Mr President, if you are sick of people talking about how old you are, think about how I feel. You are only 79 years old. I am 82-three years old who is ahead of you. You’re still a kid, though it’s true that crossing the lawn of the White House, you walk like a tin woodman who needs lubrication. It didn’t feel good to even fall off the bike. I wish you remembered that the best hope after 75 is the mystical dignity – big politicians, grandfathers know best, Konrad Adenauer, that sort of thing. Think gravity. By the way, you need a new tailor. Suits are tight too. You are not 24.
Just for your eyes, I’ve prepared a scouting report on the situations you’ll find yourself in serious old age crossing the mystic limit of 80. Your timing, I must say, could be better. I note that you will turn 80 exactly 12 days after the mid-term election in November. My guess is that neither the historic birthday nor the election results will put your party in a celebratory mood.
You must have seen that old age is a real phenomenon, and that time passes at a rapid pace. A year is compressed to a month. Death becomes Zeno’s paradox. The end is always there, exactly ahead in the mist and darkness, though you don’t know when and how it will come upon you. You are now in the youthful sense (it used to be an official American thing), as Thomas E. Dewey told voters in the 1948 presidential campaign, “The future is before us!” Whatever happens to a person in their 80s, it is not really the future. Often what comes before him is just the opposite: the past, that interesting country, rich in its treasures and amusements and regrets. Old age naturally prefers the past; It feels safe there.
The medical fields await. If you’ve reached here, you know about them. The 80’s don’t kid around. Your calendar will be overwhelmed with doctor’s appointments; The first half hour of dinner with friends will be spent in medical updates. You’ll acquire specialist jargon – for example, learning about the Gleason score for the prostate.
Think of old age in terms of “pilgrim’s progress”. When John Bunyan wrote his poignant allegory at the end of the 17th century, his full title was “The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That Is Too Come, Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream.” It’s not a bad description of life in one’s ninth decade, which at times appears to be “under the semblance of a dream” and certainly looks like a gateway to a world to come. The dodgy pilgrim would wallow in Despond’s Bay, spike his blood sugar during lunch at Vanity Fair, gasp up hills of difficulty, suffer from valley of humiliation, dream of captivating mountains. Aging is like life, but more intense – and made awkward by weaknesses.
Sleep acquires a spiritual significance; If you can’t sleep (I never can between 2 and 4 a.m.), you find strategies: Pray, read, think (but please, think about evils or what should have happened). come anyway).
But you are not an old monk like me. You are the President of the United States of America. Teddy Roosevelt set a dangerous standard for the office when he praised “the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is covered in dust and sweat and blood.” Are you still ready for this?
It’s good to remember that TR died at the age of 60, completely spoiled. His cousin Franklin died at the age of 63 – doomed, spent. Lyndon B. Johnson, FDR’s lifelong hero, expired at age 64, exhausted. I remember when Dwight Eisenhower, 70, left the White House in 1961—with his successor, 43-year-old John F. Kennedy – He seemed to be the oldest person in the world. But of course we were all young that winter.
The moment, when power passed from Eisenhower to Kennedy and the 1950s to 1960s, marked the empowerment of an illusion that is still at work in American culture—an existential error Bob Dylan, now 81, made. As summed up in his 1973 anthem, “Forever Young.”
He was the germ of the deadly National Renaissance – a term that is defined as the retention of juvenile characteristics in an adult animal. Old age got lucky—an attitude that, decades later, seemed hilarious as it was discovered, the hard way, that no one can (or should be) young forever. In fact, life has a seemingly inevitable flow of it, from birth through childhood through youth to adulthood to middle age to old age, and finally to death, with rules and roles appropriate for each stage. It’s good to be old. It’s good to be young. It is right to be a child and, when the time comes, to be a mother or a father, and right, further down the road, to be a grandfather and, gradually, to be a corpse. Everything has a time, and under heaven there is a time for every purpose. Let’s leave it at that.
There is no doubt that you, being the fox of the eighty-year incumbent, have your reasons to urge you to run for re-election. But if I were you, my friendI would not.
Mr Morrow is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy. His latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money”.
Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 general election by a landslide to Ronald Reagan, so it’s hard to understand why Joe Biden is still following Carter’s “malaise” playbook today. Bateman via Getty Images/Shutterstock Composite: Mark Kelly
opinion | It’s called the 80s. They’re on their way for you, Mr. President
Mr President, if you are sick of people talking about how old you are, think about how I feel. You are only 79 years old. I am 82-three years old who is ahead of you. You’re still a kid, though it’s true that crossing the lawn of the White House, you walk like a tin woodman who needs lubrication. It didn’t feel good to even fall off the bike. I wish you remembered that the best hope after 75 is the mystical dignity – big politicians, grandfathers know best, Konrad Adenauer, that sort of thing. Think gravity. By the way, you need a new tailor. Suits are tight too. You are not 24.
Just for your eyes, I’ve prepared a scouting report on the situations you’ll find yourself in serious old age crossing the mystic limit of 80. Your timing, I must say, could be better. I note that you will turn 80 exactly 12 days after the mid-term election in November. My guess is that neither the historic birthday nor the election results will put your party in a celebratory mood.
You must have seen that old age is a real phenomenon, and that time passes at a rapid pace. A year is compressed to a month. Death becomes Zeno’s paradox. The end is always there, exactly ahead in the mist and darkness, though you don’t know when and how it will come upon you. You are now in the youthful sense (it used to be an official American thing), as Thomas E. Dewey told voters in the 1948 presidential campaign, “The future is before us!” Whatever happens to a person in their 80s, it is not really the future. Often what comes before him is just the opposite: the past, that interesting country, rich in its treasures and amusements and regrets. Old age naturally prefers the past; It feels safe there.
The medical fields await. If you’ve reached here, you know about them. The 80’s don’t kid around. Your calendar will be overwhelmed with doctor’s appointments; The first half hour of dinner with friends will be spent in medical updates. You’ll acquire specialist jargon – for example, learning about the Gleason score for the prostate.
Think of old age in terms of “pilgrim’s progress”. When John Bunyan wrote his poignant allegory at the end of the 17th century, his full title was “The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That Is Too Come, Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream.” It’s not a bad description of life in one’s ninth decade, which at times appears to be “under the semblance of a dream” and certainly looks like a gateway to a world to come. The dodgy pilgrim would wallow in Despond’s Bay, spike his blood sugar during lunch at Vanity Fair, gasp up hills of difficulty, suffer from valley of humiliation, dream of captivating mountains. Aging is like life, but more intense – and made awkward by weaknesses.
Sleep acquires a spiritual significance; If you can’t sleep (I never can between 2 and 4 a.m.), you find strategies: Pray, read, think (but please, think about evils or what should have happened). come anyway).
But you are not an old monk like me. You are the President of the United States of America. Teddy Roosevelt set a dangerous standard for the office when he praised “the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is covered in dust and sweat and blood.” Are you still ready for this?
It’s good to remember that TR died at the age of 60, completely spoiled. His cousin Franklin died at the age of 63 – doomed, spent. Lyndon B. Johnson, FDR’s lifelong hero, expired at age 64, exhausted. I remember when Dwight Eisenhower, 70, left the White House in 1961—with his successor, 43-year-old John F. Kennedy – He seemed to be the oldest person in the world. But of course we were all young that winter.
The moment, when power passed from Eisenhower to Kennedy and the 1950s to 1960s, marked the empowerment of an illusion that is still at work in American culture—an existential error Bob Dylan, now 81, made. As summed up in his 1973 anthem, “Forever Young.”
He was the germ of the deadly National Renaissance – a term that is defined as the retention of juvenile characteristics in an adult animal. Old age got lucky—an attitude that, decades later, seemed hilarious as it was discovered, the hard way, that no one can (or should be) young forever. In fact, life has a seemingly inevitable flow of it, from birth through childhood through youth to adulthood to middle age to old age, and finally to death, with rules and roles appropriate for each stage. It’s good to be old. It’s good to be young. It is right to be a child and, when the time comes, to be a mother or a father, and right, further down the road, to be a grandfather and, gradually, to be a corpse. Everything has a time, and under heaven there is a time for every purpose. Let’s leave it at that.
There is no doubt that you, being the fox of the eighty-year incumbent, have your reasons to urge you to run for re-election. But if I were you, my friendI would not.
Mr Morrow is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy. His latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money”.
Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 general election by a landslide to Ronald Reagan, so it’s hard to understand why Joe Biden is still following Carter’s “malaise” playbook today. Bateman via Getty Images/Shutterstock Composite: Mark Kelly
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