John McCain was a white American man, whose whiteness and Americanness and maleness were his most prominent and predictable characteristics. He was also considered to be a hero. Barack Obama spoke on McCain’s “courage to put the greater good above our own.” Joe Biden remarked that McCain’s life was “proof that some truths are timeless.” There are many other tributes like this from many other prominent American and international figures, each extolment more gracious and fawning than the last, fitting for a man who put his life on the line for his country as a young man and then, for his remaining years on Earth, continued to serve it.

This sort of veneration will likely be the legacy that prevails when he’s regarded by history. I do not disagree with it. He was, in the context of whiteness, in the context of Americaness, in the context of maleness, and in the context of what those things fused together are intended to mean, a hero.

That McCain is considered and will continue to be considered heroic is less a way of synopsizing his life and more a testimony on whiteness and Americanness and maleness. Or, more accurately, an indictment. And we do not have to look further than the very recent past for proof. We know, for instance, that despite his conspicuous animus for President Trump and the type of nasty, dishonorable, and cowardly Americanness Trump represents—an Americanness that John McCain considered himself above—he was so aligned politically with this man he detested that he voted with him 83 percent of the time. And we know that his choice to select the squirrelly and thick-witted Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 paved the way for Trump’s ascension, the way a fart leads way to a shit.

There were many other decisions like this; careful and measured political choices that aligned McCain with what was (and is) the status quo for white American men. There was his dogmatic support of the Iraq War. Which, to be fair, he later admitted was a mistake. But, as Splinter’s Paul Blest articulated, he didn’t seem to learn many lessons from it.

It was a late summer afternoon, Sally Dale recalled, when the boy was thrown through the fourth-floor window.

“He kind of hit, and— ” she placed both hands palm-down before her. Her right hand slapped down on the left, rebounded up a little, then landed again.

For just a moment, the room was still. “Bounced?” one of the many lawyers present asked. “Well, I guess you’d call it — it was a bounce,” she replied. “And then he laid still.”

Sally, who was speaking under oath, tried to explain it. She started again. “The first thing I saw was looking up, hearing the crash of the window, and then him going down, but my eyes were still glued—.” She pointed up at where the broken window would have been and then she pointed at her own face and drew circles around it. “That habit thing, whatever it is, that they wear, stuck out like a sore thumb.”

Authorities in Florida say they are responding to a mass shooting at an outdoor entertainment complex in Jacksonville.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office warned residents to stay "many blocks away" from Jacksonville Landing, an outdoor shopping mall along the St. Johns River.

Unconfirmed reports on social media indicate that the shooting happened at a video game tournament.

No other details have been released.

The NYPD paid Spike Lee — one of its fiercest critics — more than $200,000 to help launch a new policing program aimed at improving relations with minority communities.

The department tapped the “Do the Right Thing” director in 2016 as a consultant for the campaign, a spokesman for the department’s nonprofit New York City Police Foundation confirmed Thursday.

The contract with Lee’s advertising firm, Spike DDB, was for $219,113 — which was paid for by the Police Foundation.

“The Foundation approached and consulted several creative teams including the Spike DDB agency to help develop a public awareness campaign that would aim to strengthen the partnership between the NYPD and the communities it serves,” said spokesman Brady Littlefield. “We received tremendous input and ideas, and that process ultimately resulted in last spring’s neighborhood policing ad campaign.”