Editorials

The cover of a recent New Yorker was a cleverish Barry Blitt caricature of four old folks running a race while pushing the kind of aluminum walkers used by mobility challenged people of all ages. Since I’m currently one of them (having been in bed with a broken ankle for a month) I sympathize. Apparently we’re supposed to snicker at these runners because they’re still involved in electoral races even though they’re kinda sorta (OMG) old.

Otherwise, they’re not that much alike.

From left to right:, visually, not politically:

Donald Trump. No need to say more about him—we know too much already.

Mitch McConnell: A canny political operator, wrong on most issues by my standards, but clever.

Nancy Pelosi: Another super clever politician, but good on most important questions.

Joe Biden: In his current incarnation, quite adept at identifying and promoting effective policies. He hasn’t always been so great, but he’s learned a lot on his journey.

A diverse set, but the common denominator is that they’re all now, well, old.

Luckily, Dianne Feinstein was not part of the group, which could have proved embarrassing.

New Yorker Editor David Remnick’s Talk of the Town comments in the same issue are headed “This Old Man” in print, “The Washington Gerontocracy” online. Pretty clearly, Remnick (b.1958) views with alarm some data he’s selected from assorted polls. He worries that “more than seventy per cent of respondents suggested that Biden is too old to be effective in a second term”.

The New Yorker, even before Remnick, has traditionally hoped that it caters to the youngster market, but I doubt that’s true. I only have anecdotes to support my opinion, but these are sometimes better than the data-lite often featured in glossy magazines like The New Yorker.

Harold Ross, its original editor, is often quoted in an urban legend as saying that his brainchild was “not for the little old lady in Dubuque.”

Well, maybe, but I learned to read it from my mother, born 1914 in St.Louis, which is probably more sophisticated than Dubuque ever was, but is not Manhattan, She missed out on college because of the Depression, but made up for it by being a voracious reader of the kind of snappy prose that the New Yorker has always favored. She claimed that the main advantage to not being employed outside home most of her married life was having first crack at the latest issue when it came in the mail, before my father got home from his office. She read every one of them until she died, finally a little old lady at almost 99,

I (b.1940) was rumored to have taught myself to read when I was about 5 with New Yorker cartoons, in those days funnier than the dreary self-centered ones in the current issues. I’d moved on to the heavier stuff by 1958, which was the year I started college and Remnick was born.

New York City has always been populated by the impecunious young and the rich old, and the magazine has reflected that, especially its ads. I would not be in the least surprised to learn that a stunningly high percentage of the New Yorker’s readers,young and old, poor and rich, have voted for Biden and will do so again.

John Lanchester in the latest London Review of Books in a great piece about how numbers are weaponized in politics says this:: 

“ The best short book about the use and misuse of statistics is Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics, first published in 1954, a devil’s-advocate guide to the multiple ways in which numbers are misused in advertising, commerce and politics. (Single best tip: ‘up to’ is always a fib. It means somebody did a range of tests and has artfully chosen the most flattering number.)

“More than seventy percent” is in a similar category, especially as employed by the trendy press to diss the powerful.

It’s easy to attribute Biden’s lack of “an inspiring fluency at the microphone” to his age, as Remnick does. He seems to have forgotten that Biden’s a former stutterer who has displayed occasional speech hesitancy from childhood. It’s nothing to do with age, and it hasn’t ruined his career.

Perhaps the good editor, now at the awkward age of 64, is contemplating with dread his own eligibility for Social Security. No doubt he has already started getting that smarmy junk mail from the AARP, reminding him that none of us is eternal. When he raises the age issue in pigeonholing these four very different candidates, he might be indulging in some personal anxiety.

What Remnick and his contemporaries forget is that old people have been young, but young people have never been old. Like many my age, I’ve made my share of political mistakes, but I think I’ve learned from them. Right now, right here in Berkeley, I have all too often been represented or misrepresented by people I supported as candidates who have turned out badly. After about my 70^th year I got better at avoiding these duplicitous people.

If anyone’s tempted to believe that younger always means better, they might be reassured by looking at Berkeley’s own Margot Smith. She’s the former chair of the Gray Panthers, among many achievements, as well as the mother of four. Now she’s running for the California District 14 Assembly Seat, against the current incumbent, a sweet young mama and career politician who’s widely criticized for being in thrall to the development industry, which threatens to obliterate Berkeley with unrentable “market rate” “luxury” apartment boxes. Margot would never be suckered by those smooth-talking developers.

And yes, she’s 93. What that means is that she’s been around long enough to know where all the bodies are buried, and she’s got a lifelong habit of speaking truth to power. She intends to run a full-fledged campaign for the two-year term, albeit on a tight budget, as the best way of informing the public about the indignities being perpetuated in their names.

Margot is from a generation familiar with the literature of the Bible, so she’s probably heard this:

“the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Time and chance finally caught up with Dianne Feinstein, but statistically speaking Joe Biden likely still has some useful miles on him This is hard for the sixtyish commentariat to accept, but as those of us who have lived a couple of decades longer can testify, old folks know a lot and can get a lot done. If Margot goes to Sacramento, she'll teach them a thing or two.

An admirer has suggested a slogan: “I may be old, but I’m not stupid.