Thursday, February 14, 2008

McCain and Hemingway

One of the reasons I love Wonkette so much is because, at its best, it rises to an almost Menckenesque level of wit. This is one of my favorite posts of all time (about John McCain):

Do you have special heroes who help you decide what to do in your life or whatever? John McCain sure does! And they tend to be fictional characters from ridiculous juvenile books and movies, generally about how romantic it is to get shot down or blown up for some pointless bullshit cause that was always a losing proposition that wasn’t even wanted by the people it would ostensibly benefit.

But it's this brief summation that makes it art: "In other words, McCain is a 70-year-old man who still reads Hemingway books." That is such a brilliant encapsulation of the man that it seems pointless to add anything to it. But there is more to him than just that. One interesting thing to note about John McCain is that he's never held a job outside of the government for very long. Between his army service and his congressional service he's been drawing a government paycheck for ages. His father was a powerful Naval officer. The sad thing isn't that McCain reads Hemingway books, but that he has so little life experience outside of the cocoon of the very powerful that he actually thinks that life is like that. After all, he's got nothing with which to compare it. The worries of average folks are things that are to be looked down upon with contempt. It's all about honor and glory. He's conservative because Republicans were more pro-military when he started his political career than were the Democrats, but ironically he's probably more statist than, say, Barack Obama is (it's debatable w.r.t. Hillary Clinton), even though he claims to be a small-government conservative. I tend to be less than sympathetic to the conservative critiques of his sins (e.g. his opposition to the Bush tax cuts, campaign finance reform, etc.) but the larger critique--that he doesn't feel the small-government philosophy in his bones--seems eminently valid, and I can understand why a lot of conservatives dislike the guy.

For the record, I can't stand Hemingway, and John McCain's Hemingway love is actually a much more powerful strike against him from my perspective than, say, his stance on the war. Hemingway is a bete noire of mine because he is so palpably full of shit. His work is generally lazy roman a clef, I find, too light on analysis of his characters' motives and feelings and too heavy on derring-do and romanticism of war. Plus, once you get past the novelty of how differently he forms sentences from Fitzgerald and his ilk, it is indisputable that he is just a terrible writer. Significant moments pass by without much heft very frequently. A man who loves Ernest Hemingway simply can't be anything other than a conventional White man whose conception of meaning is defined through conflict. Hell, even Bush seemed to evince an affection for Camus on occasion. I will grant that Hemingway does effectively manage to convey his worldview and beliefs through his writing, but as both are utterly banal and sentimental and, well, bullshit, I find it hard to respect someone who really reveres this trash and takes it seriously. These are romance novels for men, make no mistake about it. Hemingway's continued popularity bothers me nearly as much as the continued popularity of Gone With The Wind, another intensely shallow trip through the human psyche that is infinitely more tolerable because it sticks with the story and characters instead of deciding to babble about human nature quite so much.