As I’ve said it’s always a bad idea to write a post at night. At night the brain is tired and unlikely to give of its best. The mood tends to be dark.
But here I am.
When you’re young, the world is a fascinating puzzle that you throw yourself into. And the immediacy of your little neighborhood; your family, friends, work acquaintances and enemies, takes up almost all of your attention. Sure, you notice things like recessions and wars because they impact you directly but as soon as things are resolved for you, your attention reverts to your little world. And so, you are shielded by indifference from the spectacle of how our world works and who runs it.
So, it’s unsurprising that my familiarity with Joe Biden in the time before he was vice president was limited to the few times, he made the papers. He ran for president long ago and almost immediately was singled out as third rate at almost everything except lying. That was his only true excellence. Plagiarism and misrepresenting his own achievements were his oeuvre. This is what I remember about him from before he ascended to a larger stage.
Of course, since then he’s become a phenomenon. As president of the United States, he’s the most famous man in the world. He wields enormous power which he has used to impoverish his countrymen and immiserate whole areas of the world with his wars. Knowledge of the sordid financial arrangement that his son Hunter Biden has perpetrated to extort money from foreign governments is ubiquitous. Everyone has heard that Joe Biden is “the big guy” who skimmed 10% off the top of all of Hunter’s pay offs. And the governments that he squeezed were places like Ukraine and China; authoritarian regimes that could pay for the influence peddling with no questions asked.
Now, this is all old hat. There’s no end to the talk of Biden’s dishonesty and other character faults. Everyone has seen the videos of him sidling up to children and women and pawing them and nuzzling them. It’s extremely disturbing almost shocking. But it’s old hat.
But here’s the thing. What does this say about our society? Do the stories about Biden and Clinton and Obama and their depravity mark our society as terminally decadent and tottering on the edge of dissolution or is this just the routine state of all societies? Were all the presidents creeps? Or have we reached a dangerous low point.
I guess I can’t claim I have a definitive answer. I’d be interested in getting people’s opinions. But I’ll give my opinion here.
So, human beings are extremely flawed. And when handed incredible power and responsibility they can go off the deep end. Jack Kennedy had many sexual dalliances while he was in the White House. Bill Clinton had the Lewinsky scandal. And both Clinton and Obama leveraged the contacts and probably the criminal evidence they possessed through the FBI to make themselves billionaires. Therefore, there is a rich tradition of tawdry behavior by US presidents.
But I think Joe Biden is an order of magnitude worse. Biden is an odious misfit that should never have come anywhere near the White House. It’s as if a circus monkey had been appointed a municipal judge. Sure, partisan politics will allow a lot of latitude with the selection of a candidate. But this should have been a red flag. Everything about him adds to a picture that is a caricature of a despicable creep. With Biden we’ve lost even the illusion of honor. I can only imagine what foreign dignitaries must be thinking when they have to interact with this demented wretch. They probably wash their hands as soon as they can after shaking his. Most of them probably make a point of leaving their wives behind on trips and I can only imagine what the female dignitaries experience when he comes in range.
So, I think we have dropped down a very long way in the caliber of our leaders. Politicians like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi use their powerful leadership positions mostly to enrich themselves through insider stock trading which is a protected perk of the federal legislature. And the president of the United States is bought off by one of the most corrupt governments in the world; Ukraine, to pay over a hundred billion dollars to finance a war from which no one benefits but the politicians and the merchants of death.
People will say that this is just the way business is done in an empire. Caligula or Nero is just as valid a leader as Augustus or Marcus Aurelius. As long as the army and the tax collectors do their jobs we’ll roll along for another few centuries. I disagree. I think the rot is advanced and has eaten its way through the other levels of the elite. The managerial class seems to be far from the best and the brightest. The universities have become clown college. Even our supposedly state of the art information age corporations seem to lack initiative and inspiration to produce real innovation.
I think Joe Biden is a symptom. But I think this symptom is one of those markers that are used in triage. When a doctor notes this one, he sends the patient displaying it to the hospice for the morphine goodbye.