1/5/23

 Friday, January 5, 2023

In bed at 9, awake at 2 with a nasty case of GERD and onto the lzb until 3:30, then back to bed but still awake at 4, fell back to sleep at some time, and awakened by alarm at 6:30 to get dressed to pick up Andy and Peter at 7:20 for trip to Nicolet and Ogui Garage.  Lilly was sound asleep on tv room floor and didn't awake until I was already sitting down on the recliner.  When I returned at 8:30, she was asleep on her mattress and didn't wake up at all from the noise of the garage door opening and closing, the back door, and my footsteops moving to the recliner.  25°, high of 35°, cloudy all day, wind SW at 6, 3-7/12.  Sunrise at 7:23, sunset at 4:30, 9+6.    

Treadmill; pain.   Considerable CPP this morning and afternoon.

I'm grateful for many and for much, but not very conscious of it today because of too little sleep last night and too much p&d today.  I need to SNAP OUT OF IT!

Daughters of the Cult.  We watched this long documentary series on the cult of Ervil LeBaron and the 33 murdeers and 9 suicides it led to.  The members were polygamous, fundamentalist Mormons resideing in Mexico but later spread throughput the SouthWest - Denver, Houston, Salt Lake City, elsewhere.  It made me wonder, yet again, how so many people can believe the nonsense of religious doctrines, whether the doctrine is that Ervil LeBaron is God's "Prophet Mighty and Strong" or Transubstantiation.  It also made me wonder about the MAGA crowd, their belief that the 2020 election was "stolen" and in various conspiracy theories from "QAnon" and the internet.

"Killing a King" is a book I've been reading about the Oslo Accords i 1993 and the 1995 assassination of Yitxhak Rabin by 25 year old religious Zionist Yigal Amir.  The murder was brought about by the right-wing opposition to the Accords, led in large part my Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party who ended up succeeding Rabin as prime minister (after a short succession by Shimon Peres) and has dominated Israel's policies ever since.  Amir believed that the land that Rabin proposed to hand over to the Palestinians had been promised by God to the Jews - Samaria and Judea - and that Rabin was not simply wrong in agreeing to the Oslo Accords, but a traitor.  Reminds me of the thinking of the followers of Ervil LeBaron an the belief in "blood atonement."

Eldest Statesmen by Fintan O'Toole in NYRB, Jan. 18, 2024.  Excerpts:

Just 39 percent of respondents in that New York Times poll viewed [Biden] as too old to be an effective president. On the face of it, this makes little sense. Trump’s mental sharpness is at least as questionable as Biden’s—he has recently claimed that Biden would lead the US into “World War II” and that he himself defeated Barack Obama in the 2016 presidential election. He claims that “Kim Jong-un leads 1.4 billion people,” apparently confusing the North Korean dictator with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He told supporters at a rally that the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has recently called on “President Obama” to resign and be replaced by Trump. Nikki Haley’s repeated calls in her Republican primary campaign for cognitive tests to be made mandatory for officeholders over seventy-five are aimed as much at Trump as at Biden. Yet it seems to be Biden alone whose age will matter in the coming presidential election.

 . . .Yet there is an underlying reality. Biden is not just chronologically old—he is politically ancient. Trump has clocked less than a decade in the electoral arena. Biden has been around for half a century as senator, vice-president, Democratic primary candidate, and president. He launched his first bid for the presidency in 1987, when today’s median American was four years old.

Those who now make light of his verbal slips note, as Franklin Foer does in his recent book The Last Politician, that the problem is less “Biden’s age or acuity” and more “his indiscipline and imprecision, traits that stalked the entirety of his career.” This may well be true, but reminding voters that Biden was always thus is no great help when that “always” seems to stretch back into what is, for most of today’s voters, a fuzzy prehistory. Biden’s longevity in public office means that, unlike Trump, he can appear as an embodiment of the gerontocracy that Americans do not want but have ended up with anyway.

Trump, meanwhile, exudes a dark energy. . . .

 [I]in 2020, Biden could be embraced for what he was not (Trump) rather than for what he was. Being a very familiar face was, in a time of strangeness and disorientation, quite appealing. But by insisting on running again, Biden risks stirring the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt—not just for him but for the whole gerontocratic system. He already had a problem with young voters, who were not particularly excited about him in 2020. Now, polls consistently suggest that young voters are by far the most likely to say that he is too old to be an effective president.

. . . . 

None of this is Biden’s fault—but it is his problem. He stands for a grim continuity: thirty consecutive years, so far, of boomer (or, in Biden’s case, technically preboomer) occupants of the Oval Office. He is caught in a generational paradox. He does not, in electoral terms, actually represent the boomers: a majority of “old white people” voted for Trump in 2020 and will, if given the chance, surely do so again in 2024. But he can be seen nonetheless as a representative boomer figure, the most prominent and powerful embodiment of the demographic group that has dominated American wealth, politics, and culture since the 1970s. He suffers on both sides of this contradiction—most of his own generation does not identify with him, but many younger Americans identify him with the age-related injustices that have shaped their lives. It is this incongruity that makes Biden so vulnerable. Being the old white man brings him no rewards, only resentments. And resentment is the medium in which Trump thrives.

Yet Biden himself does not seem to have much awareness of the seriousness of this threat to his reelection. He has little instinctive sympathy with the specific struggles of younger Americans. In 2018, when he was briefly out of public office, he told Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times:

The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break! No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break! Because here’s the deal, guys, we decided we were going to change the world, and we did.

That “we” is an explicitly generational identity. In Biden’s mind, he and his age cohort changed the world in much tougher circumstances than those that millennials and Gen Z face today. He seems barely conscious of the implication that it’s their fault if they fail to change it again.

In the public mind, the risk that Biden might die or be incapacitated during a second term is inflated beyond its real probability. Polls show only around a third of respondents expect him to finish a second term if he wins one. Though Biden seems able to blot out those hazards, it is not at all obvious that voters will do so. Death will be on the Democratic ticket but he will not acknowledge its icy presence.

Biden is troubled by strange notions of political succession. His touchstone was the Kennedy family, and he dreamed of achieving what it could not: the creation of a presidential dynasty. The Bidens, very unusually for Irish Catholics, have that monarchical habit of using Roman numerals after their names. Biden himself is Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.; Beau (also christened Joseph Robinette) was III; his brother Hunter’s son is IV. This is more than a private affectation. It was intended to mark a governing bloodline. As Biden wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad, “I was pretty sure Beau could run for president some day and, with his brother’s help, he could win.” Before his untimely death, Beau was apparently ascending in this direction. Having served two terms as attorney general of Delaware, he had announced his candidacy for governor. His father had also suggested, when he vacated his Senate seat to become Obama’s vice-president, that “it is no secret that I believe my son, Attorney General Beau Biden, would make a great United States Senator.” There is surely a feeling that a one-term Biden presidency is a poor substitute for what should have been eight years of Joe, followed by eight years of Beau.

God save US (if only) from Joe Biden's screwed up psyche, his overweening ego, and his coveting of power, fame, mansions, Corvettes, and pride of place.  Ditto Trump, except for the Corvettes.