Watching Joe Biden Say Goodbye
People don’t survive to tell the tale of what it’s like to live through senescence. We can only look on from the outside, which most of us, most of the time, decline to do, though on July 24, millions put themselves through the agony of watching a man flicker in and out of focus. The performance was one of immense, sustained effort. It was impossible not to be aware of his corporeal form, the way his body had come a little loose from his mind. What are his arms doing now? And his eyeballs? Should he blink? As his hands with unbearable slowness clenched and unclenched, he said all the expected things. Biden’s words long ago ceased to matter. If you had simply read the transcript of this speech, you would know less than if you’d spent that time communing with the moon.
“I revere this office,” he said, but the spaces weren’t there between the words; they fused — reverethisoffice — into a single statement. It did not say: I revere this office. It said: I got through this line. I’m on to the next one. You can breathe now. He came back, he faded, he found a mostly natural way to point and say something about the economy. His eyes were unnervingly fixed on the teleprompter as if the sight line were a string holding him erect. “That time and place is now,” he said, tapped the table, swallowed audibly. It was a little moment of vigor that made you wonder if he had overspent himself, borrowed too much from the future.
Is this heroic? It is good, I think, to call it courage, because if anything is clear in 2024, it is that American statesmen and judges must develop an ethic of celebratory exit. (Every time Amy Coney Barrett says something about the dignity of the unborn, find an elder to lecture about the dignity of retirement.) Books must be written about the bravery of stepping back. Posters with pro-pullout slogans hung in every city hall. Someday, a bunch of dumb kids you don’t even like will be impatient for you to finish a sentence, and it would be better if we had some comforting palaver at the ready.
Joe Biden is an angry old man complicit in mass murder. If he is about as normal a man as can be elected president, he is still not a man about whom we are obligated to care. But I find that I do care. I find that I am moved. This is the little drama into which we have been thrust: a man who never could have gotten this far without a certain recalcitrance, begged by the very people who elevated him to acknowledge his faltering mind. If being persuaded by Nancy Pelosi to tweet a world-historical retreat is not a universal experience, finding that one’s ambition exceeds one’s capacities absolutely is. It was visibly so hard for him and so necessary for us.
“You know,” he said, “we have come so far since my inauguration. On that day, I told you as I stood in that — ” and here he lost his way, eyes unblinking, struggling to read as America waited. “We’re stood in that winter of peril and winter of possibilities. Peril and possibilities.”
The winter of peril. Sometimes when I am afraid, I read about a problem and find the fear dissipates with context. This is not what happens if one learns more about a future Trump administration. And yet the fear had been, for so long, abstract. It was hard to find purchase. Warnings about a darkness to come were delayed, misconstrued, literally garbled. In late June, onstage with the felon and sexual assailant who would be king, Biden spoke a kind of poetry, severed from logic, sentences that led to unexpected places. We finally beat Medicare.
This was the moment an inchoate anxiety found its shape. It was channeled into yearning for a specific change: Swap him out. Dread sharpened into demand. Millions of people ached openly for a new messenger. I cannot remember, in my lifetime, being part of such a sustained communal longing. Someone. Anyone. Please.
Enfeebled as he seemed, Biden somehow stood firm, a wall of “no.” With every public appearance, it became less clear whether this was the personality with which he was born or yet another symptom of a single man’s decline. A celebrity would call for him to go. Biden is seething, we read. A senator or two. Jill is determined. The news cycle is not adapted to process the great, mostly silent rise of collective desire. Journalists quoted anonymous sources who sensed shifting vibes, and it read as wish fulfillment until the very moment he finally gave way.
Like a lot of people, I find myself affectionate toward a woman I had little use for 20 minutes ago. The normal amount of excitement about Kamala Harris is the amount that was shown her in 2020 during a bloodless, procedurally banal primary. Harris is a former prosecutor with cop energy, a little remote, and not, in Washington, particularly loved.
Oh, but the waiting. The winter of peril. The long season of despair. To be greeted, after all this time, with a woman who could simply say: This fucking guy. It was the waiting that produced the coconut/Venn-diagram/one-handed egg-cracking Reels, the 160,000-strong Zoom, the brat discourse, the $100 million, the ear-splitting cheers in Milwaukee.
There was no strategy here, only weakness and folly against a great wave of want. On Wednesday night, Americans waited, once again, for this man, aged and COVID-struck, to finish. “That’s what’s so special about America,” he tried to say. And what it sounded like was: Time runs short. You too will die. His eyes flickered briefly back into awareness before going dim. We will all one day lose the ability to translate feeling into speech. The Republic will not endure forever. But then it isn’t winter at all. It is late July, gardens in bloom. It’s not over for us yet, so long as, in the few days of life we are granted, the dead make way.
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