One of the biggest issues in the U.S. election isn’t the economy, or the border (southern, not northern), or various worldwide conflicts.
It’s age. Specifically, old age.
The only thing that can stop the rematch nobody wants between Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 77, is if one of them kicks the bucket, which, at their ages, is not outside the realm of possibility.
The issue of age – and specifically memory loss that goes with age – burst to the surface recently with the report by a special council on Biden’s handling of classified documents. In a blatantly political statement, the council (who is a lawyer, not a doctor) wrote that Biden would “likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. He also said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age”.
There are worse things than being a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. For instance, being Donald Trump. But the line stung. Are memory lapses a sign that you’re not competent? Geez, I hope not.
Dr. Charan Ranganath, a memory expert, recently wrote an illuminating piece about forgetting in The New York Times.
There are, he wrote, two levels of forgetting. Plain old forgetting (scientists call it retrieval failure, which happens when I’m playing Jeopardy!) is when the memory is there, but you can’t pull it up. But Forgetting (yes, with a capital F) is when a memory is totally lost or gone. In Biden’s case, not remembering when he was VP is forgetting and nothing to be concerned about. Not remembering he was VP is Forgetting, and that would be a problem if it happened.
Pretty much everyone’s memory gets worse as we age. I’m now 68 (or, as Biden would call me, a ‘whipper-snapper’), and I find my memory is getting worse all the time. The special council wrote that Biden couldn’t remember the dates when he was vice-president, or when his son Beau died. Well, so what? I can’t remember dates at all. I figure if I get the decade right, that’s good enough.
Here’s how lousy my memory is. A while back, I was told of something that I had said that had a lasting impact on the person doing the talking. I had no memory of saying it. Not only that, today I can’t even remember who told me the story about something I said that I can’t remember. (My wife, on the other hand, claims to have a great memory. I, however, am convinced that she remembers things that never happened.)
The essential question is, are Biden and Trump too old for the job? Yes and no. While it’s far from ideal that a pair of sometimes confused geriatrics are vying for the most important job in the world, age alone should not exclude them. Biden is the same age as Martin Scorsese and Paul McCartney, younger than Jane Fonda, Clint Eastwood and Warren Buffett, and nobody is telling them to quit. Biden may stumble on his words, but his government has been, overall, pretty solid, and not just for an old man.
Put another way, who would you rather have as your leader? Eighty-one-year-old Joe Biden … or fifty-three-year-old Justin Trudeau?
I rest my case.
Um, what was it again?
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