# Start Here > Guest Forum >  Spengler: A funeral for a world that never was

## Unregistered

> Funeral services are not for the benefit of the defunct, who is beyond our praise or condemnation, but for the living, who know before long that they will follow the honored dead into a cold grave.
> 
> Senator John McCains funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.
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> The eulogies for the Arizona senator, to be sure, were a convenient occasion for the Establishment to show its dudgeon at the pointedly un-invited President Trump, as the New Yorker noted, calling the event the biggest resistance meeting yet.
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> McCains daughter Meghan contrasted what she called her fathers real greatness with the cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice, a reference to Trump. Politics, though, were less important than the American elites collective exercise in self-consolation after the catastrophic failure of its policies and its repudiation by the voters in the 2016 election.
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> Senator McCain served his country and suffered on its behalf as a prisoner of war, and deserves respect on the occasion of his passing. But the unctuous sea of self-congratulatory declarations of virtue embedded in his obsequies was enough to make the portraits in the Capitol rotunda puke.
> ...


I guess when all else fails, wait for the establishment to croak.

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