In 2014, the great George Strait staged his final tour, calling it “And the Cowboy Rides Away.” It was a celebration with friends, honoring his work. On July 27, 2017, we saw another cowboy, one not so straight forwardly celebrated, ride away: Senator John McCain.
It has been hard to know what to write about in the last year. I have felt like we are living in a state of constant disruption. That is not all bad. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in another context of deep conflict in America, in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” tension can make transparent and force us to confront fundamental issues. Perhaps that is what the tension in our country is doing: forcing us to look at the deep cleavages in American society and to reexamine what it means to be an American.
Senator John McCain’s action on the healthcare “Skinny Bill” was, whether we agree with his choice or not, a moment of radical and courageous choice of order in a time of tension. President Trump has questioned Senator McCain’s heroism. In July 2015, he said outright, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” And the criticism has gone so far, in the “Far Left,” to suggest that God is punishing John McCain for his support of the “New Right.”
Well, there was something epic in this maverick’s return to the Senate. I mean that properly: epic is the genre that emerges when a society is in deep division, questioning its own values. Usually, those virtues are tested out by an epic hero who both embodies and questions them. McCain returned to the Senate, scarred from cancer surgery. He was both met with honor and criticism. Standing in this paradox, he spoke about order and responsibility: “It is our responsibility to preserve that [comity and compromise], even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than winning, even when we must give a little to get a little. Even when our efforts manage just three yards and a cloud of dust, while critics on both sides denounce us for timidity, for our failure to ‘triumph.’”
I heard the voice of President George H. W. Bush telling us that some actions would not be “prudent.” What President Bush was saying is that we must use our reason--and, I would add, our love--to discipline our desires and emotions in order to achieve good ends for ourselves and for others. That is what Senator McCain was calling us to in his, as The Atlantic called it, “incongruous” and “surreal” speech.
Whether he is a maverick or not has been debated over the past few days. Well, he may or may not be a maverick, but he emerged as a courageous man and a statesman: a still point in a sea of chaos. I do not think he cast his vote against the Skinny Bill to get back at President Trump. I think he became the sacrifice: He let Senator Lindsey Graham and others stand with the Republican Party while he voted no and took the criticism as well as the praise. Now, he goes into cancer treatment and, perhaps, faces death--and I think realizing the irony that he does not have to worry about getting good medical care, whereas many Americans in his position, should the bill have passed, would.
He, with his fellow warriors, the stalwart Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, two strong women who remain to fight the fight, threw himself into the breech and opened a possibility that we may have civil discourse on an issue, health care, that has a critical impact on our lives.
And, then, the cowboy rode away.