“A well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” is not a reassuring descriptor for a statesman with enough fissile firepower at his fingertips to incinerate the globe to a depth of several feet of charcoal. No more would we be reassured if the same statesman, while cleared of criminal wrongdoing, were simultaneously judged too mentally truant to stand any prospect of a fair trial even if he were likely guilty. These are obiter comments to be sure, not intended by special counsel Robert Hur to stand as the main thesis of his recent report into allegations of documentary impropriety during President Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president (a tenure that, according to Hur, Biden can’t remember in any event), but as with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it’s always the footnotes and apposite asides that vivify and justify an otherwise laborious read (come to think of it, pluralize the Fall there and you have yourself as good a title as any for a summary of Biden’s political dotage).
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To read, as we do in Hur’s report, that Biden can’t recall the date of his son’s death is to feel pity. On a human level, it’s the only seemly response. On a political level, too, it’s to feel yet more pity for the president’s handlers, who even with the connivance of a tame and forgiving media are working shifts to convey any credible, coherent image of Biden that goes beyond the binary logic of At Least’s He’s Not Trump. But like a callous ringmaster putting a tired old circus elephant through its paces long after its utility has ended, they keep trying. President Barack Obama is famously said to have remarked about his then vice president, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” For once, his judgement cannot be faulted.
In civilian life, a man of similar moribundity would be having a hard enough time of it puzzling his way through the flurry of post-it notes left by concerned relatives on fridge doors, hob dials, and hot water taps while struggling to remember why he’d wandered from his armchair to the kitchen. On top of that, Joe just happens to be running for reelection to what remains, for all its shop-soiled prestige, the most powerful political station in human history, the presidency of the United States. Given this asymmetrical collision, it’s not surprising that we’re watching a sitting president mentally unspool in real time on the national and international stage (and we might reasonably, if uncharitably, conclude that he would do well to remain sitting, simply for his own safety).
It may seem invidious to focus on Biden’s rhetorical demerits when there are precious few 21-entury politicians capable of voicing anything other than decaffeinated bromides, but when gaffes and verbal missteps begin to accumulate like pathogens in a petri dish to the extent that entire speeches sometimes amount to blunders agonizingly stretched out on the rack of senescence to the length of several paragraphs, it becomes legitimate, even necessary, to stop and marvel at the sheer negative grandeur of the spectacle, the same way we all slow down on the highway to rubberneck at a multi-car pile-up. We are all by now familiar with Bidenisms so mangled that they make Trumpisms by comparison look like polished gems of locution plagiarized from the pages of Nabokov. Almost every speech Biden delivers is followed by an embarrassed corrigendum from the press office, amending dates here, correcting names there, rearranging the president’s word salad into something vaguely resembling sentient speech: “What the President meant to say was…” But that’s the trouble. Sometimes it’s not clear what the president meant to say at all, least of all to those luckless souls in the administration charged with telling us what he meant. Consider this:
Virtually every … mass shooting … every … circumstance where a large number of people have been victimized and lost, I spoke to them … I learned a long time ago, but you all learned in your life as well…
Or this:
There’s not a single solitary Biden man that is younger than any Biden woman.
Or any of these:
At a food insecurity summit in September 2022 Biden wondered where Sen. Jackie Walorski had got to (she died a month previously). On the campaign trail in Las Vegas in early February of this year, casting his mind back to the prehistoric past of the 2021 G7 summit, not only did Biden forget that François Mitterrand (who died in 1996) is no longer president of France, but he also forgot that Mitterrand had never been president of Germany. Recalling the same conference a few days later, Biden claimed to have taken counsel with Helmut Kohl (who died in 2017). Ah yes, the consolations of dementia. No one ever dies, and you make new friends every day.
On a visit to Israel in 2022, meanwhile, Biden assured his Jewish audience that he would continue to “bear witness” to the “honor of the Holocaust.” To a slightly less offended, but doubtless similarly perplexed, audience at an ecological rally, he promised to build a railway “across the Indian Ocean” (one week earlier, at a press conference with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, he’d promised to build the same railway across the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans). Then there are the transpositions of titles, presidencies, entire nations, with names and faces lost in a haze of fungible fog: Ukraine becomes Iraq (or, on another occasion, Iran); the president of Egypt becomes the president of Mexico; Rishi Sunak is the president of the United Kingdom; Donald Trump is still the sitting president of the United States. (READ MORE: ‘Gratuitous, Inaccurate, and Inappropriate’: Kamala Lies Some More)
And so on.
The risk of Joe stumbling over his words is, of course, the least of his minders’ problems. It’s a polite peculiarity of our language that as you get older, you no longer fall over; instead, you have a fall. And we are all wincingly familiar with Joe Biden and his falls, his habit of crumpling to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut, the only bright spot being that all things considered, he seems to bounce back from the ordeal more or less immediately. One of the baleful benefits of dementia we must concede is the patient’s invulnerability to embarrassment.
Alas, the aesthetician’s skill cannot repristinate the mind, nor can it reinvigorate the body. The face- or latex-like rictus that Biden’s plastic surgeons stapled artlessly and needlessly over his ageing but still handsome features sometime after 2008 may convey in certain lights and from certain angles a weird patina of rubbery vitality, but behind the fixed grimace we surmise a tired and confused old man wishing he was somewhere else, or perhaps already there, far away from all these strange people congregating in their strange crowds, with their strange voices, strange faces, and strange demands.
In Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973), the zombified gratification-based dystopia of the future takes pains to present its leader to the public as physically and mentally vigorous — while, in fact, behind the scenes, all that remains of him is his nose, his head, body, and limbs having been atomized by an assassin’s bomb. In the person of President Joe Biden, in the high weirdness of his words and actions, what we are presented with in the zombified gratification-based dystopia of 2024 is the very inverse: The body is still there, still animate, just about; but something vital is visibly declining, dimming, putting out to sea and receding from solid shores. And this is no longer comedy, nor even tragicomedy. This is simply a tragedy, and a high-stakes one at that.
