Eugene McCarthy is Dead...

An Icon and a Hero to many, he was, by the time I came on the scene a man with a complicated and unhappy legacy.
Yes, his was a lonely and courageous stand against LBJ and the war back when it counted.
Alas he is also the man who endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980 with the pithy epigram "Better a competent extremist than an incompetent moderate".
A more Goldwaterian meditation cannot be imagined by Humble Elias.
This would be the same Ronald Reagan who famously "joked" about turning North Viet Nam into a "parking lot" making the late President a comparatively rare example of a pure genocide humorist.
This was a man who once famously waxed poetic before the nation on behalf of Adlai Stevenson.
All gone.
All of it.
Yup that was Gene the man for Humble Elias, whose youth came to an end on a overcast Wednesday morning in the First Week in November back in 1980. He and so many others were duly hustled aboard a long shit-train which shows no sign on stopping as of 12:28pm EST 12-12-05.
Indeed it's picking up speed isn't it?
Where was Gene McCarthy and his boundless love for the Youth of the Nation when MY bad scene was coming down under the aegis of Ronaldus Maximus?
Nowhere...he was spewing venom at Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter etc etc...and still in his heart you know he harbored a vast secret bestialand penultimate hatred of Bobby Kennedy.
To tell the truth, there was always something spiteful about Gene McCarthy he could be relied upon to give perpetually disaffected progressives a nicely impotent electoral option in any given presidential election, a position now admirably filled by Ralph Nader.
But yet for all that, when Allard Lowenstein came knocking on his door, hat in hand desperate for an anti-war candidate....Gene said yes.
Better men than Gene had begged off, but McCarthy at least put his money where his mouth was.
Too bad he could never live up to that one supreme act of courage.
But then who can.
Rest in Peace, Gene.