Beyond Biden XO

WHEN EVERYTHING ELSE fails for the leader of the free world, let him brandish the Bible. He may have to do this, literally, as a growing number of Christians believes that his antagonist is God’s choice. Under attack from biology, Joe Biden may find solace only in the Book that extols old age as the glorious pinnacle of a righteous life. The special counsel, appointed by the president’s own Justice Department, investigating Biden’s possession of classified documents even after leaving the Obama administration, did not find such virtue in debilitating senescence. He politely doubted the still-not-doddering president’s mental acuity. The president, he said in his report, is a “well meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” with “diminished faculties in advanced age.” A president who confuses Macron with Mitterrand and Merkel with Kohl and can’t remember the name of the organisation Israel is fighting in Gaza may have a problem with memory, and his infrequent stump appearances and press conferences add to public concerns about his fitness and eligibility for another term, at the end of which he will be 86. “Joe Biden,” in the words of an Atlantic writer, “looks like he is turning into a statue of Joe Biden.”

Is it the greying of the American Dream as the most watched contest of 2024 is turning out to be one between two gerontocrats? Donald Trump, at 77, is the younger opponent. The Republicans, and the public at large, according to the polls, seem to be less worried about his age. That may be because age has only fuelled his rage, which in turn has turned him into a pumped-up behemoth trampling on civilities and the old pieties of conventional politics. The pursuit of power is the ultimate vengeance. Biden XO, all said, has its liberal aficionados, who will argue that biological malfunctions have no bearing on his presidential duties, even if they impinge on his public appearances. Translation: governance is a private matter, conducted behind closed doors, so shut up. Beyond the cellular dilapidations of the world’s most powerful politician lies the desperation of democracy. Biden’s party suffers him because he is non-Trump, and the Democrats have no raison d’être other than Anyone-but-Trump. And the Republicans are too scared to displease the man who hovers over them with unlimited ballistic bile. The staggering incoherence of Biden and the crude realism of Trump bring out the limits of an old truism: the more the body deteriorates the wiser you become.

That’s taking a leaf from the East, where the wise men have always been of a certain vintage. When Chinese communism appropriated the wisest of them all from their cultural history, the ancient comrades of Zhongnanhai gained an extra dose of indispensability. Confucius never left the scene. When Mao departed to meet Marx, not as a retiree, the Chairman was as young as 82. Deng Xiaoping, the most influential Chinese after Mao, also a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, was 92 when he exited the stage. Old age never slowed down the man who made Marx eat Big Mac. In the empire where “celestial” was a legitimate adjective to the mandate, the divinity of power grew with the emperor. The onslaught of ideology didn’t change the tradition. The current paramount leader, busy codifying his own thoughts and finetuning his own cult, aspires to be the eternal leader. Revolutions ripen when they are nurtured by the old. Indian communism, though it was denied an empire except the one its comrades carried in their antique minds, too, venerated the Extra Old at the helm, before the young Karat came along. The East was partial to the wise old men.

We didn’t have a Biden moment when Morarji Desai became prime minister at the American president’s current age, 81. Then the grand old man of Indian politics’ first wave of anti-Congressism had his own indigenous ways of keeping healthy, and he never confused Jayaprakash Narayan with Jagjivan Ram for that matter. The man who succeeded him, Charan Singh, was only four years younger when his dream was fulfilled, just a few months short of Trump’s 77. It was not age that stood in Advani’s way when he, at 81, chased his dream—the one yatra that failed him. Maybe we preferred the experienced to the idealistic. Maybe the science of beating biological age had a head start in Eastern traditions. We have learned to stand on our head and hold our breath and pose like a peacock to live longer. Is there a cultural aspect to Biden’s biological problem then? It may be a case of democratic “covfefe”, the word his nemesis once deployed to trump linguists. Had it been uttered by Joe Biden, it would have sounded very normal.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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