I am 78 and one morning this week I was sitting at my computer reading news of the senile decay of US president Joe Biden, 81, when I discovered I'd dressed with my shorts on back-to-front and inside out.
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Does the president, just newsworthily described by Special Counsel Robert Hur as "a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory [and] diminished faculties in advancing age" have any of these sorts of wardrobe wobbles I am now occasionally prone to?
"The presidential contest in the United States this year is likely to pit two decrepit men against each other," Yale scholar-commentator Robert Moyn has just written in his online piece The Trouble With Old Men.
"Were the incumbent to win he would be 86 by the end of his second term," Moyn marvels and laments.
Biden's likely opponent, Donald Trump, is 77 now and if he becomes president in November will be 82 by the end of his second term.
This coming presidential contest, already of riveting interest to all thinking folk, surely takes on some added interest for mature-age folk alert to their own decrepitude.
Is Biden as muddle-headed and enfeebled by age as his enemies accuse and as worried Americans fear? Surely not.
But facts count for very little in today's America and Americans increasingly think of him as unelectably senile. He badly lags Trump in the latest NBC polling and when that same polling asked which of the two decrepit men has the "necessary mental/physical health" for the presidency, 46 six per cent thought Trump had those gifts while just 23 per cent thought Biden blessed with them.
It is hard for a rational Australian to think like an NBC-polled American and to imagine that a narcissist-sociopath-moron like Trump is somehow more mentally healthy than a well-meaning dullard like Biden. But mere appearances seem to matter in these things and in his new online piece, The Hologram President, Lee Siegel fancies that while for so many Americans Biden seems to be only a "hologram" of a human being, Trump seems to them to be refreshingly real.
"His very vulgarity is, to many, a breath of fresh air. [He seems] at the very least, a human being ... unlike distracted, confused Biden," Siegel, 67, diagnoses.
Most perceptions of Biden's decrepitude derive from signs of his failing memory. So for example in recent times he has confused Angela Merkel with Helmut Kohl and the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt.
But what do these sorts of forgetfulnesses about details necessarily say about a whole mind, about a whole personality?
MORE IAN WARDEN:
How are you going with these sorts of things, mature-age readers? If these days you sometimes can't remember all the names of your classmates in your University of the Third Age Morris Dancing ensemble, what, if anything, does that say about you?
I worry about a prejudice here; something I will call recollectionism.
I am alert to recollectionism, because while I have an exceptional memory for fine details of many things (the colourful anecdote, a true story, with which I opened today's column is an anecdote about absent-mindedness, not about memory) in so many ways I am a poor, weak, inadequate human being.
Yes I'd easily win Hard Quiz with any one of my several esoteric and useless-to-society special subjects. But there is something only robotic having a memory-for-details like mine and meanwhile I am pocked with flaws of character and absences of talent. What an inadequate prime minister I would make! Joe Biden gets statesmen's names mixed up in ways I might not, and yet he is a much better man than me.
But he is surely at fault in being so egomaniacally sure that at his great age he still has marbles enough and energy enough to be the best possible president of the United States.
It was not supposed to be like this. In his The Trouble With Old Men, Robert Boyn, a boyish 51 (and just named One Of The World's Top Thinkers For 2024) points to a worldwide epidemic of powerful oldies. He reminds us wistfully that "At the birth of political modernity, the French revolutionaries explicitly targeted the empowerment of the elderly: what came to be known as the 'old regime'.
"[But now] the indefinite extension of lifespans since the advent of modern medicine in the nineteenth century ... has made the youthful gains of early modernity all but vanish in our time. Men no longer drop dead as readily as they did a century ago, and can remain in charge for what seems like forever."
Young Robert dreams of a better world where the deserving young have "rooted out" gerontocracy.
"[Then] society could be organised to equip children for their future, to encourage youth to make their mark, and to build social support for men and women in their prime. After that [prime] there would be caretaking and memory, playing for time in the face of inexorable decline, necessary death, and ultimate oblivion."
And with that haunting vision of a perfect society old men like me will not live to see, I must leave you now. I have to hurry off to my U3A Morris Dancing (if I have got the day right) just as soon as I can find my mislaid car keys and then, wherever I've parked it, my car.
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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