Our Sick SOTU

O, tempora! O, mores! — (Latin: “Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!”)

Before I get to the sick stuff, let’s give President Biden his due. His words came not trippingly off the tongue, but in spurts that seemed propelled by steroids. Only with my streaming service’s instant replay could I understand them all.

But he did what he had to do, and he did it well.

Biden laid out the long list of his accomplishments before losing the House. They included: (1) the first big infrastructure bill in a generation; (2) regulated (and much lower) insulin prices for our millions of diabetics; (3) medical help for vets maimed by breathing burn-pit gas; (4) saving Ukraine, for now, from Putin the Terrible; and (5) the first big bite out of climate change ever. And this is just a partial list.

More important, through an impromptu and clever rhetorical trick, Biden got his so-called “conservative” opposition to “agree” not to cut Social Security or Medicare. He did this although every sentient being knows that so-called “conservatives” have been gunning for these social programs ever since FDR and LBJ, respectively, created them.

Biden even played the role of statesman. He congratulated Kevin McCarthy on his Speakership, causing him to visibly soak it up like a errant kid praised on a playground. Several times, Biden invited his opposition to work together for the good of the country. In reciting his own many legislative accomplishments, he gave credit to those that were bipartisan. As surprising as that may have been to some, there were many.

But the “optics.” Oh, the optics! As I watched the action in the huge House chamber—the interplay among the worthies who are supposed to govern us—I imagined myself watching the Roman Senate in the time of Nero, Caligula, or Commodus.

The first thing that struck me was the age gap. There was Joe Biden, the oldest person ever to become president, doing a creditable job of reporting his administration’s many successes—the more remarkable for his age and the nation’s grave division. There was Democrat Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader (with a real majority, of one, this time!), stooped with age and smiling benevolently like a kindly grandpa. There was ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, rightly congratulated for having been the most effective Speaker ever, looking for all the world like a cross between a kindly grandma and an Egyptian mummy.

And then there were the kids, whom we’ll get to in a moment. But few stood out in between.

When the President finally turned to congratulate Hakeem Jeffries, our new House Minority Leader, I literally got up off my couch. I clapped and cheered in a room with only me and my wife it it! Finally, I could see a Democrat old enough (52) to have some sense and clout, young enough to have a worthy future, and with enough experience in Congress (ten years) to know where the bathrooms are and how to get things done. As far as I could tell, Jeffries’ likes are few enough: he’s a rarity sandwiched between the fading geezers and the strutting, clueless ingenues.

Literally glowing among the latter was Senator (Senator!) Kyrsten Sinema. She wore an iridescent day-glo yellow dress, with day-glo horn-rimmed glasses. Her glowing dress had extended epaulet-like shoulders of the same material, making her look like a character in The Game of Thrones. Just to make sure no one missed her, she placed her yellow irradiance in the center of the room.

If there had been an award for dressing wildly inappropriately for the occasion and the institution, Sinema would have won it by acclamation. She seemed the very model of today’s young “look at me!” pols.

Then there were the smirkers. After watching the original “Top Gun” decades ago, I never paid to see Tom Cruise smirk again. Little did I know that, in watching the 2023 SOTU, I would see Ted Cruz smirk in a way that made me even sicker. His trademark smirk followed our President’s rhetorical trick, which seemed to extract a GOP promise not to touch Social Security or Medicare. Here’s what I imagined Cruz thinking under his smirk:

“Gloat now, if you want, Joe. In a few years, you’ll be gone, maybe in the grave. I’ll still be here, supported by an endless stream of money, blessed by our Supreme Court and donated by our ever-richer oligarchs. They will never rest until they cut their taxes so low that they no longer can help seniors and others in need. They, and I, are here for the long haul. And they are motivated by the most powerful force in history: love of self and celebrity. You, who care about the poor and old, are a dying breed. He who laughs last, laughs best. That would be me.”

With her “look at me!” dress, and with his trademark obnoxious smirk, Sinema and Cruz were just the tip of the iceberg. Somewhere in the crowd was George Santos, whose Olympic-class lying made no difference to a party for which celebrity and power have totally eclipsed service. Then there were the bomb-throwers: Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan. The rhetorical bombs they threw accused the President of lying and causing the fentanyl pandemic without, of course, any evidence or time to provide it. So much for reasoned, serious discussion among adults.

Have I missed anyone? Does anyone in his/her right mind think any of these clowns strives to be a “public servant” in the way we Boomers were taught in high-school civics, and came to expect over a lifetime of political engagement? Does anyone think any of them lends our democracy wisdom, even basic cunning, let alone dignity?

But even this was not all. The crowning excrescence was Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ response to Biden’s SOTU for the Republican Party. You would have to go back to Joe (not ‘Gene) McCarthy to find a more execrable example of vague but vile, wrong-headed rhetoric.

I tuned in a tad late, so I can’t be entirely sure; but the part of her speech I heard contained not a single fact, let alone a verifiable one. All was claim, blame, name-calling, and emotional lament. It was an excruciating interval of mindless venting.

As a whole, Sanders’ speech brought to mind the turn of phrase by which David Brooks had described the writings of Harriet Miers, whose undeserved nomination for the Supreme Court later failed. Miers’ work, Brooks wrote, was “a relentless march of vapid abstractions.”

So it was with Sanders’ response speech. But hers got even worse. She spent whole minutes in obsequious sycophancy to our former president, reporting a secret trip she had taken with him to war-torn Iraq, to visit our troops. So star-struck, uncritical and flattering was her report that, in keeping with his current disfavor, she never even mentioned him by name.

This, it seems, is our current governor of Arkansas, a sovereign state. To tell from her speech, her head is full of strong emotions—mostly fear and hate—but not a single thought about policy, programs, or practical measures to improve her voters’ lives, let alone the actual current status of the voters who had elected her. Her speech was a world-class embarrassment to us, as wildly inappropriate to our nation and our times as Sinema’s iridescent day-glo, epauleted yellow dress.

In an impressive attempt to maintain journalistic objectivity, PBS’ Congressional Correspondent Lisa de Jardin tagged Sanders’ speech as the opening salvo of the GOP strategy for 2024: a campaign of all culture wars, all the time. But don’t count on it. Our oligarchs can see the writing on the wall. If their candidate (probably Ron DeSantis) doesn’t win in 2024, they are probably done. Our nation could return to true democracy, resurrect antitrust law from the dead, raise taxes on the oligarchs and their corporations, and show some care and concern for all of its various people, including recent migrants and our eleven-million mostly Hispanic serfs.

So I’m betting our oligarchs will pull out all the stops this time. They control the media, at least the ones their dupes follow. They control much of the Internet, spreading lies algorithmically for profit. And their Field Marshall McConnell is as wily and evil a traitor to democracy as ever rose out of the Old Confederacy. He will use every lever of power at his disposal to insure continued oligarchic rule, just as he did in denying President Obama a Supreme Court appointment. After all, this is a man who self-confessedly married for money.

At the end of the day, it was the oligarchs who destroyed ancient Rome. Their senators assassinated the demagogue of their time, Julius Caesar. But his death didn’t make much difference. The Pompeiian Civil Wars—a much bloodier version of our present harsh division—did their trick. And the oligarchs’ preoccupation with their own finances and prosperity did the rest.

Every long-lived democracy in human history has suffered the same fate: death by corruption. Today, even Britain is teetering on the edge. If our own relatively new democracy is going to avoid that common fate, we will need young leaders of intelligence, skill, experience, courage and utter dedication to majority rule.

People like Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jeffries, Wes Moore, Gina Raimondo, Rafael Warnock, and Gretchen Whitmer will have to step up, perhaps before even they think they are ready. At very least, someone like them must replace Kamala Harris as Vice President. (I would gladly add Stacey Abrams, but as she has yet to win a statewide election, she might have to serve by appointment.)

With Caesar gone, the “good” general (Pompey) won, for a time. But as Caesar himself had said in crossing the Rubicon, the die was cast. The corruption of the oligarchs, coupled with poison from the lead water pipes of Rome’s elite, sealed its fate, though the complete decline took centuries. In our case, the decline would be much faster, and the consequences for our species—in our era of runaway global warming and nuclear weapons—far more severe. And science has not yet told us how much our own unique environmental poisons, including endocrine disruptors, ubiquitous plastics, and nanoparticles, are hastening our own descent into madness.

Of course I will vote for Joe Biden if he wins the Democratic nomination. But we need new leadership. We need new blood. If Lincoln could do it after only ten years in public office, and Obama after twelve, others can, too. We can’t let the fate of our Republic and of our species hang solely on the health of a man who would be 82 years old on his next inauguration, however clever his performance in this otherwise farcical SOTU. The fate of the paragon and chief defender of modern democracy hangs in the balance; who will step up?


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