American Gerontocracy? National Elderly Abuse? Should We Euthanize It All?
Seriously, what are we doing here?
“Oh yeah! Life goes on! Long after the thrill of living is gone.”
—John Cougar Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane”
I want to make it clear that Dianne Feinstein is valid and I stand with her, mostly because she can’t stand on her own. Despite the problematic haters smearing the distinguished California Senator with ableist slurs like “she’s 89 years old” or “she doesn’t show up to her job because she has a serious case of shingles” or “her memory is rapidly deteriorating”—all of which to depict her as unwell and unfit to hold public office—she has defied all odds and returned to the Senate this past week, really taking the “die” out of Dianne. The moment I saw her soy sauce-colored hair, stroked-out and looking like the trollface, I knew she was back and ✨thriving✨ and slaying. It is perfectly normal for a person’s index finger to be at a 90-degree angle to the rest of their hand. Now Feinstein is taking Republicans to task by asking them the pressing questions: Where am I? Who are you? Is this the River Styx? Are you Hades?
There is something initially unsavory and insane about seeing a photo of chipper 23-year-old staffers wheeling this decrepit bag of bones around until they can work for Chris Dodd or whoever. However, there is also something deadening and bleak about watching these Vichy Democrats helm a sufficiently rotten bulwark in consequence-free perpetuity, a meticulously hedged and carefully tranched party that has allowed a stupendously bad-faith opposition to grow only more perverse as America further drifts into fatalism. This is a sort of grim cosmic punishment here as Feinstein and other similarly geriatric stiffs spend their twilight years tormented in undignified fashion, every waking second of their life is just confusion and fear and pain. They are performing their, and America’s, stage-managed decline.
A party defined by tactical retreats is adamantly doubling-down on its own gerontocratic rot, which is infuriating in the typical Democratic ways but devastating and damning in essential ones. The people who spent their political careers trafficking in the familiar rhetoric of half-loaves and compromise to justify their kludgey, insufficient, better-than-nothing half-measures are now tearing down the whole gilded edifice through their own demented impotence.
Joe Biden’s next State of the Union may be delivered in front of a gaggle of staffers spoon-feeding soft-serve vanilla-chocolate swirl ice cream on the floor of the Senate while dabbing the mouths of fossilized Congresspeople after they spit up a little bit. They will be diapered up before baby play.
Donald Trump was invited to speak at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire, and through pipe-organ sinuses, he delivered unbroken whim-tossed monologues in response to his recent conviction for sex abuse. He continued to do the strange accordion thing with his hands while lying and picking weird food fights about January 6, diverting into dithering rants about how he doesn’t use the bathrooms at Bergdorf Goodman, and shamelessly plugging Truth Social.
The following day, Anderson Cooper justified his network’s transparently cynical ratings gambit. “Many of you are upset that someone who attempted to destroy democracy was invited to sit on stage and … predictably spewed lie after lie after lie,” Cooper lectured solemnly to the camera. “Do you think that staying angry and staying in your silo is going to make [Trump] go away?” This sort of vague maundering and unconvincing umbrage in defense of The Free Press is nauseating in the ways that deflect the responsibility of major news networks to make value judgments about what broadcasting is in the public interest. Given the context of how mainstream media outlets gave Trump $4.6 billion in free media in 2016, it now scans as vinegary and venal. These journalists and pundits may complain about Trump, but their bosses have no problem profiting off him, even at the expense of a functioning democracy.1
CNN’s decision to air this town hall is ghoulish in the most contemporary of ways, but it is ultimately unsurprising. This speaks to the desperate vacuousness of American politics that even Trump’s aestheticized and undercooked grousing could be passed off as a critical ideological stance; it speaks to the value-neutral uselessness of free speech absolutism that anyone could’ve mistaken this segment as fulfilling any sort of journalistic utility, or even worth defending. This town hall was the same salty, high-fat dogfood that cable news casualties choke down. It merely confirmed that the specter of Trump still blithely lumbers through the crabbed sanctums of national consciousness, that he still peppers lies with bluff and bluster, and that his singular and obliterating narcissism will plunge America further down dark avenues of possibility. We have seen this before—we are stuck in an infinite time loop where nothing really changes except everything gets kind of worse.
Given that many reporters function less as journalists than as TV recappers, the Monday Morning Quarterback articles written in response to this Town Hall were amusing—not because of their futile prescriptions on how to best interview a serial fibber, but because of their pathological frustration with Trump’s immunity to facts, logic, reason, or understanding the relationship between things done today and things that happen tomorrow. There is only flailing counterargument. Trump lives in a weightless suspension between his last lie and his next one, and this dynamic has broken the gravity well of media management and containment. CNN craves the ratings but they loathe his ability to dictate what stories account to him or the context in which they are discussed.
The all-devouring nature of Trumpism was plopped in a Prime Time slot for the exact reason why the same corporations that denounced the GOP after January 6 have since been donating to them in much higher numbers than they have to the Democrats: There is still money in this particular banana stand. It also confirms the vacancy and drift that defines America’s increasingly theatrical and abstracted politics. Trump called the flummoxed moderator a “nasty person” and an audience of vengeful and embittered nullities hooted like an episode of Maury when he yet again defamed E. Jean Carroll—which may get him sued by her for a third time—and then he nosedived into a bizarre tirade about how the jury was not notified that the name of Carroll’s cat was Vagina T. Fireball.
There are pundits and political journalists who range from anywhere between middlebrow to actively vile, and it is bracing to know that despite their earnest or greasy efforts to give the toxic mundanity we see a cosmetic heft, there is no longer a respectable, intellectually honest, or compelling defense of the status quo. American politics is a fetid slurry of moral relativism and consequence laundering, and the rationalization of this untenable present is as zombified as the two frontrunners vying for the presidency.
“The relationship between political campaigns the news media and the public isn’t exactly an interplay between independent actors, it’s a web of influence,” Charles Blow writes in the New York Times. “The dynamic is particularly relevant when it comes to the avalanche of headlines and polls about President Biden’s age. Headlines and polls don’t just measure and reflect public sentiment, they also influence it. The persistence of a theme elevates and validates that theme. It’s true that if he’s re-elected, Biden would be the oldest president we’ve ever had, but he was already the oldest president the first time he was elected. What changed?”
It should go without saying that the linear progression of time will make Biden four years older in 2024 than he was in 2020. Any available reputable polling data suggests he is also an unprecedently unpopular incumbent who is ambiently assumed to not be in charge of anything. Charles Blow, and any other irredeemably lanyard-brained politico, laments over the “manufactured panic” over Biden’s age, though the genuine panic lies in his sub-40% approval rating and that a second Trump victory would mark a signal failure of American democracy. Meanwhile, the Democrats have staked themselves to an octogenarian who is visibly confused in public a lot. The only less appealing candidate they could run is Biden’s current vice president.
It is clear, even without augering the entrails of Beltway groupthink, that it doesn’t take a particularly discerning mind to asses that Biden is a desiccated mummy. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said that a second-term Biden is unlikely to “make it to 86 years old,” and in response to the last State of the Union, former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted that, “At 40, I’m the youngest governor in the country, and at 80, he’s the oldest president in American history.” Biden’s Weekend at Bernie’s candidacy was a major sticking point when he ran in 2020, but even as he craps his pants at state dinners and wanders off into gibberish non-sequiturs mid-speech, Democratic apparatchiks and associated media remoras are viscerally dismayed that voters are responding to the observable reality that Biden looks like a melted candle and that the opposition party deigns to make a major campaign issue out of it.
It was clear during the 2016 and 2020 primaries that the Democratic Party’s little emperors didn’t appreciate having attention called to their flagrant nudity. But at some point, the tactic of simply waiting for the emperor to put on some damn pants becomes untenable, especially when he falls off his bike and says the one word that can describe America is “Asufutimaehaehfutbw.” The Democratic Party assembled like the Kronenberg to railroad their preferred candidate through the 2020 primary. Now Biden’s specific brand pitch of glad-handing wheeler-dealing across the aisle to Get Things Done has been neutered by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and two rogue Democratic Senators gumming up his administration’s agenda.
Clintonist Third Way politics have remained vexingly prominent in the Democratic Party despite repeated, devastating, high-profile failures. The Biden administration’s shortcomings would further indicate its existential crisis when dealing with an opposition full of increasingly fascistic, reality-avoidant hogs and deranged vampires. Biden is who the Democrats wanted, who they insisted would restore the soul of this nation—and, by proxy, continue the narcoleptic lineage of this undead West Wing corporate centrism. This is why their complaints feel grasping and desperate and off. The Blue Team faces their own horrified realization; they are on a nightmare track to hell and may not be able to veer off.
The system’s refusal to outright collapse, but instead continuing to dither and drift, is aptly represented by a doddering and atavistic Wall Street-backed candidate and a raving bloated marzipan golem. Donald Trump is registering obese at the weigh-in and Joe Biden is Connor McGregor shadowboxing a bus in the parking lot. Metaphors fail daily, but if the bloodless senility at the withered heart of national politics isn’t enough to alarm Americans of their outsized gerontocracy, then turn the Capitol Building upside down. It looks like an adult diaper.
CNN opting to give Trump a national megaphone also makes a farce of their three-year wall-to-wall Russiagate hystericizing in service of “saving democracy.” They either knew the most conspiratorial aspects of this story were political kayfabe and still went for the shameless pursuit of eyeballs and are continuing to do so now, or they earnestly believed in the delusion of Trump being a KGB-backed Manchurian candidate, but the fulsome pursuit of maximizing ratings takes priority over their journalistic integrity.
After CNN's ratings plummeted when Trump left the Whitehouse, I theorized that CNN would become "closeted pro Trump". I think that this may have become reality lol.