Tag Archives: Richard Nixon

Are Aging Powerbrokers Sinking the Nation?

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Shakespeare gave his audiences fair warning about advancing age and the risks of clinging to power. By the end of the play, King Lear is old and crazy, with his dominion in chaos.

There’s a lot of discussion in the popular media about political leaders who have stayed in power too long. Our recent history with Joe Biden at age 82 and Donald Trump at 79 are the most  recent cases of apparent declines in mental stamina, though, in Trump’s case, the evidence is decidedly mixed. Incompetence and dementia can look like the same thing. There is also the example of Mitch McConnell (83) in the Senate, who appears to not have had the good graces to step down when he could keep track of his thoughts. Senator Diane Feinstein of California was incapacitated before she died at 90, and the District of Columbia’s Eleanor Holmes Norton seems to be suffering through the same frailty. On the whole, these cases and others like them feed a cultural norm of impatience with those still in power and showing unusual longevity.

Interestingly, and as a matter of policy, the Church of the Latter-Day Saints picks their oldest elder to be their leader. Dallin H. Oaks will start his term to lead the church at the age of 93, one year older than the recently elected President of the central African state of Cameroon.  By contrast, many commercial airline pilots must retire at the comparatively young age of 65. And surgeons are mostly done by age 70. But just when a trend seems clear, someone like Bernie Sanders (84) comes along,  exciting the young with his articulate and impassioned rebukes of his Senate colleagues and Donald Trump. Sanders is an example for arguing that “age is just a number.” And there is the special case that is New York City, which has just elected 32-year-old Zohran Mamdani as mayor. By comparison, and with some exceptions, many of Sander’s colleagues in Congress–most in their 60s or older–lack the inclination or stamina to be effective legislators.

Shakespeare could have easily imagined the enfeebled American nemisis, King George III, who was 81 when he died. Today, some of Britain’s senior leaders end up in the House of Lords, which has a ceremonial and advisory role in governmental affairs. We have no equivalent of a body of wise old men and women who can apply their experience to intractable national problems. That’s too bad because there are leaders from both parties who could help shape some constructive paths forward for the nation. Easing out President Nixon in 1974, after the Watergate coverup, was arguably easier because of the presence of senior members in both parties who convinced him that it was time to go.

Joe Biden’s struggles to remain alert and coherent were evident at the end of his presidency. Perhaps that is one reason so many Americans are primed to consider whether Trump is able to process information and ideas and, more tellingly, to perform the very presidential necessity of staying on point throughout a presentation. Sadly, even less than a year into his administration, some of his constituents and his counterparts in other nations no longer view him as having the character needed to be a reliable partner.  The General Services Administration will want to count the silverware when he finally leaves the public housing we mistakenly assumed he would leave in tact.

I have sympathy with younger Americans who claim that the nation’s leadership should be in the hands of more nimble minds. There is a lot of grumbling about “boomers” my age who have ostensibly damaged accesibility to the  American dream. Did we give our children too much? Did we grow too isolated and materialistic? Have we sentimentalized the accumulation of wealth at the expense of more universal values? And have we allowed our media to be turned into wall-to-wall distractions that diminish real life experience?

All of these questions are timely. On the other hand, it is easy to be disappointed to discover that many current protesters responding to Trump administration policies are much older than youthful activists in the 1960s. Protests against Isreal on college campuses are an exception. But I have attended recent rallies and marches against Trump-era policies where the age of the average attender seems to be on the far side of 60. That is not going to cut it if we are going to renew this society.

Messages Out of Sync

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In this age of distraction many of us don’t notice when we sabotage our own messages.

Over a lifetime of language use, if we are paying attention, most of us will notice the ironies and contradictions that so easily creep into our discourse. Some of us are better than others. And, as least in popular culture, even stand-up comedians can be good at zeroing in on pieces of our verbal or visual communication that are at war with other parts of the same message. Think of the old Woody Allen joke: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.'” In those ancient days of my college experience there also seemed to be no end  to repeating the same joke about Richard Nixon’s locution, “We can’t stand pat.” Of course he obviously meant that we need to keep moving forward. But Pat was his reliable spouse’s name. It was an unfortunate but funny unintended meaning that was further undermined by his dead-serious demeanor.

We are all guilty of blindly producing unintended meanings. But in this age of distraction many of us don’t notice when we contradict ourselves in the same message. That’s why one is lucky to have someone who can be their formal or informal editor.

There is no shortage of examples.

  • A full-page ad in a recent issue of Psychology Today features an image of a counselor talking to college students under the shade of large tree. The counselor wearing an official-looking lanyard and gesturing to the others is obviously in charge. It’s the bottom headline that is out of sync. “Earn Your Counseling Degree Online,” it asserts. The college making this offer is apparently prepared to deliver to your computer nearly all of the skills and knowledge needed for a counseling degree. Is it possible to teach and master this kind of personal communication almost entirely on the internet? A promise of teaching full competence remotely needs more.
  • Lately I’ve been reading and writing a about Mark Twain, a towering presence in American literary history. Early in his career he expressed admirable outrage for the same kind of governmental grifting and malfeasance that we are seeing today. His hostility to government leaders in the 1870s seemed prescient: an early warning for our own “Gilded Age.” And yet, as his biographers point out, his later years were often consumed in overspending on a lavish lifestyle, followed by dark moods when his investments floundered. I began to see my hero fading into the distance as he began duplicating the quest for easy wealth that he had criticized in his early writing.
  • There is an old advertisement for Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold Medicine featuring the testimony of a trucker, even though the medicine includes a warning to “not use heavy machinery” while using it.
  • A few years ago I passed a car with a “Conquer Cancer” sticker on the back and a driver up front puffing on a cigarette.
  • Denali National Park is pristine region of thousands of acres that is named after the Indian name of what is now been renamed Mt. McKinley, the highest Peak in North America. GMC clearly wants to invoke the same spirit of this natural wilderness with their popular Yukon Denali, a hulking SUV with, as one option, a gas V8 that gets 14 mpg in ordinary driving. To the extent that “the personal is political,” this seems like a non-sequitur on four wheels for any environmentally conscious driver.
  • Apparent contradictions can also yield pleasant surprises. I’m struck by the achingly beautiful music that was written by stoic men writing the last century, including Johannes Brahms, Edward Elgar and Sergei  Rachmaninoff. Common motifs in many of their pieces are the very meaning of musical melancholy and wistfulness. Our modern view of masculine expression now admits to most of the same feelings that women express. Even so, and perhaps unfairly, I see in images of Brahms an unlikely figure to have produced examples like the 3rd Movement of the Third Symphony. The music of the Romantics is a reminder that a person’s appearance is an unreliable marker of what might be going on inside.

  • Facing politically divisive issues this June, President Donald Trump noted that “My supporters are more in love with me today, and I’m more in love with them, more than they even were at election time where we had a total landslide.” It was an odd kind of lexicon for a world leader to employ about him or herself. It is usually an insecure person might need to publicly affirm their popularity. That is usually left to others. Ironically, the compulsion to say it suggests the opposite. The spontaneous assertion of others’ love for oneself seems like reliable  evidence  of self-doubt.