Senile Joe is a Fitting Symbol of Our Times

Biden puts a face on what I mean by End of Cycle.

I hope you weren’t shocked by Joe Biden’s performance in the first presidential debate on CNN a few days ago. If you were, it can only mean one of two things: either you’re not in the habit of following the news, in which case I’m tempted to say, good on you, you’re not missing much; or you think you are following the news, but are getting it through the distorting prism of corporate media. In the latter case your news will have been censored - excuse me, curated - to the point where the degree of Biden’s senility may well have come as a surprise to you. In which case all I can say is, maybe you should consider exploring other news outlets.

The fact is that the US president’s mental and physical incapacity has been evident for years to anyone with a modicum of curiosity and a functioning internet connection. However carefully edited the video footage, however dense the clouds of verbiage of establishment journalists, it’s been obvious that Biden’s tendency to veer off course while speaking has been matched only by his tendency to veer off course while attempting to walk from point A to point B. Assuming he’s able to figure out where point B is in the first place.

This is the man who supposedly has been at the helm of US domestic and foreign policy for almost four years - a man who cannot find his way off stage when the teleprompter comes to an end.

It’s hard to know whether all of this is too comical to be taken seriously, or too serious to be taken comically. Many no doubt will find it comical anyway, many others will take it very seriously, while most probably won’t know whether to laugh or to cry. But what definitely is not serious and definitely is comical is the reaction of corporate Democrats to the debate fiasco.

The very people who have covered up Biden’s senility for years, long before he even got elected president (assuming he actually did) are now clutching their pearls in shock and horror at his display last Thursday. Listening to them one might imagine he had suddenly become senile just the day before, so that everyone was taken understandably by surprise by the sorry image he presented.

This is what happens, I suppose, when you repeat a lie so often that you end up at some level believing it. Collectively these media talking heads and Democratic Party apparatchiks had willed Biden to be compos mentis, if only for the duration of the debate. When he failed spectacularly to meet this minimum requirement, they were left in a state of dismay.

At the obvious level the dismay has been prompted by fears of the political fallout from the fiasco, but underlying all that I suspect there has been something else astir within their clouded souls: the dawning realisation that maybe lies don’t work after all, however smoothly delivered, however well coordinated and amplified, when confronted with brute fact.

And beneath that again, but still only obscurely perceived, a further troubling suspicion: that a worldview built on lies is inherently unstable and insubstantial. For it is in the nature of knowing falsehood that it unravels as much or more than it weaves up. Hence the febrile activity characteristic of professional liars, who have to weave unceasingly the tissue of mendacity at one end so that it can keep ahead of its unravelling at the other.

For as long as the weaving outpaces the unravelling the fabric of lies seems secure enough. But inevitably there are moments when the situation is reversed - indeed we are witnessing one such a moment now, in the aftermath of the CNN debate. That’s when the inherently precarious and, yes, unsustainable nature of the whole enterprise becomes apparent.

Let’s take this one step further. The presented world is based on lies, although interwoven with truth also, otherwise it would crumble forthwith. The ratio of lies to truth has changed, however, in a remarkably short period of time, the Covid operation signalling a dramatic lurch in this respect. So given that the very fabric of our collective existence is now woven through and through with falsehood, and given also the inherent tendency of the lie to unravel by itself, we must surely conclude that the seemingly real and objective world, having become so comprehensively laced with mendacity, is bound to display an unravelling tendency also.

Seen in this light the professional liars who have worm-eaten every major aspect of life function as the agents of decomposition of this reality. This presumably is not quite what they aim at being; yes, for sure they are happy to decompose everything good, true and authentic that they can lay their hands on, yet at the same time they want to be perched securely above the result of their labours, not realising that through their subversion they are working also their own unavoidable downfall.

This is where the sorry figure of Joe Biden shuffles into view again. For what is presented to us by the current US president is a veritable spectacle of decomposition of the mental and physical faculties. His handlers and manipulators thought they could get away with presenting that spectacle as something other than what it really is, but as it turns out, there are limits to everything. And a live debate, with no possible editing and little scope for spinning the outcome, was well designed to expose those limits.

This whole bizarre situation brings me back to a recurrent theme in this Substack, which is the analogy between the individual life cycle and the life cycle of civilizations, with similar symptoms being displayed in each case especially in their terminal years. If that contention has seemed a bit abstract or approximate when presented in more general terms, consider in this regard Joe Biden and the country he allegedly rules. In both cases the hallmarks of a deranged senility are unmistakeable.

At the collective level the regression so far hasn’t brought us back all the way; we’re still only at a kind of second adolescence, as exemplified by the petulance, self-obsession and irrationality of Wokeism or the overweening sense of entitlement of DEI. Assuming the current course is held, however, we can’t have too much longer to go before this adolescent mentality reverts back completely to a collective second childhood, at least so far as certain major sectors of the population are concerned.

Hopefully it won’t come to that, but if it does, the US and the world at large will only be playing catch-up with the two presidential candidates on display the other evening. The childishness on Trump’s part was illustrated, unsurprisingly, by his hallmark schoolyard hyperbole. His administration was the best in all of history, while Biden’s is of course the worst in all history, and everything else likewise is the best if attributable to the Donald and the worst if not.

As for the incumbent, what more is there to say? Clearly there’s a retirement home somewhere in Delaware that’s missing an inmate. That means that the debate matched someone gone back to second childhood against someone who never seems to have matured very far beyond a childish mentality in the first place.

So that’s what on offer, unless RFK Jr were to be given the chance to voice his critique of this dire state of affairs, and to propose his remedies for it.

Unlikely, of course. Cogency and integrity are not required by a deeply corrupt system that stages its two-horse race every four years for the edification of the populace. Third parties would only spoil the fun. And so the grotesque charade careers once more towards its terminus, a little more pointless and dysfunctional each time round.