no longer the hero

Article by missy on October 7th, 2008 at 11:00 am

angry mccain

if he ever was, McCain has become Richard III, Iago and Macbeth rolled into one.

He is the scheming, lame and eternally bitter Richard of Gloucester, needing to kill all goodness around him so as to never face that contrast to his black soul, and needing war, too, as peace gives him nowhere to put his rage:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

He is Macbeth, desperately needing power to vanquish his consuming, existential fear:

Seyton!–I am sick at heart,
When I behold–Seyton, I say!–This push
Will cheer me ever, or disseat me now.
I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

But, most of all, McCain is Iago, feigning good will to “my friends” while seething with hatred for the Othello, the man who has so easily won the love and fealty that McCain believes – no, knows – is his due. Obama has not just won it for himself but stolen it, somehow. For how could Obama come by his popularity, his charisma, his charm but by some trick, some dark magic? It cannot be that McCain, son of an admiral, veteran of not only war but prison camp, can truly come in second to this young, black man:

The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not,
Is of a constant, loving, noble nature,
And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona
A most dear husband. Now, I do love her too;
Not out of absolute lust, though peradventure
I stand accountant for as great a sin,
But partly led to diet my revenge,
For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap’d into my seat; the thought whereof
Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards;
And nothing can or shall content my soul
Till I am even’d with him, wife for wife,
Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor
At least into a jealousy so strong
That judgment cannot cure.

It never ends well for Shakespeare’s villains; though Iago survives his treachery, his is the cursed half-life of a self-damned soul.

And so it will be with McCain, particularly if for the next 27 days he does nothing but attack Obama’s character. Doubtless it will narrow the point spread, but the poison will leech into McCain himself.

McCain has no Teflon; he does not have the same sociopathic amorality that allows George W. Bush and Sarah Palin to sail through the political waters unaffected by either the ugly truth or their own nasty lies. McCain can’t do the Bush/Palin “regular guy” schtick; he is largely charmless, and his meanness and spite comes from his tortured and all-too-easily wounded ego.

Somewhere, deep down, McCain recognizes the small scared and scarred man that he is, and each time he lashes out at Obama he rips of a piece of his own armor. He has done himself no service with his campaign, either politically or existentially. Whether he wins this race or loses, I believe he will have shortened his life substantially. All the more reason to vote against him.

But I cannot help feeling the same reluctant pity one feels for Richard III, who was born into the world a mean, ugly, angry little shit, always second to his handsome and primogenitor-blessed older brother, and destined to leave the world much the same as he entered it. John McCain certainly entered the world with significant advantages (and what he didn’t come by naturally he married into), but he also was born with a aircraft-carrier-sized chip on his shoulder. If his Othello had not come along in the form of Barack Obama, McCain would have had to invent him, to kick the bastards in the nuts one last time before he shuffles off his mortal coil.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light, Sen. McCain, if it makes you feel better. But know that as you do, the bastards you are fighting are your fellow citizens. And they won’t thank you for it, whichever way things turn out on November 5.

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Ashley

October 7th, 2008 at 1:53 pm · Reply to this comment

I really find your articles on Sarah Palin and John McCain revolting. Do you really believe that every woman has irresponsible unprotected sex and then uses abortion as birth control? I am a 29 year old woman who would not have an abortion; some people actually respect the rights of unborn children, both male and female. How can you say you support women’s rights, but yet also support thousands of female babies being killed because they are an inconvenience? You are more concerned with wildlife than with human life. You sound like an idiot when you say you care more about the rights of an animal than you do a human. That is insanity as far as I am concerned. There are Christian people left in this world who believe that children should be taught to live a respectable life and adhere to moral standards. Why do you have such a problem with that? Does it bother you if we do not teach our children to be “free spirits” who collect welfare their whole lives and spit out babies if it is convenient to get a larger check, but abort the inconvenient ones? Obama is not what I want in a president, I want someone who I respect, like John McCain and Sarah Palin. McCain/Palin, the right choice for America in 2008.

missy

October 7th, 2008 at 2:25 pm · Reply to this comment

Your comment is so chock full of subjects (and all totally unresponsive to my post); I hardly no where to begin, Ashley.

So why don’t you tell the good folks who read Democracy for Vancouver what it is you “respect” about John McCain and Sarah Palin, and why Barack Obama “is not what [you] want in a president.”

Points off for mentioning Christianity, though, as that is a religion you share with Sen. Obama, as well as Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin.

October 10th, 2008 at 11:52 am · Reply to this comment

The reason that I was pressing the issue of abortion was that a reply I received said “points off for mentioning Christianity” and I was pointing out that a candidate who openly supports abortion does not seem to me to practice the same form of Christianity that I do. In my church we were taught that a child is a gift from God and should not be aborted. Apparently, Obama’s church or Obama himself does not agree.

Also, yes I do have two friends (and they are still my friends even after having abortions) who did not bother to use birth control, got pregnant, and then said they just did not want a baby and had abortions. That is using abortion as birth control after the fact.

The purpose of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are to prevent another terrorist attack on American soil. It’s preventive maintenance, like having your car serviced. I understand that civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have unfortunately lost their lives. It is a sad fact of war. But, ultimately the citizens of those countries will better off without Al-Qaeda and Saddam terrorizing them in their own country. Civilians also died in WWII but that did not stop us from trying to stop Hitler did it?

Life is not perfect; there have been wars since the beginning of time. Also, anyone in the military had to know that they might one day be involved in a war. After all, that is what the military does.

missy

October 10th, 2008 at 3:46 pm · Reply to this comment

So abortion used as birth control is murder, but invading a disarmed and beaten-down country as “preventive maintenance, like having your car serviced” is sad but blameless?

Iraq in 2003 was not Germany in 1941. Iraq had no part in 9/11, had made no threats against the U.S., had no weapons of mass destruction, and yet we invaded that country and killed upwards of 1,000,00 people. That’s “preventative maintenance”? What did we prevent? Al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq until after we invaded (as religious extremists they were secular Saddam Hussein’s natural enemy, and Osama bin Laden counted Saddam as among the worst apostates in the Arab world); and our invasion has monumentally shifted the balance of power in that part of the world to Iran’s favor. That’s “preventative maintenance”?

This is an honest question, so please take it as such: Do you truly, sincerely believe that we have done the right thing in Iraq? Not just since the “surge,” but objectively, in terms of national security and defense, and balancing the rights of the Iraqi people to not be killed against our rights to protect ourselves? Because there really was nothing to protect ourselves against in Iraq, and we knew that. That’s been proven over and over again. So, just as a straight yes or no question, given the information now available to you (and that’s been available to Bush & Cheney since well before we started this war), was invading Iraq the right thing to do?

Not that you care, but if you answer “yes,” it will not make me angry or frustrated. It will break my heart. Because I don’t want to believe my fellow Americans can be ready to kill other living, breathing people, fathers and mothers and children, for no reason at all except to appease our wounded national pride.

That is not only sociopathic, it’s a war crime.

October 10th, 2008 at 10:18 pm · Reply to this comment

It’s not a matter of “supporting” abortion, its a matter of respecting a woman’s privacy and caring about her health.

http://www.elroy.net/ehr/abortion.html

October 8th, 2008 at 3:35 pm · Reply to this comment

Ashley,

I don’t know what it was in my post about McCain’s resemblance to many of Shakespeare’s villainous male characters that brought you to the subject of abortion, but it seems to be the one most important to you.

Are you aware that McCain himself said he would leave the choice of keeping or aborting an unwanted pregnancy to his daughters (during his run for the White House in 2000)? His “choice” to become pro-life followed directly from his presidential ambition, nothing else. And regarding Governor Palin, I would bet you $1,000 that Bristol Palin’s shotgun marriage doesn’t last 5 years. Teenage marriage can do far more damage to a woman than abortion, to say nothing of what her child will have to endure under the care of two immature parents.

Abortion is an unbelievably difficult and personal issue for each woman confronted by it. Until you have been the child of a mother who had a nervous breakdown and was suicidal after being denied birth control by her Catholic physician (who called her a slut for asking for it) and then had 3 children between the ages of 22 and 25, don’t talk to me about “using abortion as birth control.” Do you know any women who have used abortion as birth control? I don’t. But I have known women who had abortions after birth control failed, or after finding out that their long-desired child had a birth defect so severe that the child would only live hours or days after birth.

I have also lost my best friend to a placental abnormality for which the only cure is a late term abortion, because placenta percreta is only diagnosed after the 20th week. The only cure for this condition is to stop the placenta from doing any further damage, by removing it – and the growing fetus. My friend died when the doctors could not stop her post-partum hemorrhage.

Tell me, Ashley – have you protested the more than 100,000 innocent civilians killed by the U.S. in Iraq? Did you protest the deaths of the more than 500,000 children who could have been saved by prescription drugs we refused to allow into Iraq during the sanctions after Gulf War I?

Let’s start with the actual living, breathing human beings who are suffering and dying without healthcare, or under our bombs, before we turn on women who are making the most difficult choice of all to the best of their ability.