Portrait of an Old Man
Or: Biden x Trump x Rembrandt
Gunshots, I suppose, are thunders, or at least their little brothers.
But I promise you, this is a newsletter about life beyond Thunderdome; and a post about a painting by Rembrandt, the one that hangs beside my beloved Athena here in Lisbon. I didn’t notice it until after the recent debate, when the face of another decaying old man was everywhere. Once I’d breezed past Rembrandt’s Old Man, now its eyes formed wormholes and — the power of a culture that makes business, blood-play and fantasy out of its own collapse — took me back to America even from gardens an ocean away.
In the debate we saw Biden growing crippled before our eyes, the end stage of an American Job whose Presidency, from Covid to Kiev, has been spent atoning for all his predecessor’s sins. His empty gaze was a twin of Rembrandt’s Old Man, face just as frozen, but more affecting, because while Rembrandt’s character is unknown, what we were watching — and some enjoying, cruelly — was the loss of the spark Biden once had, a magic that lifted him from state college to the White House. A gift whose power, once, was to articulate a positive vision of high America (or its return) a vision that became more remote with each repetition until the man himself was unable to recall, let alone articulate it, and so became one more brutal proof of the falling away of a consciousness, or a soul-world. A preview of what Leonard Cohen meant when he said, “You won't like what comes after America.”
Last night, we found out. Brute violence. An assassination attempt that might have been the only thing capable of pushing Biden from the headlines. A bullet that came two centimeters away from triggering a summer of horrors. Slow fading pales against fast death, vacant eyes have nothing on an adrenaline rush. A pumping fist, the bullet’s grazing as proof of divine favor — right of kings? — and Trump reborn in victimhood, maybe even coronation, raging proof of his only real argument for power, that God really likes him, blood streaming down his face, held by Kevlar-clad apostles, leading the crowd in chant, “USA, USA!”
Regarding which, Biden’s Presidency always reminded me of lines from Tennyson’s poem about the wandering man himself, Odysseus, at the end of his travels:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
Biden was always better than America deserved, with a far left lost in neoliberal shadow puppet theater, a far right that would topple the Republic for the thrill of it.
By all accounts he was appalled by Charlottesville and — in disbelief at polling done by the Black Congressional Caucus which showed him as the only Democrat who could beat Trump — decided to do his part for the nation’s better angels.
This was someone who God gave three modest gifts: decency, luck, and charm.
The decency astounded Barack Obama when he vetted him for VP.
“Joe,” he said, seeing Biden’s only real asset was his house, “What’d you do wrong all those years?” The answer was that, somehow, Biden had maintained the integrity that later spared America a second Trump term and the worst of a plague. To Obama’s view? The product of public schooling was, if not quite a chump, at least chump-adjacent. This rube didn’t get how money worked.
And even before the debate, that might have been Biden’s undoing. Covid saw flagrant disregard for basic economics: the fivefold increase of the US money supply, a policy that now looks like a heist, the rich bailing out their own class (“the markets”) in ultimate disregard for what would happen once inflation hit. The poor and the working classes would finance the bailouts each time they paid rent, or bought bread, or water, in those places of God’s favored land where it’s dangerous to drink from the tap. And that’s what happened, a 20.8% inflation of consumer prices still suffered as the stock market hits new highs. People are slow but not stupid. It all felt so in line with the bailouts of 2008, the violation of whatever social compact remained after twenty years of desert wars.
“Through money,” wrote Oswald Spengler, “Democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.”
Which brings us to the American colosseum, home of seven hundred million blue-lit eyeballs and, now, two very different visions of death, one creeping, one avoided, and vastly more crowd-pleasing. Agon, ecstasy - rebirth.
The election is Trump’s to lose, now.
But this, as I said, is an essay about a Rembrandt.
About the worn form and rickety hands of an old man who staggers on, even for just a little while, through the howling that’s left after the world that gave him meaning, friends, maybe love, has arced and passed away. It’s worth a visit by anyone, very young or very old, a chance to step outside the day for a moment or so, to visit with a fellow traveler whose eyes, I now think, are far less sad than familiar.🦉