McCain's Point

Why would John McCain have asked Barack Obama and George W. Bush to eulogize him, anyway?

Bush and Obama have a couple of things in common, but one stands out above all: they were the two men who defeated John McCain in presidential campaigns--Bush did it in 2000; Obama did it in 2008.

McCain's most avid supporters would probably cry foul about the way that those campaigns played out--both were hard-hitting campaigns, and McCain was the victim of some tough attacks. But that's the game as it's played--politics is rough-and-tumble in America, and somebody has to lose. In 2000 and 2008, it was McCain.

It would be easy for McCain to have held a grudge--to think that he would have been a better president than his two opponents, to believe that it could have gone differently. Maybe he did hold a grudge, in his heart.

But in the gesture of inviting those two men to deliver eulogies, McCain reminds us of a simple truth: after the campaign, we have to live together.

Campaigns can be tough, feelings can get hurt. Politics matters, after all, and the two parties have very different visions of American society right now. But the American system is finely tuned to be a sort of pendulum--elections are predictable and scheduled, and as such can't be timed by the ruling party in an attempt to hold onto a majority. We are going to disagree, sometimes angrily--and nothing can change that. But we have to live together in spite of our disagreements. In this framework, it's best to limit the scope of our fight: keep the politics in politics, but be civil to one another, and judge people on their personal qualities rather than their political views or group participation. That was McCain, through and through.

This is an interpretation of politics that has become increasingly outmoded--first on the online political Left, and more recently on the new (awful) Right. McCain is seen as a vicious warmonger, an enabler of the imperial state, a collaborator with the evil of Republican economic policy and social spending. In this view, opponents are reduced to their policy preferences, or the people that their policies directly benefit. (Note that second-order effects are utterly ignored.) A disagreement over the responsibilities of government and the effectiveness of specific policy choices becomes a moral failing, rather than an understandable difference of opinion.

The stakes are high, so this perspective is understandable. But McCain believed that this was a dead-end. To McCain, this was a question of shared values: he wrote, "we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement" in his final letter to America. This is a modernized update of an old sentiment, matching McCain's rhetorical style to the substance of the peroration of Lincoln's First Inaugural:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

These sentiments of similarity, whether true or not, are useful. The "crush one's enemies" perspective fails because of the regularity of politics: sometimes we are bound to win, and sometimes we are bound to lose. To the victor goes the spoils, certainly, but we don't have an elected dictatorship in America; we have a republican system with multiple levels of government, constitutional limits, and checks and balances to prevent the tyranny of narrow majorities. Neither side will be permanently vanquished, even in a violent war**. Thus, we have to live together, and we're better off associating with one another to foster empathy, rather than isolating ourselves and developing only contempt.

McCainian magnanimity fits in that system perfectly, and his final wishes reflect that perhaps better than anything he did in politics.

Rest in peace, Senator. You earned it.

**It's reasonable to argue that the Civil War vanquished a gross evil: chattel slavery. This was, in one sense, the triumph of incivility. But unfortunately, the Civil War did not solve racial inequality in America, and it's hard to see how a second violent conflagration would; we still live with the sins of ourselves, our ancestors, and the distant settlers of the American continent, and there is nothing quite as tangible as the ownership of property to vanquish.

Some Secular Thoughts on the Catholic Palm Sunday Liturgy

Palm Sunday is one of the most important days of the Catholic liturgical year for reasons fundamental to the religion: it's about the condemnation and death of the Messiah. As a Catholic, I accept the theology of the whole thing. But for the last few years, I've returned to the same set of thoughts about why the liturgy is so powerful and important to me from a secular standpoint. The Catholic Church's Palm Sunday liturgy teaches us important lessons about how to live, even before we get into the great spiritual, theological, and eschatological questions about Jesus, God, and the universe itself. But if we take a "Jefferson Bible" approach to the divinity of Jesus, the lessons remain quite powerful.

The Catholic service on Palm Sunday starts with a procession and Gospel reading, which is unique in the liturgical year. In Year B, Mark's Gospel serves as the first reading. It includes the following passage, talking about what happened as Jesus entered Jersualem:

Many people spread their cloaks on the road,
and others spread leafy branches
that they had cut from the fields.
Those preceding him as well as those following kept crying out:
"Hosanna!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!
Hosanna in the highest!"

So the people hailed this guy as he entered town, waving their palms and offering encomiums (and it's why we get palms at the beginning of mass). That's the groundwork for what's about to come in about 10-15 minutes: the passion narrative.

The passion substitutes for the main gospel reading, and it's handled as a sort of "table read" for a stage play. There are four characters:

- Jesus, read by the priest.
- The narrator, usually read by a deacon or a lay reader.
- The "voice," who fills in where one specific person (like Peter or Pontius Pilate) has a line of dialogue, usually read by a deacon or a lay reader.
- The "crowd," read by the congregation.

This is unique in the Catholic liturgy; normally, the Gospel reading is proclaimed by the priest or deacon, and then a homily follows. For Palm Sunday (and Good Friday), the passion stage play substitutes.

The rough narrative of the passion is as follows:

- Jesus has dinner with his apostles/followers and tells them one of them is going to betray him.
- Judas betrays him and he's arrested.
- Jesus is accused of many things but the testimony conflicts. He is eventually condemned to death for blasphemy and mocked.
- Jesus faces the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who finds no reason to put him to death.
- Pontius Pilate offers "the crowd" a choice between the release of a revolutionary and the release of Jesus, as part of a way to celebrate Passover. The crowd chooses the revolutionary.
- Jesus is mocked as "King of the Jews" and physically abused.
- Jesus is crucified and dies.

The whole stage play takes about 15 or 20 minutes to work through. For the Passion according to Mark (Year B), the crowd has a few pieces of dialogue. Several stand out. (The narrator notes are included, and the required dialogue is in quotes.)

- They all condemned him as deserving to die. Some began to spit on him. They blindfolded him and struck him and said to him, "Prophesy!"
- Pilate again said to them in reply,"Then what do you want me to do
with the man you call the king of the Jews?" They shouted again, "Crucify him."
Pilate said to them, "Why? What evil has he done?" They only shouted the louder, "Crucify him."
- The soldiers led him away inside the palace, that is, the praetorium, and assembled the whole cohort. They clothed him in purple and, weaving a crown of thorns, placed it on him. They began to salute him with, "Hail, King of the Jews!"
- With him they crucified two revolutionaries, one on his right and one on his left.
Those passing by reviled him, shaking their heads and saying, "Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross."

It's a little incongruous with the rest of the Catholic liturgy. The guy we say is God and worthy of "unending hymns of praise," we're mocking and condemning to death here. Sarcasm and spite reign. What gives?

For me at least, the Palm Sunday liturgy forces me to grapple with my humanity.

First, we're fickle. We're holding palms, just like the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as a king, and then just a few minutes later, we're condemning him to death.

Second, we can be mean. The mockery Jesus faces from random people and from soldiers is just callous and cold-blooded; he's a prophet and so we say, "Oh yeah? Prophesy!" They call him a King, so we clothe him in a regal purple, give him a crown of thorns, and laugh in his face. We then nail him to a cross and tell him to come down. It's just profoundly cruel.

Third, we can get caught up in a mob. The story insists that Jesus is innocent of the charges against him, but the mob insists that he be put to death anyway, ferociously advocating for a murderer to be released over the teacher.

That we have to play the part of the mob is a reminder that any of us could have done the same thing in their position. It's why it's always been deeply unfair and silly to "blame" a certain subset of people for Jesus' death: the things that got him were fundamentally human failings. Crying out "Crucify him!" makes us feel uncomfortable, because we know that he's innocent and how the story ends. But how often are we in analogous situations today? How often do we "crucify" a blameless person by acting without compassion and by surrendering to a mobocratic spirit?

There's another part that's important, though: the passion play also tells us that we can be better. Several characters do better: the nameless woman who anoints Jesus' head with oil; Simon the Cyrenian, who helps carry his cross; and Joseph of Arimathea, who prepares Jesus' body for burial. They're the ones to emulate, not the mob.

And so the Palm Sunday liturgy--and the audience participation therein--is an annual reminder for me: any of us can get caught in the mob, and all of us can aspire to do better.