The beatification of John McCain began a long time ago, but it’s poised to kick into overdrive now that the man has died at age 81. There will be a great many more things named in his honor: schools, statues, federal buildings, battleships; McCain appropriated so much money for wars that we’ll be able to name a whole fleet after him. Maybe McCain will get his own national holiday, hopefully not too close to Martin Luther King Day. All through his career as a senator, McCain represented a fairy tale ideal of bipartisanship that never quite matched his politics, but it’s clear that the myth of John McCain will long outlast any of those nasty little inconveniences.

The D.C. press corps has already tweeted out endless kudos to their buddy and chastised the president for his pettiness in failing to honor McCain sufficiently (I have no idea what this bit of grandstanding is meant to accomplish… Trump has already proven incapable of shame; do you really WANT him to make some insincere paean to a man he will never stop despising?). They have also, strangely, chastised people who might dare speak ill of the man on the occasion of his passing.

I find it galling—predictable, but galling—that members of the embattled press, the self-appointed last guardians of truth in a dying democracy, would be so insistent on dictating how the world ought to remember this man, and that people should shut up if they have an issue with it. Was John McCain not celebrated for his supposed bluntness? Didn’t he name his campaign bus the Straight Talk Express? Am I supposed to politely ignore his record as a lawmaker? The bad wars he championed? The ruinous tax bill he voted for? The introduction of Sarah Palin to the universe? The fact that he mostly turned a blind eye to his own party’s enduring, horrific corruption? Why should I avoid any of that? Because he was nice to some reporters on a bus 18 years ago?

John McCain’s political career was not, and should not ever be considered, a guidepost for How America Should Work. His token outreach efforts to the other side of the aisle encouraged a false narrative that conservatives and liberals could govern together in shared power, and in peace and harmony, when conservatives have never wanted any such thing. And his minuscule defiances of his own party have, in a twist, only seemed to legitimize that party’s standing. For years, John McCain existed to perpetuate the idea that there is a heart to the Republican Party when there is not, and Americans everywhere are still paying dearly for that ruse. You shouldn’t get extra credit for being the nicest asshole in a room full of assholes.

Of course, you cannot talk about John McCain without mentioning his service in Vietnam and the way he survived all the horrific years he spent in captivity. His was a particularly venerated form of American heroism: violent and manly. In terms of reputation, John McCain was a trooper, first and foremost, and that inherent trooper-ness was unassailable, no matter what came after the fact. To borrow a usually noxious term, acknowledging McCain’s service is a form of acceptable virtue signaling, a way of elevating both McCain and the person namedropping him, often to vacuous ends. He was a patriot. He was honorable. He did his duty. He put country over self. McCain gets lauded for that last bit a lot. And that's fair, although few reporters ever seemed to ask just what KIND of country McCain was putting first:

There is a vision that McCain’s party has for this country—one that he very much supported—and that vision involves not necessarily serving your country, but obeying it. McCain’s life story, along with his general approachability, helped to deify him, even though you could make a clear argument that McCain’s political career actively made the lives of Americans worse. So many remembrances of John McCain begin with the phrase “Well, I may have disagreed with him on policy, but…” “Policy” is a very nice, vague catchall term. It allows you to talk about politics in the abstract without ever coming close to assigning personal blame for the broken lives and bodies that result from those politics. And lauding a man for his persona more than his work is a strange phenomenon; it acts as a way of perpetuating the myth that this country will always follow its better angels, even though it has an abysmal record of doing so. That McCain fella, he’ll vote to gut Planned Parenthood, but by gosh he’ll still shake your hand after he does it! THAT’S THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA!

This isn’t enough. The McCain Way of kicking up a small fuss as your own party robs the people blind is not a way for America to move forward, not in a timeline this dark. His political career is more of a monument to the old status quo than anything else: a stodgy, right-center America where you can rock the boat a little but not so much that anyone of import really gets wet. This is a country that needs more work, not more blind faith. This is a country that has pathologically avoided reckoning with its past sins, and McCain stands as a chummy avatar for that willful ignorance. He was a useful hero. For the bulk of my adult life, I heard idealistic liberals and politico types cry out for John McCain to do the right thing, to be better than he was. Rarely did he prove that, and when he did, it was often the bare minimum. Yet now that he’s gone, it seems like being rarely good was enough. It shouldn’t have been.