You’re John McCain. When you were 21 years old, you were flying a bombing mission over Hanoi, and a missile shot your plane down. You ejected from your plane, broke two arms and a leg, then landed in a lake and almost drowned. The soldiers who took you prisoner crushed your shoulder with a rifle butt and bayoneted you in the groin.
You were interrogated, beaten, denied medical care. You spent two years in solitary confinement. When your father was named commander of all the American forces in the Vietnam war, your captors tried to send you home. But adhering to the military code of conduct, you refused release, since other soldiers had been kept prisoner longer than you. So instead, you were tortured for years, beaten at regular intervals. And after five and a half years, when the war finally ended, you returned home to a country that had fundamentally changed.
You missed the cultural upheavals of the ’60s. While they were happening, you were being tortured. You’re unmoored, not sure how to return to American life. You remain in the Navy, go through physical therapy, take command of a training squadron. You cheat on your wife, who you married before your capture.
You don’t pay a lot of attention to music. Music has changed, and you weren’t around while that was happening. But one day, you hear a song. Two Swedish women are singing, in imperfect but somehow also perfect English, about a 17-year-old girl on a dancefloor. The music is bright and effervescent, and the voices are almost rapturous with joy. But there’s an undercurrent to them, too, a sort of bone-deep melancholy. Those voices celebrate youth even as they mourn its loss. They stack melodies on top of melodies, rising on the music like currents of air. You love this song.
More than three decades later, you are running for president, and somebody from Blender magazine asks you to name your favorite songs. You oblige, and you name that song, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” as your favorite song of all time.
A few weeks later, the historian Walter Isaacson tries to snark-attack you about your pick. He asks you, “What were you thinking?” You’re John McCain, and you’re not going to take any of this shit from Walter Isaacson. You allow that your cultural experience is pretty particular: “If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life. I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”
But you also know that ABBA rules, and you’re happy to tell Walter Isaacson this: “Now look, everybody says, ‘I hate ABBA. Oh ABBA, how terrible! Blah blah blah.’ How come everybody goes to Mamma Mia? Huh? I mean really, seriously, huh? ‘I hate ABBA, they’re no good, you know.’ Well, everybody goes. They’ve been selling out for years.”
You’re John McCain, and you are catastrophically wrong about so many things. But you are goddamn motherfucking right about ABBA.
