Disengagement

A theory that was current in gerontology when I was a young man teaching that course was the theory of disengagement which was not really a theory but only a single proposition rather than the linking of a number of propositions, but never mind that. The proposition was that people as they got older disengaged from their social affiliations and so became more isolated from one another staying in their own rooms or houses, people dying off around them, and withdrawing from friends still living. People shrunk from their social contacts in preparation for death. That does not seem to me an accurate picture of what old age is like, now that I am there from the inside, while other findings at the time, such as that old people are often thought to be losing their mental acuity when all that is happening is that they are becoming hard of hearing, a point which is something to which I can attest, though that might have been a geriatrics insight rather than a gerontological one.

It does not seem to me that old people disengage, even though, obviously, some of their friends and spouses die and people retire from their vocations. But many  oldsters stay at work for as long as possible and retire into alternative occupations without remuneration so as to keep active. Oldsters keep touch with old friends and cultivate people of the younger generation and engage in the same things they did while young, which for me was keeping up with politics and movies. Old buddies are precious because they share a point of view and their bygone experiences and are also because they are associated with those people who have died. Oldsters are not just waiting in the vestibule of death.

But there is something deeper that lurks behind the specter of disengagement that explains better what it is to be an old person. People shed their grieve]nces as they get older perhaps because under the light of eternity it is just not worth holding a grudge or because the  oldster is no longer in the battles that made grievances meaningful, such as a battle over academic prestige or who will run the corporation, thinking someone else acted unfairly and got the slot you wanted. Old people can accomplish a little bit of serenity because, after all, the  winner in life is not the one who has the most toys, but the one who lasts longest while remaining comfortable, because you will no longer have any trinkets of wealth, power and prestige once you are as dead as a doornail even if the Egyptians and other religionists thought and think otherwise, grievances as well as successes reaching into the afterlife because that is iust what happens, is the substance of living life. So people disengage from their bad feelings and only that though not everyone takes advantage of being so liberated.

Shedding grievances is included in religion because it is part of human experience. Bill Murray in that very wise movie “Groundhog Day” says that God may just be a very old person who has seen everything. Like an old person, He gives past grievances because the grievances no longer matter. That is different from the Christian view that elevates shedding grievances into a doctrine of forgiveness, which is to erase past grievances as if they didn’t happen and, indeed, take it as a virtue to abolish the past so that you are a better person for forgiving your trespassers even though it is obviously impossible to erase away a murder or a hurting insult, just find a way to go past it. Indeed, God in the Christian view, does the sublime event of forgiving mankind for its original sin by having His own Son suffer for mankind’s deeds, becoming, as in the story of Abraham and Isaac, the scapegoat for mankind, as if Jesus whatever they were, which might be a tendency to perverseness, which is hardly the most ultimate flaw, and Jesus suffered just a whit, three days in a tomb, for redeeming all of mankind. A mighty cheap bargain.

Think rather of every old person having a magic wand whereby the person  can change the world by changing an attitude and so transform  other people and oneself into being fully human by forgoing their grievances. And why not? Old people are also free because if they are run over by a truck they can think the pain wouldn’t last long and they have anyway lived out the vast majority of their lives. Old people are therefore invincible even if they are fragile. Nothing much can happen to them and so shedding grievances is a minor part of the situation of being old. Every day is a joy and a vacation.

That doesn’t mean to be aimless. You can still write a book or be nice to people. But those are added virtues rather than what have  been the burdens of your identity, what shaped you and what you know to have characterized you. It is all now gratis, a gift more precious than Jesus could offer because Jesus was compelled by his Father to do that.

Make use of this liberation while being old with regard to people in the midst of their lives, full of struggles and things to lose and matters about which to grieve. As an adult, you can be kinder to others, be only moderately competitive, and just neglect the small stuff. Enjoy the breeze while the  kids are in the playground. That is not asking people to be saints, which are singular accomplishments of rectitude, but simply the pleasures available to ordinary life. All people want to be pleasant except for those few who want to be mean and even those who are mean find an excuse for being so or regarding themselves and not really mean, though only a lover can appreciate that. That is what David Hume thought and that is contrary to the Christian view which is, deep down, people are just louses, cockroaches, meanies. What can a belief in original sin otherwise mean? 

Not that old age is a long set of epiphanies. You are busy managing your pills and being sure not to eat what will upset your delicate digestion. You need not have gone beyond ambition or anger, but those qualities seem to have been stoked. But you can look at the vast expanse of human creation and sometimes say “This is good ''.

The Politics of Drag Queens

There would seem to be a rage for drag queen events such as Drag Queen Story Time where Michelle Tea, in drag, tells stories to young people which tell them to be kind to people who are different and disclaim that the children aged three to eleven are not being groomed for sexual activities. And there are drag queen shows where families bring their children, though I don’t think I would have found that back then, but Republicans are supposed to believe that families should decide how they should conduct their children, but escorting children to drag shows was apparently a bridge too far. I do not know if such exhibitions have any impact on the children but the Republican Congress is outraged at the events, quizzing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at a committee hearing about whether they are taking place at military bases, he responding that no government money was being used, while avoiding the question of whether these events were facilitated by the military and whether soldiers retained the right to engage in free speech when off duty. Even so august a figure as a defense secretary goes out of his way to be as non confrontational as possible with Congresspeople lest he chide them for their grandstand plays, which is what I suspect they are. I sometimes wish witnesses at congressional hearings would talk back and call the Congresspeople outlandish and ridiculous rather than allow them to mouth off, always reclaiming their own time so as not to let witnesses answer the largely rhetorical questions. Ah well, the purpose of committees is, after all, to bloviate rather than develop information.

A suspicion that  politicians are out to engage in false rather than true outrage, that theory are lambasting gays because that is a group their constituents think they will like to be picked on, is evidenced to me by the long ago time when Gerald Ford, then a Michigan congressman, tried to get Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to be impeached because he had included a serious article within the pages of “Playboy”, a way for Hugh Hefner to claim it was not just a magazine of girlie pictures. I remember on camera a colleague telling Ford not to expose the pictures that were next to the Douglas article because they were so raw, however outraged Ford might be inclined to do so. But I knew Ford had been a ballet dancer as well as a football player and so probably not a prude but just hypocritical, faux angry at what would later be called a cultural issue.

But what if the current politicians are as honest as they can be about being outraged at displays of drag queen theatrics, especially including children, is not only seen as a danger to the children but also to the moral fabric of the nation? I would think then that there had indeed become a sea change in morals in that this generation had become within conservative precincts to have become much more prudish about sex since, let us say, when  women bobbed their hair and wore short skirts following the First World War. Consider a point in World War II when it seems men and women were copulating like crazy before men got shipped off to war. There was a film of 1941, just before that, called “All American Coed” starring Frances Langford about a slightly misspelled Princeton which included a drag team as part of its extracurricular activities showing off their skills, to comic effect, set to compete with an all female review of beauty queens out to strut their stuff as ringers employed by a girl college, a misspelled Bryn Mawr. Being in drag was good humored fun and children were allowed to see the movie because no qualitative ratings system had arrived. Would that movie today not be allowed? Is this today a serious enough issue on which to engage Congress?

Let us raise the ante and treat this as dealing with an issue about the morality of voting. An acquaintance of mine recently told me that she voted for the best candidate regardless of party which seemed to show that she was objective and therefore not swayed by political rhetoric. I certainly do require character and competence as bedrock or minimal standards for voting, though I remark that Republicans are more apt than Democrats to nominate questionable figures as their standard bearers. But there is also the question of the party agenda, its issues and programs, that are in a current election and persist over decades as their visions of the world. Stick to the party, I say, that has the point of view I espouse, and so be partisan. Sure, there are fringes of a party that I find I object to. After all, I came up with a party dominated by segregationists, though the Republicans were not very forward minded at the time on civil rights and that the squad of four, even though I disagree with Ilhan Omar and AOC on one or another of issues, these are serious people while Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Green are not, and though I disagree with some of the Democratic agenda which seem to me wrongheaded, such as with regard to climate change, on the whole I can endorse the Democratic view, while the Republican view is anathema, as in the present instant, sincere or not, as opposing gay and transgender groups, exhibiting a meanspiritedness not likely to earn my support, not a likely prospect, even should a more moderate standard bearer emerge.  Republicans are rightly not looking to court my vote but to court the acquaintance of mine who will let and see the qualities of the person nominated. I, on the other hand, will foreclose candidates who don’t just excoriate Trump but also excoriate those who malign the minority communities that now include drag queens, who are also just human beings even if a bit quirky in how they prance around. Is it really all that difficult?

The Mer A Lago Indictment

There was already last night remarks from cable commentators on the Trump indictment regarding purloined secret documents. MSNBC pundits agree of the enormity of having an ex-President indicted for violations, among other things, of the Espionage Act, no other President ever having been accused of subverting the nation. It is a sad day that we've found ourselves in this situation, distasteful to think of anything similar to the authoritarian regimes that regularly throw in jail their defeated political opponents, which was the case in Russia and recently in Pakistan. Here is a response and a few comments on what has been said in the past day since the event of the indictment.

Lawrence O’Donnell said last night on MSNBC  that the indictment would have been less unsettling if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Nixon, allowing Nixon instead to have been indicted, and so a precedent for the idea that no one was above the law. But that context was very different. Nixon was disgraced and sorrowful of his own misdeeds. He said that he did wrong things even if his opponents had piled up on him. That was a lame excuse. Trump is unremorseful and running again for President and many of his supporters don’t care or disregard whatever he does. Commentators can find a number of people to blame for the present predicament but demur from blaming the electorate for having elected the scoundrel in the first place.  

Which leads to my own observation. The electorate for the 2024 election are not subject to the rule of law, including that Trump is innocent until convicted as guilty, when they make up their minds as to whether to nominate him again as President. They can use whatever evidence they want to use for judging a candidate, just a rumor or a bit of charm or a political disposition, or thinking that Hillary was haughty. And so there is enough evidence that Trump is a bad dude without waiting for the trial to proceed. Noone is entitled to be President even if everyone is entitled to a fair trial. So a public judgment can be made before the trial takes place. It is all up to the people again, they  having the final verdict on Trump’s political  fate.

The details of the indictment today also reveals the motive for the outrageous affronts committed by Trump to the nation. It was a simple and petty case of vanity. You would think that people who had been President were beyond this, but Trump, ever a petty man, wanted to show secret documents to political operatives only so he could show them off as in his own possession, which would have made him merely venal and amoral. Maybe he wasn’t planning to sell them to the highest bidder. How superficial can Trump be? That explains a lot of him.

The Republican leaders, for their part, are liars about the facts and, worse, unpatriotic in that they are craven to their constituents, unwilling to tell their constituents the truth, that being a higher calling than merely remaining electable, their higher calling being to lead a crisis through rather than obfuscate. It was ignoble for Trump as President to avoid what was happening with Covid, his excuse that he was shielding the people, when his duty was to speak the painful truth and many of his Republicans avoid the enormity of what Trump has done and claim, as did Nixon supporters, that everyone in politics did such shenanigans, which was not true, and as in presently the case where important Republican Trump defenders, do the same thing by conflating Trump’s appropriation of secret documents with Pence and Biden cooperating when documents were found inadvertently to have been sent to their homes.  Shame on the Republicans and don’t trust whatever they say about anything. This is the litmus test.

Bob Woodward on CNN today echoed Ben Bradley’s instruction after Nixon resigned of no gloating, and applied it to Trump. He is right in that even a Trump conviction would be just a recognition of a tragedy rather than  revenge satisfied. But don’t anticipate. Trump has weaseled out before from a lot of things managing just fines for Trump University and E. Jean Carroll. There is a long way before a  conviction much less a sentencing which I hope leaves him out of jail to live out his life without the remorse Nixon felt. That absence of humanity is on Trump.

Another observation of mine. In my generation, we turned on the television set to see if some additional major political figure had just been assassinated. Now, we await breaking news as to when Trump will be indicted in a different inquiry. Is this not progress rather than devolution?

Chris Christie

The moral thing is to vote for the one you believe in.

Chris Christie has announced that he is running for :President and the cable and New York Times commentators immediately opined whether he had “a lane” whereby he could become President, that meaning a combination of constituencies that could add up to a majority of convention delegates and decided that he couldn’t because he could never break into the Trump supporters but could only serve to unseat Trump and letting someone else inherit his following. That was the same reasoning that led none of the Republican candidates in 2016 to refuse to oppose Trump, making nice so as to inherit the booty when Trump would inevitably falter. Well, maybe there is no such  thing as a lane, only an opportunity whereby someone manages to catch fire, to capture attention. Both Obama and Trump made their own lanes when so many constituencies turned out in favor of them while Jeb Bush, with the money and the name, was never able to become a taste treat. The commentators are just trying to be objective and so all they can talk about is the horse race or, to use a different metaphor, all the carrom shots needed to get anointed a nominee, but all they do is show their preferences, Christie just a bully and not a serious person, given his poor performance as Governor of New Jersey and a whiff of the Bridgegate scandal, Underlying their political analyses is an assessment of the worth of the candidates.

 I want to pose the same question in a different vocabulary: who should someone vote for, given the dynamics on the ground, and my answer is that people should vote for the one who would make the best president regardless of the dynamics and so not a calculation of handicapping a winner however sophisticated they might think by second guessing who will emerge triumphant, Christie being intelligent and willing to work  across the two parties and sensing he would not take down the temple, whether through an insurrection or Pence’s evangelicalism, however sincere that belief might be, should be the same issue. My ideal is that both general nominees will be reputable enough that a voter can rest easy whichever one is  elected in that they both would manage respectably, aware of the stakes foreign policy and appreciating various ethnic and other status communities, even if, inevitably, a Republican president will cut taxes for the rich and cut services from the poor.

My mandate to support the candidate you believe in rather than play the horserace of who might win and how to strategically interpose in the process is moral rather than prudential because you can feel satisfied if you voted the way you believed in even if you lost. You had fought the good fight but might rue the day if you had miscalculated what your influence might inadvertently cause. That moral principle even applies in  spirit to those people who think that a Democrat should want Trump to be nominated because he was more likely to be defeated by Biden, my favorite, however much that mental experiment is ineffectual in that I do not vote in a Republican primary though people do switch allegiances in  political parties so as to make the worst candidate the nominee. I want the better person to win and I don’t want to bring into the tent a monster who might perchance prevail. Worry what you wish for. Look what happened in 2016 when people voted for Trump as a protest vote or Britishers had second thoughts about voting for Brexit as also a protest vote, not really expecting it would win. 

My view of being honest rather than scheming is very different from the usual Conservative patter, which is to say that Trump is unelectable, a three time loser and so people should move beyond his baggage. That is  too much of a calculation which is different from recognizing him for what he is, which is a fomenter of rebellion and people honest enough to admit that even if they prefer him still because they claim the election in 2020 was stolen. Be honest rather than obfuscate. Marjorie Taylor Green says what she thinks, which is to free the insurrectionists rather than just avoid that unpleasant issue. It may be that it does not bring peace to the dinner table to confront the Trump supporters but that at is not the goal of the political market, to hash things out, even if it results in having a wishy-washy moderate so as to avoid absolute opposition which is not an admirable or long term solution, as was clearly the case when the last few pre civil war presidents  obfuscated. Rather than dismiss Trumpites as mean spirited and largely ignorant, as mostly they are, tell them to tell the truth about why they like him, and clips of film interviews show them to tell the truth and want to go back before women got the vote or maybe to the Fifties except that segregation was indeed bad, though transgender people are now bad, Mega voters against any new ideas or practices as being unnatural. In that case, Trumpists are honest even if reactionary in that they posit a golden age of an ancient regime and so expound what Karl Mannheim said in 1929 was an ideology rather than a utopia, and I prefer otherwise, society becoming in the future increasingly enlightened as that is demonstrated in legislation and an increasingly humane spirit.

Here is what seems to be an exception to my rule to vote for the candidate you most prefer, offering yourself to the honest truth. What if there is a three contest race and you prefer the small third party candidate who is bound to lose. That is what happened when people voted for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore and Nader’s absence in the race would have given Gore the election. Should you have held your nose and voted for Gore as the lesser of the two devils? My answer is “no” and vote for Nader anyway but only if you are really sure that there is no difference between the two major candidates, both unacceptable, rather than just claiming that is the case. Really no different? Really and honestly?  In that case, go with Nader but the case seems to me a stretch. 

Democrats also face the problem of being honest with themselves. What about Biden? The Times said a few days ago that although he is showing his age, he still remains alert, clear on the issues, still mastering the details, and in charge of his administration, and I also think articulate even if his voice is weaker, and that his administration is the furthest left one since FDR, Biden having managed to turn narrow majorities and recently a minority in the House to major achievements though not all of them as I had hoped. But what happens if he starts drooling, which is a shorthand for significantly diminished powers that remain short of the requirements that could occur so as to evoke the 25th Amendment? Will Democrats just cover it up? It would be their turn to deal with a presidential embarrassment, something they have carried with Trump ever since he announced his candidacy and found themselves not able to unhorse him, or worse, find themselves unable to become unamored with him.

Here is a different scenario. One thing that might happen if Biden’s capacity diminished was to become a figurehead for the Presidency whereby the president reigned but did not rule, Biden heavily relying on a strong and able White House and cabinet. He might remain affable and give set speeches and smooch with the crowd and that would be all, his basic point of view continuing on. In fact that is the way Republican administrations often do their business, picking a candidate for name recognition, Reagan and George W. Bush clear examples, who delegated powers to a strong cabinet with Reagan and a strong vice president with George  W. The alternative party, the Democrats, had followed a very different course in that the candidates duked it out between  one another on different policies and personalities and if the Democratic nominee became the winner of the Presidency took over kit and caboodle and set up his own administration.  That is the substance of saying that Democrats  make “strong” Presidencies. It isn’t that Democratic administrations are more intrusive in society than are Republican administrations. Trump got three Supreme Court justices who would overthrow Roe v. Wade and that is plenty intrusive. But Democratic Presidents are strong in that they run their own administrations. Having a Democrat resign himself to doing what Republicans do would be a loss because Democratic Presidential leadership is less elusive but the alternative is nonetheless legitimate.

We don't have to consider this succession or rather “de-cession" for very long because what will happen if Biden falters all depends on when and how he deteriorates. If it happens early enough, there will be a scramble for who will replace him as the party nomination. If he falters close to Election Day then the focus will be on the Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harrris who I hope will be up to the task. If Biden is elected and then deteriorates, the American government can change over into the Republican model, a good question about who in the Biden circle would come to significant  power. Biden, however, might also deteriorate slowly and so last longer than he should have and become like Hindenburg or Biden might know enough and be brave enough to do what De Gaulle did, which was to resign over a minor matter because he knew he was failing because he could no longer memorize the long speeches he delivered and decided on his own that it was time to go.

Democrats will have to watch these developments carefully, deciding honestly when it is time for pressure to invoke the 25th Amendment, and disregarding the Republicans who already claim that Biden is on drugs that keep him barely functioning. As usual, there is a heavy duty on the citizenry to use their moral honesty to keep the nation afloat.