PLEASE DON'T TALKE ABOUT ME WHEN I'M GONE

One of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies is Mark Antony’s speech on the assassination of Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.” Then, of course, Antony goes on to praise Caesar.

There’s a Latin phrase – de mortuis nil nisi bonum – that dates back centuries before Julius Caesar lived and died.  In English, it’s “of the dead, nothing but good.”  Not speaking ill of the dead strikes me as a generally sensible policy, at least in the short term, and assuming the deceased wasn’t a truly awful person.  Let the loved ones grieve in peace and save the criticism until after the funeral.

But the ancient Romans weren’t operating on internet time, which was probably one of the reasons why they declined and fell.  Nowadays, everyone has a hot take on everything, and the sooner you get yours out there, the better.  That’s why I’m going to offer a few opinions about John McCain right now, even though he hasn’t been buried yet. As far as I’m concerned, your first funeral is the one that counts.  

There’s no reason to doubt that McCain comported himself heroically as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.  Apart from that, the highest praise I can offer is that Donald Trump hates him.  McCain did some expert trolling of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin when he planned the details of his own funeral. 

McCain was probably the best Republican of his time, which is damning him with faint praise.  He was on the wrong side of most policy debates in his long career, but he had an authenticity about him that made most of his fellow Republicans look like empty suits. Which of course they were.

There was plenty to criticize in both McCain’s personal and public life.  In the Navy, his recklessness cost taxpayers three airplanes, not including the one shot down over Vietnam.  He cheated repeatedly on his first wife.  I don’t know if he was personally homophobic, but he consistently spoke and voted against gay issues.  He was an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Iraq.  For all his mavericky-ness, he toed the Republican Party line the vast majority of the time. 

But nothing he did was worse than giving Sarah Palin a national stage in 2008, by making her his running mate.  She was a con artist whose primary skill was her instinctive ability to connect with the people who, eight years later, would become Donald Trump’s deplorables.  Palin laid the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump and the zombification of the Republican Party.

To his credit, McCain owned up to some of those mistakes, although it would be fair to describe much of his self-criticism as too little too late.  In today’s degraded political climate, I guess that makes him a statesman.