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The stark contrast between a patriot and a poser

By Georgie Anne Geyer

I was deep into preparing a column about Labor Day, our great end-of-summer celebration of the valiant toil of our working men and women, delving into its founding as far back as 1885 to commemorate those who, as one union brother put it, "from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."

I was reading up, sadly, on how the unions, which gave such public representation to labor, are fading. Stanford University's Francis Fukuyama wrote recently in Foreign Affairs magazine of one of the major problems in America today: the "perception of invisibility" on the part of labor, which served so effectively to hand over the presidency to Donald J. Trump.

I grew more impatient with our once-great country as I read about the 1 percent, who hold 90 percent of our wealth but aren't smart enough to figure out that it is in their own best interest to deal pragmatically with such a problem. And then I heard the dreadful announcement on television of the death of one of the truly original men of our times. John McCain was dead.

President Donald Trump can best be characterized as a kind of playacting New Jersey crime boss. He never really got over Roy Cohn. Everything about him, from his behavior to his politics to his beliefs, is rooted in a New York subgroup of people who share nothing with the founders of this land. He loves authoritarians and wants with all his gnarled heart to be one.

From the beginning, the question about him that I have heard - first confusedly whispered and finally spoken loudly and clearly - is whether Donald Trump is just an aberration in America today - or whether Donald Trump IS America today. Are those of us who still believe in manners and respect and dignity in the world simply being swept away in his tsunami of resentment, ego and defiance?

While John McCain's death at 81 does not, of course, ANSWER this question, it POSES it, POSTURES it, POSITIONS it in a way I at least hadn't quite seen or experienced before. Suddenly, everything is quite clear. Sen. McCain - with his amazing rich personal history serving this country as a warrior, as a senator, as a public servant, as an international diplomat-without-portfolio and as a man of humor and anger - has reminded us in his death of what many of us hope we still are inside.

For those workers or former workers who feel that awful "invisibility," John McCain even in death showed them what the best kind of visibility in America can be. For labor that feels lost today, he offers wisdom. The words that defined his thoughts about the Congress, for instance, repeated over and over, were "regular order" ... a return to the "protocols and customs of this body" ... working "across the aisle." "We're getting nothing done," he angrily regaled his fellow senators. In the end he had, he said, "the satisfaction of serving something more important than myself."

He "believed in the country, not the party," his friends said. He was a "romantic about his causes and a cynic about the world." He thought we needed a national service for young people. He made dozens of trips around the world, meeting with people, thinking with them, listening to them - even in Vietnam, where he had been tortured for five years as an American POW. A lover of Hemingway, he knew that in the end the bells would toll for him, and last week, they did.

His own opinions and conclusions on America and warfare were interesting and often unexpected. When President Reagan sent American Marines into Lebanon in the 1980s to "keep the peace," McCain demanded to know exactly what peace there was to keep; and when 241 Americans, incredibly exposed, were killed by a Palestinian truck bomb, McCain was furious. No protection! No reason! Yet he supported the Iraq War and, as chief of the Armed Services Committee, he was a central figure in rebuilding the military.

Although he lost his hard-fought campaigns for the presidency, which could not but dim his unquenchable spirit (but for only a moment), and although all his regaling to his fellow Republicans about working together found little fertile response, and although he had to be sobered by the permanent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact is that he was right about most things - and he was right most charmingly and spiritedly.

John McCain almost assuredly could never have imagined the forces that his death, even more so than his life, have released across the nation. There is something almost Lincolnesque in his funeral, as it moves across the country gaining spirit and, yes, love at every turn.

So, yes, President Donald Trump was right to fear the senator from Arizona, because this week America can see the contrast: the president who believes only in himself versus the man who believed in his destiny and his country's.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2018, Universal

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