Not a Republican Since Lincoln

Lt. John McCain (front right) with his squadron and T-2 Buckeye trainer, 1965

US Navy photo - Library of Congress

Just before Christmas, I ordered The Luckiest Man. The title’s named for a favorite John McCain description of his life. The man was entirely too optimistic.

The book was flown to the doorstep by drone–swear to god. I saw the little sucker buzzing away with that smiley arrow on the side. Judging from the 500-plus page book, I believe Mark Salter spent more time with another man than is normal without having married him–far as I know–but maybe there’s a Twitter feed I missed. The book reviews were charitable, and I’d heard Salter speak previously in complete sentences, so it seemed like a safe bet.

I was a biography and history junkie as a kid, so I’m just reverting.

Amazon also shipped Obama’s memoir/history, A Promised Land, and a history book by Alan Mikhail, God’s Shadow. Mikhail’s book is on Sultan Selim I, a significant Ottoman ruler. Suleiman the Magnificent was his son. Talk about bloodthirsty politics; those Ottomans were practitioners of the first order. From the imperial might of the Ottomans to a present day great power–with McCain in the middle, a man who almost made it to the White House and I’m sad he didn’t make it.

In grade school, my teacher the nun made me select something to memorize, and I chose Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which still brings me to silent awe. Lincoln attended no college. He received his only education and law degree by first reading the law, then sitting for the bar. Proof positive reading can improve one’s writing, if not oratory skills, provided you do the work.

Asked for volunteers to recite, I raised my hand–and I didn’t raise my hand for nuttin in grade school. With the Gettysburg Address, I had no trouble. Surprised the bejesus out of that woman with a wimple. Here I was, an underweight Irish Catholic punk being taught by missionary nuns in the heart of Dixie. [1]

I held the Gettysburg Address in the same esteem as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

As did the rest of my very Catholic family in exile. My mid-70s grandmother, youngest daughter of a refugee child from County Clare, she left me with the distinct impression we were living in the midst of a foreign, and not altogether admirable culture in South Carolina. Took me time to come to terms with my own prejudice. And all these years later, I’m still living in the heart of Dixie.

I know the serpentine history of how an element in the Republican Party–opposing slavery in its founding–evolved–mouldered–from Lincoln to Southern ‘massive resistance’ to integration. The Democrats fractured over the issue of slavery in 1860; they fractured again in the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill. In both cases the Republican Party was the chief beneficiary, if only with the opposite effect.

Has Irony left the house?

Even in my youth, there were Republicans such as George Romney who stood against this second, less admirable metamorphosis. At the sad end of that trail are some really sad stories, but I’m holding out hope. Mind, I won’t argue Democrats were saints in the 1960s–John Stennis, Harry Byrd, Strom Thurmond (who was a Democrat before he changed parties) to name but a few. Growing up in the South, my mother and grandmother drew clear distinctions between neighbors they knew as decent souls verses the pockets of hate that still existed.

Henry Mitchell, the Washington Post gardening guru, wrote that knotweed is an impossible weed to dig out of a garden once it gets a few roots in the ground. A great metaphor for racism. And knotweed is also known as Japanese Knotweed. Of course it is.

By many readings, John S. McCain III was the privileged son of a privileged White Southern heritage, military down to the family’s genetic code. Both his father and grandfather on the McCain side rose to admiral rank; the USS John S. McCain, a guided missile destroyer, was named for the pair who had both served in World War II. The elder McCain commanded an aircraft carrier, his son a submarine. Then came McCain III, born in Panama.

When I read of John McCain leaning on crutches following his five and a half years of captivity in the ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ with years spent in solitary confinement, still refusing to leave until his fellow prisoners of war had been released–not cheering for any of them would be soulless.

War is hell, as Sherman said. In the midst there is sometimes a better story—such as McCain’s.

Once McCain was elected a Senator, his politics dismayed as much as confused me. Arizona? Where had the boy gotten to? But no confusing his slanted humor and sharp rhetoric.

Mark Salter’s book is his own biography. You can’t work that closely with someone and expect to be an impartial judge–else, what were you doing all those years, and why the hell did he put up with you? One Salter story stopped me, the one describing McCain’s plebe year at the Naval Academy.

“He ‘hated every minute’ of his plebe year. ‘I don’t even like to remember it,’ he added. He believed the abuse he received from upperclassmen was more than they accorded other plebes, ‘because my contempt was obvious.’ He didn’t resent merely the hazing which he considered an abuse of authority by the upperclassmen who focused their attention on him. He resented the authority itself, ‘the idea that I had to take shit from someone just because he was a couple years older than me. ‘ ”

from The Luckiest Man

I recognized that tune. I’d lived through similar hazing at Clemson.

In 1955, Clemson had changed from a military school with a corps of cadets, attempting a transition to a normal college–if still in that land where the dogs ran free and the shotguns missed more ducks than not.

In 1967, my freshman class at Clemson had our heads shaved–twelve years later. Called ‘rats,’ as the tradition insisted incoming freshmen were called, with weekly drill and lots of harassment by the upperclassmen. If my mother had heard of the head-shaving tradition, she didn’t warn me.

Oh, great fun! Let’s humiliate our youth and beat them into saving the country—from the Vietnamese?

A quadrangle is a four-sided geometric concept. The so-called quadrangle at Clemson was a sorry patch of concrete pavement where the mandatory two years of ROTC platoons assembled for drill. Clemson remained a deeply military-influenced school in those days.

I’ll never understand the military science of ‘break em down and rebuild them,’ how that was ever a solid concept. Then send ‘em off’ to be honorable by shooting at rice farmers.

I was one of how many and none no better than drowned rats, so why not name the image? At that age, all you have is hair and then they go shave it off. But OK, we were all living in the ‘Tin Cans’ as the dormitory was called–and I was no worse off than the other freshman. My roommate, a redhead kid from New Jersey, had freckles where the hair used to hide them. He’d had a concussion in a motorcycle accident on black ice, so a few beers and he was dead drunk. I spent one night trying to sober him up in the showers, clothes and all.

The Tin Cans were built applying a breakthrough construction technological termed ‘lift-slab construction’ where laborers poured a concrete slab, hoping seven days would cure it, then supervisors cranked it up by hydraulic jacks to clear the landing pad for the next floor–an in situ factory. Johnstone Hall was on the cutting edge–it even got a mention in Wikipedia.

Johnstone Hall, Clemson U. photo by Chris Pruitt, 2010

To fill in between the lifts, they installed these pre-fab metal panels with no insulation to speak of, aluminum windows, one per room, two rats per room. The detail found interesting were the two foot outside ledges where the styrofoam coolers kept the beer chilled in the winter, and if you were bored, one could walk the ledge a few rooms down, plant firecrackers under a window at midnight and be back before anyone saw you. No one fell in my years at Clemson, though a few were startled.

ROTC, being mandatory after they’d shaved us rats, we were told to choose which. I chose the euphemistically called ‘counter guerillas’ company because I hated polishing my shoes and brass buttons for drill. Bad wool uniform I hated as bad. Hated it like watching grass grow while the seniors wanted to tell us how lowly we were, standing in attention on a concrete plaza just outside the Tin Cans.

Instead, the counter-guerrilla company ran PT early mornings three or four miles in weighted combat boots, M1s and someone screaming to keep up. I recall a few of us puking on the hills and I won’t say it was easy, but it got me out of drill, and by god that was worth enough.

The dining hall was across the quadrangle where the suckers drilled, and football season brought dates across that concrete quadrangle like beauty queens–remember, this was in the South where the boys drank liquor and their dates, being just as drunk, tried to keep them at bay. With only a handful of girls at Clemson, they were imported from down the road from Winthrop and Furman. Some believed you couldn’t get a girl pregnant if you got her stinking drunk first. A few families were started that way. Good times.

Hard liquor was strictly illegal on state property as were the lesser vises. Wink wink, say na’ more.

At seventeen, I wasn’t yet legally drinking aged, which I don’t recall being a problem at Clemson. Come football weekends, we had a constitutional right as newly liberated Southerners to fry as many brain cells as were wonted on bad bourbon and bad apple wine. Free tickets to watch Frank Howard’s lily-white farm boys get their heads handed to them by Bear Bryant’s Alabama integrated football team.

There were a handful of Blacks on campus–including several talented architectural students, Harvey Gantt being the first. But Frank Howard represented racists of the old school who didn’t want no darkies on his team. Recall, Clemson’s main administration building was named for Pitchfork Tillman. It took a while before Clemson’s alumni could come to terms with Blacks playing on the football team. The need to have a winning football season won out in the end.

South Carolina in the 60s, alcohol, football and military honor went hand in hand with much worse aftereffects of the Civil War.

In the 2000 presidential campaign, John McCain was beating George Bush for the Republican nomination until he hit South Carolina and got tripped up by not supporting their right to fly Confederate flags at the state capital grounds. Bush sidestepped it by declaring South Carolinians had the right to decide the issue for themselves. American politics is a blood sport with power practiced from an early age. Bush was the better politician, but McCain was the better man.

One day in the Clemson dining hall—hard by the Quadrangle—I was looking no further than to sit with my cafeteria dinner when an older student interrupted my one boy procession to a table and decided he’d roleplay an asshole.

“Rat! count those peas!” pointing at the bowl.

So I did, performing as ordered.

“Rat, you didn’t count all of them!” laughing to his mates.

So I began again, pushing peas from one side to the other, while he pushed them back again. Great fun.

“I’m done.”

“Rat, count those damn peas!”

Asshole’s mates smelled blood and drew around. We had become the center of attention in the dining hall. The difference being we weren’t at boot camp, weren’t even at a military school, and he was being an dick, which I was glad to advise him of.

“Rat, you’d better count those peas!”

“Go f___ yourself!” or something along that line of exquisitely expressed anger.

I was (true story) called to what was termed an ‘Honor Court’ put on by students like in the old days to answer charges for what, insubordination? Virginia Military Institute still has an honor code–and it’s still a military academy, so you get what you sign up for. I very nervously attended the Honor Court; though I’d done my research and wasn’t planning to back down.

“How do you plead, rat?”

“You don’t have authority to do shit.” Then returned to my tin can and threw up.

Later in the year I ran for the Student Senate, won, and immediately began writing a bill to shut down hazing. Rat Season was made voluntary the following year, in large part because of the Student Senate’s opposition supported by The Tiger, the student newspaper. Two articles ran in The Tiger, one quoting the Dean of Students explaining the rules for a non-mandatory Rat Season, the second said:

“Student Body President Tim Rogers announced this week that rat season would no longer be mandatory. In an interview with The Tiger, Rogers cleared up some common misconceptions concerning rat season and expressed hopes that the transition to nonmandatory status would be carried out peacefully. Rogers said, ‘Rat season has never been mandatory but until recent times the question of its mandatory nature had never arisen.’ " from The Tiger, article written by Dick Harpootlian, July 26, 1968

‘Poot’ was my editor in those days when I wrote apolitical feature articles. When The Tiger turned against the Vietnam War, he and his mother were attacked personally as Communists. He’s stayed in South Carolina politics ever since.

“Harpootlian is of Armenian descent; his grandparents immigrated to the United States after fleeing their hometown of Harpoot in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide.”

from Wikipedia page, Richard Harpootlian

Reading up on the Ottoman Empire could prove important if I ever go back.

They say dogs shouldn’t be trained by threats and punishment. Nor should people. Yelling is OK if the person isn’t a dick and has something worth listening to. Yelling does expand the lungs. Patience is better. I’m working on it.

In a life, how many times does one run across petty tyrants? I have no claim on a heroic life. I never endured what McCain did in the Hanoi Hilton–probably not even what every Naval Academy plebe is put through. I’m hoping I’ll never be challenged like he was. But the anger at being insulted by a cretin no matter the pedigree, I’ll stand with McCain.

In the 2000 presidential primaries, I voted for McCain. I might have voted for him again in 2008, except there was this other guy running. McCain’s concession speech to Obama (again) is a worthwhile reminder of how statesmanship should be conducted. Biden’s eulogy for John McCain makes a similar point.

[1] The South Carolina was founded by clots of Scottish immigrants, with a scattering of French Huguenots–and African Americans by the boatloads. Very few Catholics, and thus the missionary sobriquet. “In 1950 only 96 priests and 230 religious sisters served the 17,508 Catholics in the state, spread across forty-two parishes and twenty-six missions.” from South Carolina Encyclopedia