Hmmm. Maybe I have more in common with John McCain than I thought.
You see, in the Washington Post's new bio piece on McCain, entitled "The Curious Mind of John McCain: Ambition and Emotion Color the Complex Intellect of the Candidate," McCain reveals that his favorite book is "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway:
"But his favorite book is Ernest Hemingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' whose protagonist, Robert Jordan, has been McCain's hero since he was 13. In the novel, Jordan, an American volunteer on the anti-fascist side of the Spanish Civil War, finds love, then chooses death in service to a hopeless cause he believes in."
Now, I'm not surprised that McCain would pick perhaps the bleakest, most depressing book ever written as his favorite. But I am more than a little surprised that he chose Robert Jordan as his personal hero.
What's so shocking about choosing "an American volunteer on the anti-fascist side of the Spanish Civil War" as your hero? Uh, well, nothing much if, like me, you're a Chomsky-loving, Phil-Ochs-listening, Jose-Saramago-reading leftist (Er, I mean progressive).
But McCain should probably pick up a history book to supplement all that wonderful fiction he's apparently reading, because the "anti-fascist side" in the Spanish Civil War were Anarcho-Syndicalists trying to fashion a decentralized, anarchistic, communal anti-capitalist society. This probably puts them somewhere to the left of, say, the communist party. And the Americans who fought against the fascists, the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade," were American leftists who went there to fight in support those efforts.
It was nice of the Washington Post to use "anti-fascist" in place of "anarchist" to describe Robert Jordan -- we wouldn't want to embarrass Mr. McCain, would we? But let's be real: Jordan, McCain's fictional hero since he was 13, was fighting to bring a radically new, leftist model of society into being. He was fighting against the fascists, yes, but on behalf of the anti-capitalist, anarcho-syndicalist movement.
Your hero, Mr. McCain? Back off -- I had him first!
Oh, and Mr. McCain? Guess which side the U.S. supported in that war?