I honestly made repeated attempts to avoid another political topic this week, but my best intentions were overwhelmed by, first, a generalized panic in the Democratic Party, then an attempt on the life of the Republican presidential candidate, and then the sudden prominence of J. D. Vance, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, in the national consciousness. The evolution of my thinking moved from great sympathy for Joe Biden to shocked concern for Donald Trump and then on to a kind of generalized confusion.
To begin with President Biden, he did dig himself into his own hole with a debate performance that had to be alarming for friend and foe alike. In what I took to be a loosely organized but potent and coherent plan to dump him, the press turned his every move into a competency test. There was a brutality about this process which, as it stems from intention and conscious purpose, might be better called cruelty. I recall a scene in one of the Holocaust movies I saw years ago—perhaps it was “Schindler’s List” or one of the episodes in “War and Remembrance”—which portrayed a death camp “selection.” The word “selection” had different shades of meaning, but in one convenient history I have found the process in general use at Auschwitz, in use beginning in 1942, was as follows. “The selection procedure carried out on the ramps was as follows: families were divided after leaving the train cars and all the people were lined up in two columns. The men and older boys were in one column, and the women and children of both sexes in the other. Next, the people were led to the camp doctors and other camp functionaries conducting selection. They judged the people standing before them on sight and, sometimes eliciting a brief declaration as to their age and occupation, decided whether they would live or die.”
By this process large numbers were sent almost directly from the boxcars to the cremation ovens as “unfit”—meaning unfit for productive slave labor. But “selection” was a recurrent event. Having successfully made the first cut, though it qualified the “successful” prisoner for assignment to hard labor and starvation rations, was far from a permanent reprieve. Life as a slave laborer was, to put it mildly, unhealthy and debilitating, and at periodic intervals prison “medical” officials tested the slaves by perfunctory cosmetic inspection and by requiring them to show their continuing vigor through calisthenics, by running around in circles in grotesque foot races, and so forth. Numerous Holocaust memoirs touch upon the desperate efforts desperate people made to pass these tests. For them the issue was literally a matter of life or death.
There is a difference between corporeal and political death. It is the latter that President Biden faces, or faced, or may face. But I nonetheless saw evidence of an Auschwitz syndrome. He is now required by the press and Democratic pundits--speaking anonymously because of etc., etc.--to run around in circles in the public square. His every move (by which I mean bodily as well as verbal move) is now under intense scrutiny. He is supposed to demonstrate appropriate levels of stamina, vigor, and verbal coherence. The papers now spend less time reporting what he says than evaluating the degree to which he did or did not mess up in saying it. As for content, it’s mainly binary. Confused the name Trump with those of Zelenski and Putin (bad!) Gave a “fiery speech” in Michigan (good!) This is demeaning treatment for our president, and the open glee with which some of his opponents are greeting it is offensive. They could at least dissemble the schadenfreude. But of course, the problem is one of grave substance rather than of perception only. Put aside the pragmatism of political reality. Is it not obvious on medical and moral grounds, as well as those of national self-interest, that Biden should not be the candidate for the presidency?
Even well before the disastrous debate I had noted in television clips that President Biden on certain public occasions seemed to be walking with a rather peculiar gait—one that gives the impression of a short-stepped quasi-trot. This phenomenon has been frequently commented on by others, sometimes with the assurance that it certainly does not suggest incipient Parkinson’s or dementia or anything else but maybe a touch of arthritis. I am sensitive on this issue because my own walking has become poor and is deteriorating further. Even with a supporting stick I am unsteady. My own culprit is severe peripheral neuropathy in the lower legs, a long-time problem exacerbated considerably by the side effects of chemotherapy. But I can still speak English.
Yes, I know, one size does not fit all. You read every day about septuagenarian marathon runners, octogenarian bungee jumpers, nonagenarian Sumo wrestlers. But hard cases make bad law. In one of Thurber’s great short stories, “The Curb in the Sky,” a hen-pecked, Mittyish husband whose narration of personal anecdotes is constantly interrupted and “corrected” by his wife, seeks material for narrative in what should be his own uniquely personal and singular possession, namely the stuff of his own dreams. Is there anything that I, and I alone, could possibly add to the public cacophony surrounding the dilemma of Joe Biden? The answer is “No”, but I might come close. Not much of the commentary is coming from the President’s fellow octogenarians. How does someone who is a documented decrepit assess the President’s situation? I am in my late eighties and under attack from a progressive fatal disease which happily, at the moment, is in a “robust” remission (the comforting adjective of a super-expert). I am not quite ready for the rocking chair, but I am certainly not trying to run the Free World.
I have nothing to add to the cataract of commentary concerning the attempt on the life of Donald Trump. Political murder is perhaps not inherently more damnable than murder of other kinds, but it generally garners more attention. The sensational incompetence of the security authorities on this occasion will legitimate the wildest of surmise and guarantee a profusion of conspiracy theories. Irrational acts are not always without rational explanations. My own tentative surmise, which I advance with no authority beyond what seems to me a common sense guess about an opaque matter, is that there was no conspiracy, maybe no political thought at all, only something perhaps more appalling because more senseless. It seems likely to me that this poor lost young man who shot Donald Trump did so for the same reason that Mark Chapman shot John Lennon and John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan. Chapman eventually said: “I wanted the fame.” There are many categories into which we distribute people in our minds. Donald Trump is a politician—among other things. For some folks he is a savior, for other the devil incarnate. Before any of these things, though, he is a celebrity, somebody being famous for being famous. He is a very big celebrity. In the overheated kitchen of our current politics everything seeks a political explanation. But, as Milton tell us, fame is the spur. Fame is the last infirmity of noble mind, and perhaps the first infirmity of the small, stunted mind of an obscure lost youth. The death of one spectator and the wounding of two others was simply the collateral damage of an obscure neediness. But Donald Trump’s defiant, courageous response, captured in a photograph likely to take a place in the iconography of American patriotism alongside that of the Marines atop Mount Suribachi, may well play a significant role in the election. Talk about presidential!
What, finally, of Veep candidate J. D. Vance? Well, both as an English professor and a kind of hillbilly myself I have to say I admire his autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, especially as I have the deepest suspicion that he wrote it himself. He is very smart, articulate, forceful and ambitious. Some of the more extreme opinions he has espoused in the past will be under attack in the campaign ahead, and he will be assailed for inconsistency. In very recent history he was a die-hard opponent and critic of Donald Trump. Now he is showing every sign of taking on the role of attack dog in the service of that same man. Perhaps there will be a debate between Mr. Vance and his presumed counterpart, Vice-President Kamala Harris. If so he will have to defend and explain what he calls his intellectual evolution and what some others less charitably call flip-flopping. And he will need to throw back to Ms. Harris the pithy inspirational advice she has repeatedly—and I do mean repeatedly—proffered in recent months. That advice is to concentrate on “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”
