Brendan Hoban: Sometimes we must be saved from ourselves
Western People 16.7.2024
Joe Biden, most recently the toast of Ballina and the great hope of the Democratic party in America in the upcoming presidential election, now finds himself in a no man’s land.
While it suited the Democrats to underline Biden’s credibility as the man to defeat the populist and amoral Trump a second time around (and especially as no effective or credible alternative candidate had appeared on the horizon) the hope was that Biden’s age – 81 and, after a four year term, 85 – would not become an election issue.
The gap between Biden and Trump in terms of credibility and suitability for the highest political office in the free world could not be starker. Biden, the essence of everything that is admirable in terms of public service, moral purpose and civic responsibility – and Trump, a convicted felon, a self-confessed sexual abuser, a pathological liar, a fantasist who is hoping that the presidency may protect him from a series of imminent court cases.
At face value and probably in any democracy in the world – apart from the USA, that is – the alternatives couldn’t be clearer and the decision at the polls more obvious. Biden’s credentials for high office overwhelm those of Trump.
But now after the recent catastrophic television debate, overnight Biden has been transformed from the candidate who could be relied on to defeat Trump into the candidate who may well deliver the White House to Trump on a plate.
The Democratic party tactic of holding their breath and hoping for the best has imploded. Biden was unmasked as the unforgiving television lens revealed an octogenarian in a panic of confusion and miscalculation with clear evidence of the cognitive deterioration that often attends old age. It is no fault of Joe Biden or the aged that we all eventually succumb to the encroachments of our declining years and that our ‘senior moments’ become more regular and more debilitating.
It isn’t clear at this stage how this dilemma for the Democratic party, for America and for the free world, is going to be resolved. Will Biden insist on continuing? Or will he be persuaded to enjoy the benefits of a well-deserved retirement? What does his family really think? Are they acting out of loyalty to his need or out of concern for his or their future? Could this even be an example of ageism or even of elder abuse?
The question that surely haunts his family is: should we allow a husband, a father, a grandfather in his Eighties to become either a willing or unwilling victim of the present debacle to save America from Trump?
As we move into our later years, regardless of how we imagine we haven’t really aged all that much, the grim reality is that – apart from the usually cosmetic efforts to pretend that somehow we can halt the ageing process – the years take their toll. As John 21:18 reminds us: When you were younger, you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you to where you do not want to go.
Old age happens to everyone – if we live long enough to experience it. And while personal decision-making is a great blessing that can extend into old age, we can sometimes need reminding that there comes a time when decisions – through no fault of our own – force themselves on us.
In a recent column in The Sunday Times, the doyenne of newspaper columnists, Matthew Parris, evidenced Joe Biden’s sad story, as a reason ‘why we should quit before we embarrass ourselves’ – before Parris himself announced that ‘this will be my last Saturday column’.
It is a perceptive comment as we all tend to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt when people compliment us on ‘looking well’. We are easily convinced of the accuracy of complimentary comment when, if applied to others, we could just as easily identify as plámás or merely a formulaic conversational comment.
Indeed the problem starts, long before cognitive deterioration, when we are easily convinced that somehow, while age is more than just a number, it’s unavoidable implications don’t really apply to you or me.
Biden’s catastrophic debate with Trump was an indelible line in the sand that effectively surfaced the great unmentionable question: if according to long established Pentagon protocols an American President has just six minutes to respond to a nuclear weapon hurtling towards America, how would an 85-year-old Biden – fast asleep in the middle of the night – respond to that call? And, to compound matters, Biden’s subsequent interview to re-establish his credibility was unconvincing.
A difficult truth for all of us is that we reach a point in life when we are no longer as good as we were and when our nearest and dearest need to remind us of a simple truth. It is that regardless of whether we are soldiers or sailors, presidents or priests (or newspaper columnists, as Matthew Parris pointedly reminds himself and those who need reminding!) to encourage us to ignore the reality of the sands of time slipping through our fingers is to render us a false service. Sometimes we have to be saved from ourselves. As one commentator, albeit a mite cruelly suggested, this is ‘about taking the car keys from Granda’.
Joe Biden by common consent has reached that point and pretending he hasn’t, is no service to the free world, the US, his family or himself. Who after all would want to
expedite the humiliation of a decent man whose only discernible fault is that he has grown old? Who would want to endanger his proud legacy of a lifetime of public service by sacrificing it on the altar of political expediency and family expectation?
Sometimes we have to be saved from ourselves. Sometimes we have to be told to leave the stage. Sooner or later, hand on heart, we are all ‘that soldier’.
I listened to the debate in real time on June 27 and was almost traumatized! Brendan puts it so well: “The Democratic party tactic of holding their breath and hoping for the best has imploded. Biden was unmasked as the unforgiving television lens revealed an octogenarian in a panic of confusion and miscalculation with clear evidence of the cognitive deterioration that often attends old age. It is no fault of Joe Biden or the aged that we all eventually succumb to the encroachments of our declining years and that our ‘senior moments’ become more regular and more debilitating.”
The Lord appoints limits to every human life and we must be ready to accept them with resignation and thanksgiving — “Now Lord, Thou lettest thy servant depart in peace.” But I haven’t finished my work, we protest, and in fact my life has passed in vain! Too bad, time to go, Nature hustles us off the stage. Joe Biden’s huffing and puffing, with cries of betrayal, was all too human, and thankfully he saved his honour by handing over the reins to his running-mate (but not, be it noted, the Presidency — and that nuclear scenario remains terrifying; that’s the punishment for the crimes of possessing nuclear weapons and threatening to use them).
To end on a cheerier note, how absolutely delightful to see Trump so wonderfully wrongfooted! Kamala may have an annoying laugh, but she has what Trump will never have: Youth (though he declares himself young). A smart American, in the prime of her force (at 59), has an excellent chance of slaying the paper tiger and bringing the crazy USA back on an even keel. All hands on deck! America — never again Trump!
The ‘impediments’ of age seeming to dominate American election events shouldn’t blind us to the Virgin’s child immaculately conceived.
Pope Francis encouraged Catholics to go back ‘to Galilee’ in an Easter homily a few years ago. Not the geographical Galilee of the nations and of Jesus but our own – to return to where the personal journey began for each of us. And I think he meant more than the baptismal font.
When I retired from ministry, over a decade ago, I was looking forward to a time of silence, solitude and study in ‘my old age’. The silence was shattered by the onset of tinnitus in one ear from the years of working in a shipyard where the wearing of earmuffs was looked down upon as unmanly. Later, after retirement, came a head trauma leaving me anosmic. So, for years now I have never tasted the bread or the wine of Mass nor got the smell of incense or candles or chrism at Easter. All food is tasteless to me, and only for flowers and herbs having colours I wouldn’t know the arrival of one season after another. When I’m told the choice is between onion or tomato soup I have to ‘imagine’, before ordering, the smell and taste from memory.
However, my reliance on my instincts, intuitions and inspirations have grown out of all proportion in contrast to the above ‘impairments’. And I attribute this to being introduced to the life and scholarship of Carl Gustav Jung, who lived to 86, (the father of analytical psychology), on a course in the Clonmel campus of LIT, which included art therapy. It was like hearing again the invitation “to put out into the deep” echoing from the shores of Lake Genneseret. An invitation to let go of the familiar, the reliable, the tried and tested. So much can lie deep in our unexplored unconscious ‘oceans’ that are beyond the reach of our senses. We can call it the numinous or the liminal and for me it was the dawning of a ‘new age’, not of Aquarius – more like that of an ‘annunciation’ to a woman in Galilee.
Hoping for a new messiah to usher in a new age ‘to make America great again’ – and give a spin-off to the rest of us shows the event recalled in the ‘Angelus’ can go cold.
Pope St. John Paul II said: “We note that before expressing her ‘fiat’ the Virgin bears witness to the Spirit who fills her whole soul, and to the Son she is to conceive and give birth to, when she says: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord!’. We have reached the point in time when the new age begins. To this beginning, to the Annunciation, we must always return, because thanks to it the new age endures throughout human history, and with it the new man.” (Wojtyla, K. Sign of Contradiction, 1979, St. Paul Publications, Slough, p.38).
Death in an afternoon of a young man who had gone through all the ‘exams’ of education leaves me wondering in my old age what ideology got him onto the top of that roof and can anyone save us from ourselves?