In another era – one less beset by the demands of real time – a decent dramatist might have enjoyed the stark contrast story of John McCain and Donald Trump and crafted their disagreements into a serviceable stage play. But alas such a drama would only have lent itself to the instrumentation of medieval allegory. Our modern theater thrives on the nuances of human personality, the shades of which often overlap in the rounded configurations of character, such that it’s harder to identify – for example – good and evil.

The Art of the Deal’s frequent antagonizations of McCain, a dying soldier, a former prisoner of war and routine exhorter of the good of the country above the orgiastic excesses of self, present such an obvious gulf of types (evil and good, to borrow from those terms fashioned in a simpler time) that they make someone like Milton – who wrote about the devil and angels – look modern.

That’s arguably a lot of ostentation, but it’s intended in this hour of profound national grief as a way of diffusing those less inhibited hobgoblins who might readily and willingly speak harder words, at ease in an era of politics as profanity.

We, America, lost a hero last night, who lived a life in service of a cause greater than himself; whose public fights conveyed a deeply considered sense of country; whose particular courtesies reflected the temper of one not coddled and spoiled but tested in extreme circumstances, who knew the difference between war itself and the civic rumble we cherish called the American Republic, who strove to soothe those bitternesses festering in this country rather than inflame them for his own gain; who corrected racist accusation before ever thinking to incite; who tried to ennoble sooner than mistake ratings for virtue.

This moment here – which to this day earns him the derision of part of the country still seething over perceived ethnic slights-

– demonstrates a lesson for all time – as long as there is civil rectitude somewhere amid discord – in the simultaneous resistance of demagoguery and grotesque ignorance.

Mr. McCain’s 2008 concession speech – again trotted out as more evidence by his detractors for his propensity to lose rather than win at any cost – reflects again a higher order of devotion – the kind that Lincoln spoke of in the Gettysburg Address, reechoed here like the fundament of a nation itself:

“This is an historic election,” said McCain onstage in Arizona, “and I recognize the special significance it has for African Americans, and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight. I’ve always believed that America offers opportunities to all who have the industry and will to seize it. …Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on earth. …Today, I was a candidate for the highest office in the country I love so much, and tonight I remain her servant. That is blessing enough for anyone and I thank the people of Arizona for it. …Americans never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.”

His foes will always point to 2008 as evidence of failure, when in fact McCain – on the heels of George W. Bush, and within the wider scope of the country’s elections cycles – had little chance to win that year. It was 2000 when he had his best opportunity, with the country primed to change parties after eight years of Bill Clinton, when he upset W. by 19 points in New Hampshire only to run into a race baiting machine in South Carolina engineered by W’s own doomsday brain trust. Like so many others – and in a repeat blunder of his colleague the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who had voted aye on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that plunged this country into Vietnam, McCain – caught in a Bush parallax, which exposed his worst and most hawkish tendencies  – voted aye on the Iraq War. He should have known better, but couldn’t deepfreeze the cold warrior within, and politically he would end up – as late in the 2016 presidential contest – fending from within his own party the same righteous and unforgiving backlash that baby boomers Hillary Clinton and John Kerry faced in theirs.  It stained him.

But there’s a larger life’s work there, including the maverick bipartisan accomplishment of McCain-Feingold, significant enough to warrant a disastrous Supreme Court Citizens United decision gutting it to enable a greater robber baron influx into our campaigns and elections under the guise of free speech.

Now our smarmy Jersey political culture stumbles onward amid the straitjacket shambles of a national hate-fest low enough to attempt to degrade a man a shot down in combat and subsequently tortured in Vietnam.

Just for the record.

Heroes get captured.

They fall.

They get broken into pieces.

They are beset by humiliations and the infernal fulminations and Machiavellian and Narcissist spasms of lesser men.

They suffer.

And they reanimate.

They heal.

They come back with something more than their own vanity and crassness and of a substance close to the national ideal.

And live or die, win or lose, they endure.

Rest and peace, John McCain, American, whose role in the drama rose above the ordinary yin and yang, and persisted like reason in the din.

Thank you for your service.