Cognitive Decline Dissonance
On the asymmetry of media coverage and public outrage
Once again, we’re looking at headlines and book excerpts about the alleged decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity, how A-list celebrities were shocked — shocked! — that a man nearing eighty might, after nearly four years of diligently performing the most demanding job in the world, appear tired and even haggard when he arrived at a fundraiser straight from an international trip.
Let us posit, for the moment, that all of this is true: that President Biden aged visibly in office (all but one president, in my memory, has been aged by the burden). He still discharged his obligations well, took them seriously, and — and this is important — treated people with respect and our national resources (including the public fisc) as a trust to be nurtured, not a prize to be exploited.
Let us now compare and contrast: the sitting president speaks in a rambling, shambling style that he likes to call “the weave.” In truth it is a sequence of words strung together in non-sentences that should have everyone wondering, OUT LOUD, what on earth he is talking about. Yesterday, for example, he bragged to the Emir of Qatar about the success of his economic policies:
We have a term 'groceries.' It's an old term, but it means basically what you're buying, food, it's a pretty accurate term, but it's an old fashioned sound but groceries are down.
Where to begin? With his need to explain what “groceries” are? Or with the fact that groceries are not down at all (if by “down” he means the cost at the supermarket checkout)? Is he reassuring the Emir, who certainly has never — and will never — worry about the price of groceries (whatever they are), whether at home in Doha or visiting New York? Or is he reassuring himself that he’s an economic Master of the Universe, because his trade policies have been so successful? (Said policies, it should be reiterated, amount to tariffs on most goods coming into the United States; tariffs which are paid by the consumers of those goods — i.e., the citizens of the United States; and which tariffs have been raised, lowered, rescinded, and reinstated no fewer than fifty times in the last four or five weeks.
A man who wreaks unnecessary havoc — for example, by imposing a 145% tax on goods coming from China — should not then be permitted to claim “success” when he reduces the tax to 30% because of mysterious “negotiations” with his foreign counterparts. First: he should have no credibility with these claims; he is well known to be a liar, the truth escaping his small mouth only incidentally. Second: even partial recovery from a self-inflicted wound is hardly a “win” — and the entire world is tired of this kind of winning.
(Exhaustion of any persons or parties in opposition is part of the point, of course. “Flood the zone with shit” on the assumption that resistors cannot possibly answer every outrage. And yet we must, or we — and our constitutional democracy — will suffer death by 1,000 cuts.)
The cognitive decline of the incumbent is evident, and has been since his last turn in the Oval Office. But the media continues to focus on Biden — no longer incumbent, his long career now over — and the alleged coverup of his decline. What of the here and now? Biden is no longer our problem — if he ever was. The focus on him is one more distraction, one more story that might be worth noting in the history books but which is wholly irrelevant today. We have much bigger problems — like the dismantling of the American Experiment and the obliteration of 250 years of history.
This moment will not last forever even though the last 100 days seem an eternity. Our energies should be focused on two things, and two things only:
halting the further erosion of the rule of law (which is the root of American Exceptionalism in the world); and
planning how to rebuild.
It won’t be easy. But as Jimmy Dugan says in “A League of Our Own”: it’s the hard that makes it great.