Saturday, July 6, 2024
1947 The AK-47 goes into production in the Soviet Union, the Kalashnikov
In bed, not on recliner, around 9:30, awake at 1:54, and up at 2:10 to let Lilly out. Let her out again at 4:50 but she stood on the sidewalk, as she always does, looked around for about 3 or 4 minutes, turned around and came back in. She irritates me with her nervous need to be let outside for no reason other than nervousness, a need to move, to change location, to do something. I think it's part of her dementia and confusion. Her heavy breathing or panting is continuing, too, making me wonder about her heart and lungs. In the predawn first light, the only birds I hear are the cardinals and robins competing to mark their territories, or are they just happy to be alive in the summertime?
Prednisone, day 55, 15 mg., day 19. I took the pills at 4:10, followed by cottage cheese and berries at 4:20. I nodded off at some time after 5 and woke up at 7. Then again, woke at 9. Sleeping in chunks. BP at 2 p.m., 122/72.
I'm grateful, like the singing cardinals and robins, to be alive in the summertime.
Seeing myself in Joe Biden, Joe Biden in myself. All the attention to Joe Biden's age and accelerating decrepitude reminds us fellow octogenarians of our own ages and decrepitude. Biden's stiff, awkward walk is very much like mine and has the same main cause, arthritis in his spine. His weakened voice and frequent throat clearing are much like my own, caused I suspect by thickened mucous in his mouth and throat. His hesitancy in descending the steps to the moderators' desk after the debate with Trump mimics my own very similar behavior. If ever I were to forget our similar plights, numerous newspaper articles remind me of the inexorable effects of aging, the inevitable and irreversible toll of Time on our bodies and our minds. If there is a difference between us, it is in his tenacious attempt to hold onto Power, which to him is his autonomy and agency, his identity, whereas I have largely accepted the inevitable. Some scholars believe we have four fundamental human needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. When you step away from a high-prestige job, you risk losing these. Joe Biden, for reasons I suspect even he doesn't understand, has lusted after presidency his entire political life. Now that he has had it for almost 4 years, he can't or won't give it up, no matter the risk or cost to the nation. Ultimately, he is much like Trump, emotionally needy, self-invested, self-centered, and delusional.
Many politicians and other supporters are expressing sympathy and love for Biden as he undergoes the humiliating inquiry into his mental competence to hold the job he now occupies. I am not one of them, not having been a fan or an admirer of Biden's for years. Furthermore, it's not as if the whole world couldn't see this nationally embarrassing and dangerous crisis coming. Back in the February 11, 2024, issue of The New York Review of Books, Fintan O'Toole wrote an essay entitled "The Memory Hole" in which he wrote:
If Biden is being treated so badly [by the Special Counsel investigating his retention of classified documents], the decent thing is to defend him and to dismiss the whole story as a politically motivated farrago. This is a serious mistake. Hur’s commentary on Biden’s cognitive abilities may be irrelevant to the job he was supposed to be doing. But it is not, alas, irrelevant to a presidential election that could shape American history for decades to come. For even if Hur’s is a low blow, it is a punch that someone was always going to land. Biden’s age is a gaping vulnerability that the Democrats have pretended not to see.
The right seizes on and magnifies every gaffe that Biden makes, but the blunders are real and seem increasingly frequent. In the days before he mixed up Sisi and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he also confused Helmut Kohl with Angela Merkel and François Mitterrand with Emmanuel Macron. Under the pressure of a vicious election campaign, these moments may well happen more often and attract more attention. Hur’s report feeds into a narrative that was already established—that Biden is losing it—and makes it unavoidable.
Four days before Biden’s disastrous press conference, Hage Geingob died in a hospital in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Geingob, who was eighty-two and the serving president of Namibia, was the only other octogenarian running a democracy. His death leaves Biden in a club of one. Biden really is exceptionally old for a working head of government. And there has been consistent polling evidence that this is one kind of exceptionalism that Americans don’t want to claim. As the New York Times’s chief political analyst Nate Cohn puts it, Biden’s age is “arguably the single most straightforward explanation” for why he is trailing Donald Trump. “It’s what voters are telling pollsters, whether in open-ended questioning about Mr. Biden or when specifically asked about his age, and they say it in overwhelming numbers.” Those numbers include a majority of Democrats.
It’s no good pointing out that Trump is almost as old and equally prone to verbal slips. It’s no good highlighting the undoubted truth that, while Biden’s language may sometimes be uncomfortably sloppy, Trump’s loose lips utter toxic lies and dangerous slurs. These things don’t change the facts that no one has ever run for a presidential term at the end of which he would be eighty-six, that Trump gets a free pass on almost everything, and that Biden, fairly or otherwise, is the lightning rod for deep generational discontents and widespread unhappiness at the persistence of an American gerontocracy. His age gives Biden an apolitical way to retire gracefully, standing by his considerable achievements in office while passing the problem of being too old to be president onto Trump.
Nikki Haley was probably not wrong when she suggested after Biden’s press conference that “the first party to retire its eighty-year-old candidate will win the White House.” But if Biden persists in running, there will in effect be only one candidate: Trump. He will be the Republican contender but he will also be, as the monster to be feared, the primary motivator for Democratic voters. The election will be a referendum not on the incumbent president but on his challenger. Since Biden is unable to shake off the perception that he is too old to be president, he cannot make his own case effectively. He will rely on the simple proposition that he is not Trump. In a deeply uncomfortable sense, Trump, having taken ownership of the Republicans, will own the Democrats too.
Anniversary thoughts. The AK-47, or Kalashnikov, started the worldwide production of assault rifles, sturdy and economical submachine guns that are crowd-killers. It was followed by Israel's Uzi. Approximately 75 million Kalashnikovs were produced and sold and more than 10 million Uzis. We have moved on up to the AR-15 which in our land of the free and home of the brave are readily available to anyone with the money to buy one. Dubbed "America's Gun" by the NRA, it has been used, e.g., to kill 49 at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando on 6.12.2016; 17 at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on 2/14/2018; 58 at the country music festival in Las Vegas on 10/1/2017,;12 in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado on 2/20/2012; 27 in Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut on 12/14/2012; 14 at a holiday office party in San Bernadino, California on 12/2/2015; 26 at a rural church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas on 11/5/2017; and 11 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on 11/4/2018.
"But Biden’s contention that he alone can beat Trump was never true. And now he has lost some moral high ground because he hid the evidence of cognitive deterioration.
Trump is the master con man, but Biden is giving him a run for his money.
He, his wife, his vice president and his longtime aides worked hard to conjure a mirage where everything is fine in Bidenworld.
That mirage vanished with the debate.
We don’t know now who is running the country. We only know who shouldn’t be — the president and the former president."
The photo of Jill protecting Joe from an approaching demonstator on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020, seems symbolic. She is Johnny on the spot while he is slow to react. He was 78; she was about 70. Age mattered, then and now.
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