Tuesday
Of all the political pundits, no one quotes literature more frequently or intelligently than Esquire’s Charles Pierce. (New York Times’ Maureen Dowd used to shine in this area but no longer.) Pierce impressed me mightily over the weekend when he applied W. B. Yeats’s “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea” to John McCain’s funeral.
Yeats’s Cuchulain poems were part of his project to resurrect Irish mythology, long buried by English imperial rule. In that way, applying Cuchulain to McCain seems appropriate since his brand of Teddy Roosevelt Republicanism has long been buried by a mixture of corporate toadyism and Nixon’s southern strategy.
The passage Pierce chooses sounds like it could be America asking for direction—where does our journey lie?—now that a senator who believed in working across the aisle is no longer with us. I suspect that Pierce chose it for this reason:
Yet somewhere under starlight or the sun,
My father stands.
Aged, worn out with wars
On foot on horseback or in battle-cars.
I only ask what way my journey lies,
For He who made you bitter made you wise.
Such an application falls short in one way, however, because McCain was not particularly bitter. In a characteristic move, he invited two men who bested him in presidential battles to deliver eulogies. For him, the line should read, “What would have made other men bitter made you wise.”
It so happens, however, that the Cuchulain in the poem is no John McCain. He may be aged and worn out with wars, but he has also strayed from his duty, leaving his queen and his son for a new mistress. The son asks his bitter/wise mother where his father is and she tells him.
The unfortunate upshot is that Cuchulain battles with his son, whom he does not recognize, and then goes mad after he kills him. Ally King Conshubar, fearful how he will behave when he emerges from his funk, comes up with a plan:
Then Conchubar, the subtlest of all men,
Ranking his Druids round him ten by ten,
Spake thus: “Cuchulain will dwell there and brood
For three days more in dreadful quietude,
And then arise, and raving slay us all.
Chaunt in his ear delusions magical,
That he may fight the horses of the sea.”
The Druids took them to their mystery,
And chaunted for three days.
The poem ends with the success of Conchubar’s plan:
Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
Seen in this way, Cuchulain works as a dark allegory for the GOP. Leaving responsible kingship behind, it alienates the millennials who should be its future and ventures out to fight phantom enemies (immigrants, Muslims, black athletes, “the deep state”). Druids whisper wild conspiracy theories into its ears.
But let’s go back for a moment to thinking of McCain as Cuchulain. Yeats romanticized the mythical figure but knew only too well that his time had passed. I felt some of the same when I watched people romanticize McCain over the weekend. For all the talk of coming together as Americans, more appropriate seemed to be another Yeats line:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…
If we cannot check the rough beast we have residing in the White House, McCain’s vision for America will be no more than an antiquated fairy tale.
