You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

[joreth]

Thanks to tacit  and peristaltor  for the info!

The use of the word "maverick" in the McCain campaign has bugged the shit out of me from day one. The definition I *thought* the word had was someone who bucked the system, someone who was a rebel, even a "loose cannon" (a la Tom Cruise in Top Gun). This definition does not fit a man who voted in line with his own party an average of 91% of the time and who is a staunch supporter of the current, 8-tedious-long-year administration. By this definition, John McCain is the very antithesis of a "maverick".

But now I have reason to embrace his use of that word.

Apparently, the word "maverick" comes from an actual guy named Maverick. Samuel Maverick was a rancher who, apparently, didn't want to be a rancher. He raised horses and didn't brand them. Back in the day, horses were often just let out to roam free for time periods. This gave them access to "free range" food and increased the gene pool by letting the mares have a go at wild stallions. After a while, ranchers would round up all their stock, brand the new foals, and keep the choicest animals for sale, then let them out again.

What differentiates horses from regular domestic cattle, is that a wild horse is pretty easy to tell from a domestic horse, whereas other animals are not easy to tell the wild from the domestic ones. A wild horse is not saddle-broken. A domestic horse, even after roaming free for a while, will take the saddle and bit again easily enough.

The reason this is important is because, when you don't have a brand to tell you that a horse is domesticated, and you come across a random horse on the prairie, you find an animal who is saddle-broken, but you don't know who he belongs to. You know someone has broken him, but you don't know who is riding his ass. With Samual Maverick's habit of not branding his horses, a broken, unbranded horse became known as a "maverick".

What has this got to do with McCain? As peristaltor says: "We hear a lot about politicians "in the pocket" of big oil, tobacco, airplanes, masking tape, whatever. That's fine. As long as we know who is most likely to influence that politician's decisions, we as a nation can make adjustments and play accordingly. It's impossible, though, with "mavericks." With McCain, if he's a "maverick," he's not wild and untamed, he's mild and tamed but unmarked. He is therefore worse than domesticated because he has been broken, he is ridden . . . but no one can tell who rides his ass."

And that, my friends, is a frightening thought. So, in that vein, I'm now quite content to call McCain a "maverick".

Some may point out, however, that his 91% voting record does tell us who is riding his ass (Bush), so, by the original definition of the word, he is *still* not a maverick.

Unfortunately, there was another Maverick, a Maury Maveric, who was considered a "fire-brand liberal, who worked for social justice". That defintion seems more in keeping with what the McCain campaign wants us to believe with their use of the term "maveric". Maury Maverick and his namesake, Maury Maverick Jr., champions of the common man, peace, and conservation, embodied what the word came to represent. Too bad McCain isn't that guy in the slightest!

There is one more tidbit to amuse my sense of irony and shadenfruede. The Maverick Family is a little ticked off at the McCain campaign for using their name!

It didn't bother us when Ford Motor Company used the Maverick family name for their new car. We didn't care that Tom Cruise's character in Top Gun was named Maverick, and we were amused when Madonna used our name for her record label. It is part of the American vernacular. But when McCain and the media placed it in a political context, using the maverick label as the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, each and every member of this family was appalled. We continue to be.

-- Fontaine Maverick

So, let me esplain ... no there is too much. Let me sum up: 

• In the original definition, McCain is indeed a "maverick", meaning he is broken and tamed but we don't know who controls him. 
• He is the antithesis of the political definition of "maverick", which means a far leftist liberal who is best remembered for his independence from his party, who supported initiatives that saved the country from the Great Depression with "bold innovations and bold moves", and who was eventually labeled a "communist" for his championing of the "common man". 
• And the Maverick family supports Obama.

No matter how you look at it, McCain's constant use of the term "maverick" is a poor strategy.  For a man who can't seem to vet his own VP candidate, and who embraced Joe The Plumber as his mascot without seeming to realize that 1) Joe owes back taxes, 2) Joe can't tell the difference between gross income and taxable income, and 3) Joe gets a tax break under Obama's plan, it shouldn't surprise me at all that he's embraced a buzzword without seeming to understand what the hell it means.

Yeah, picking a Pres based on the idea that he seems like a guy I could have a beer with worked so well for the last 8 years, let's give it another go!  Why would we want an intelligent, well-educated guy who knows his own weaknesses and hires other guys to assist him in those weaker areas to run the country?  Nah, I want a guy just like my drinking buddy who can't balance his checkbook, maintain a relationship and who can't quite figure out how to use google to check if that email forward is fake or not.  A guy just like us is exactly who should be running the country!

I suppose I could console myself that McCain *isn't* just like those guys.  I mean, those guys could never have afforded 13 houses and convinced the entire nation that he's still just "one of the guys", looking out for the best interests of the "common man".

Comments

[joreth]

You are, of course, correct in the details about "tame" vs. "domestic" with regards to horses. This issue came up just after the civil war, so I don't know if that affects the use of the term with regards to the timeline of when true wild horses disappeared.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen any definitive science as to when the last wild horses in Europe became extinct...the last wild horses in North America (where they originally evolved) went extinct at the time of other large mammals in the paleolithic. It's believed that the last European and Asian remnants went out some time in the early middle ages. The last Auroch (ancestor of all domestic cattle) died in the Black Forest some time in the 1300s (I think) but I've read speculation that the horse was gone first.

bitter, me? Yeah. Just a little.