forward with allegations of being sexually abused and assaulted by him; similarly, though Trump reeks of racism, fewer black people voted for Hillary Clinton than did for Barack Obama.  One could easily multiply such facts, but there is nevertheless a widespread and credible view that the Rust Belt states proved critically important and perhaps decisive in Trump’s victory.

So much for the view from the Rust Belt.  India’s much derided (or vaunted, by some) ‘Cow Belt’ furnishes us another perspective on the US Elections in myriad ways about which I shall be only tantalizingly suggestive.  Both India and the US are what may be called ‘bovine’ countries:  the cow is venerated in India among the Hindus and devoured in the US; in the Midwest, especially, beef jerky is a delicacy.  But let me not venture forth, for fear of being targeted by the internet gau rakshaks, on the numerous delectable ways in which India and the US, joined at the hip as the world’s two largest democracies, are bovine-minded.  The Cow Belt, which some view as a derogatory term, refers to India’s Gangetic heartland from where Narendra Modi drew his strongest supporters in 2014.  It is sometimes called the ‘Saffron Belt’:  in either case, it is in this densely populated part of the country that Hindu nationalism has its widest appeal and where gangs of young men have organized themselves into vigilante groups that terrorize Muslims and “pseudo-secularists” (as they are described by the advocates of Hindutva) who do not pay obeisance to the cow.

Four young Dalit men stripped and beaten with belts, allegedly for transporting beef–not a crime under any Indian law, but a heinous offense to the Motherland and to Gau Mata from the standpoint of self-appointed Guardians of the Cow. The incident took place in July 2016 and was video-taped. Source: India Today.

It is here that a person might get beaten to pulp on the mere suspicion of eating beef or transporting dead cows to the slaughter-house.  In both countries, the narrative takes on the same hue, registering the disaffection of the ‘majority’ in the ‘heartland’ who are bereft of jobs and hobbled by some form of political correctness.  White racism in the United States, of course by no means confined to the ‘Rust Belt’, meets its match in Hindu chauvinism in the ‘Cow Belt’.

But there is seemingly another obvious reference when we speak of the perspective from the ‘Cow Belt’ on the US Elections.  Many commentators have pointed to the ‘strong man’ who seems to be trending worldwide today and have suggested, as did Pankaj Mishra in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, that Narendra Modi, with his boasts about his 56-inch chest, may have set the example.  Trump’s all but explicit remarks about the shriveled penis of one of his opponents in the Republican primary might seem to bolster such a view.  But it is doubtful that Trump emulates anyone except himself:  he has an equally long history both of boasts and of parading his own masculinity. Moreover, was there ever a time in the politics of the last two to three decades when the ‘strong man’ did not reign?  Have we forgotten Manuel Noriega? Or Saddam Hussein? Commentators would have been more on the mark if they had been sensitive to the shifts in the register of masculinity among ‘strong men’, shifts which portend what I would call an incredulous masculinity.  What could be more fantastic, for example, then the fact that Rodrigo Duterte, now President of the Philippines, as a candidate promised that if he were elected President he would gun down drug users and traffickers and, as President, would immediately exercise his privileges in granting himself immunity from charges of murder!  Whatever one may say of Modi, he lacks this kind of devilish humor and ingenuity.

There is also the matter, finally, of the Chastity Belt.  American feminists and women’s organizations have rightfully expressed alarm at the looming erosion of women’s rights, and in particular women’s reproductive freedoms, under a Trump Presidency.  The sexual profligacy of Donald Trump, who even hinted that he would have made a stab at his daughter if she were not his daughter, should at once remove the slightest suspicion that anyone might have that the President-elect would like women to be decorous.  He may like, one suspects, women to be the playthings of men, but he is no advocate of the view that women should be chaste.  The same cannot be said of his Republican allies in Congress, whose views on abortion I discussed in a previous blog and who, it would not be too much to say, certainly think that some women—black women, Latinas, poor women, working-class women, Muslim women—should regulate their sexuality.  The metaphor of the ‘chastity belt’, nowadays a sex toy but in its heyday an instrument for ensuring that women did not step out of bounds and remained available to their husbands, was brought home to me when I stumbled upon this gem from Sarah Palin, another wondrous specimen of American political comedy:

Source: https://adobochronicles.com/2016/06/29/slide-show-intelliquotes-from-potential-trump-vps/

With so many belts to go around, I wonder if we might not all want to make a lunge for the lungi: