There is some startling information in Tom Brune's recent Salon article "Is Mccain a competent fellow?". Jack McCain, John McCain's father, became a four star admiral (from which position he shepherded his son's career) thanks to the civil rights movement, which leads to the sort of contorted dramatic irony that can only be found in the least believable Southern Gothic novels--and in real life.
According to Brune,
After years of badgering by Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., Johnson in 1967 promoted Vice Adm. John S. "Jack" McCain Jr. from a dead-end post to commander of the Atlantic fleet, according to archived letters, documents and tapes of phone conversations that have not been reported until now. Johnson did it even though Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said in a 1966 phone conversation with Johnson that he had been told McCain wasn't competent and that "he's not a good strong tough commander."
And why should Lyndon Johnson, master of backroom politics, have listened to Sen. Dirksen? Brune provides the key:
It was Dirksen who broke the filibuster of Southern conservatives to allow Congress to pass the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, a debt that Johnson never forgot, as he made clear in notes, letters and phone calls to Dirksen.
Which is, of course, where the irony kicks in. How strange that the father ascends to his long-sought position via a quirk in the civil rights movement. His son has, according to Tom Dickinson
spent most of his life trying to escape the shadow of greater men. His grandfather Adm. John Sidney "Slew" McCain earned his four stars commanding a U.S. carrier force in World War II. His deeply ambitious father, Adm. "Junior" McCain, reached the same rank, commanding America's forces in the Pacific during Vietnam.
Now the son and grandson is attempting to step out from their shadow by winning the presidency of the United States--over the first ever African American nominee. The irony becomes more bitter when one factors in the increasing use of oblique racism in the Mccain campaign of late: the dark allusions to wellfare, Islam, community organizing, and "real" Americans.
Isn't there some moral lesson in all of this, just as a moral may be adduced from the blood feud in Huck Finn or from the multigenerational fables of Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Though, "real" life will differ from fiction, where irony is used. In real life, irony happens.
The McCain family epic has proceeded with something like inevitability--as all true stories appear in retrospect--passing now before the public eye for a few generations, offering us a view into raw ambition, alchoholism, faithlessness, and perhaps love and redemption as well: that is, it is a touchstone for the stories which we live ourselves. Just as surely their story will fade back to the obscurity in which most of us dwell--though the drama for the actors will remain.
What's the lesson to be drawn, then? Do not return favors, or the hydra of racism will never be killed? The ambitions of the father will ruin the son? Beware the irony in your own life?
There will be no neatly tucked moral at the end of this story, I think, because there will be no ending to the story. Life stumbles on without pause, offering hints of culmination but always returning with more, more pain, more love, more despair, more hope.
The very interlocking of lives that leads to this story's surprising ripples of irony--the shuddering chains of cause and effect-- assures us of the absence of a culminatory lesson. Johnson sought to repay a political debt earned in the quest for social justice; our country has reaped a bitter harvest of a racial divisive campaign--which could only have happened in the first place because of the civil rights act, the very thing which incurred the debt which lead to...
Yet the very word "culminate" offers in its etymology a guide for a principle, perhaps, if not a moral, that might be drawn from this story. "Culminate" first entered English as as astrological/astronomical term used to describe a heavenly body at the apex of its regular travels through the night sky. That is, the origins of "culmination" lie in cyclic rather than linear notions.
Western thought has relied heavily in the last two millennia on the linear notion of history. It is a concept that has been handed down from Zoroastrianism through Judaism and Christianity with each of these religions' emphases on history's endpoint. It is a notion that survived the purge of Enlightenment in the guise of "progress"--think of the boom in utopian and dystopian literature during that era--and a notion that has become central to this year's campaign. Many of us who have supported Barack Obama's candidacy have, perhaps, fallen into the trap of belief in linear culmination.
Yet we would be well served to recall that one of Obama's central catchwords, "change," cuts two ways. Though the impending Obaman presidency represents a culmination of the civil rights movement, it is not a final Culmination. There will be retrogressions as well as progressions as history stumbles on. This is not a break from the past, for there is no breaking the chains of cause and effect. Even should Obama's presidency exceed our expectations--as Johnson's sudden unwavering support of the civil rights movement exceeded that era's expectations--his actions will beget their own ironies, both bitter and delightful. The darkest currents of the past will not suddenly dissipate with his election, but will surely feed this tree beside the water even as will the clear streams of the mountaintops in Martin Luther King's vision.
Perhaps I have arrived at a muddled moral, after all:
We should no more heap blame on McCain than we should heap adulation on Obama, any more than each of us deserves blame or adulation. We are each of us caught in the swirl of history, bound to forces that preceded us and that will outlive us--indeed, that will proceed from us. McCain has been impelled towards this precipice since before his birth, and will likely wake on Wednesday a broken man striving to wrap the tatters of his honorable self-image about himself against the chill of colossal public failure. It is a position any of us might have found ourselves in should the gyrations of history have swung differently. It is this knowledge, this empathy, that should provoke sympathy and forgiveness in us. It is this identification with the commonality of the human condition that can help mitigate the hatred, brought to the forefront by the McCain campaign, that lies in each of our hearts, waiting to be awakened. It is this supersession of hatred that can cause Obama's election to be a truly joyous culmination of the civil rights movement, which was a fight against unreasoning hatred most of all.