The passing of Senator McCain over the weekend got me to thinking about why we publicly mourn certain members of our society on their deaths. To my mind, we as a society are more successful when we recognize those individuals who have put the good of society over our more personal personal or partisan interests. This behavior, as personified by Washington and many other Founding Fathers, not only brought our society into existence, but guided that society into stability and provided the structure to continue stability, even into a Civil War provoked by the endless selfishness of near-half the country. That’s why the deaths of McCain, his friend Senator Ted Kennedy, various Presidents to greater or lesser degrees, and many military personnel gain some form of immortality for their memories, while the deaths of mere millionaires, who by definition did not put society ahead of their own interests, or, at best, personally benefited from their efforts to improve society. Even such larger than life personalities as Gates, Buffet, or Musk, despite their reputations, have still operated to their own profit – it’s what made them prominent, after all – and not necessarily to benefit society, despite the promises of the free enterprise system. On their passing there will be a nod to how they transformed private enterprise, but there won’t be the mourning we see for the personality who sacrificed much for the nation.
Because that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? We, by which I mean most of us, are deeply selfish creatures who sometimes can’t even think generously about our own families. When an individual stands forth and recognizes the reasons for how the government is structured as it is, how we are all feeble creatures who have no credible claims on any sort of truth, which is the insistent basis of compromise, that our human enterprises are inevitably full of flaws, some of them terrible, requiring constant adjustment and repair, and when that personality puts forth the vociferous arguments in defense of that institution, even to their personal degradation and ruin, then we have someone worthy of mourning on their passing, celebrating their walking illustration of that which founded the Nation.
It is dismaying to see Senator Collins (R-Maine) say this:
“The lions are gone,” Ms. Collins said. “The lions of the Senate are gone. It is very sad.” [The New York Times]
As if they were an exhausted natural resource? Senator Colllins, you could be a lion. Stop being a sheep. Defend the Senate against the incompetent ways of McConnell. What do you do when presented with incompetent judicial candidates, for instance?
Election to national office is not a passport to immortality. Names such as Ryan, McConnell, Nunes, Chaffetz had their opportunities, but instead clutched the party to their breasts and swore allegiance to it, without murmur as to its mistakes; their party shaped them, rather than they at least trying to shape their party; they have lost their opportunity to be mourned by more than their small coteries, if that, who benefited from their actions.
Will new Democratic lions, beyond Obama, stand forth? We’ll have to see.
American public mourning is a celebration of the values of the best of us. The private sector, important as it is, has nothing special to it in that it’s a center for the pursuit of selfishness, and that is exceedingly common among us; that some of us do it better than others is nothing to particularly celebrate when the achiever passes. One might muse on the concept that private enterprise doesn’t enable democracy, but instead it’s the other way around, and thus those that engage and excel in honest execution of that greater endeavour deserve the praise we shower upon them when they can no longer hear it.
And we should meditate on that.
