Biden and Trump's candidacy and ageism

  

You can listen to "Let It Be" be clicking either images above.

Here's an article from Raw Story about Rockstar, Dolly Parton's new album which include numbers not only with Sir Paul, Ringo, Peter Frampton, and Mick Fleetwood on Let It Be, but also Elton John, Sting, Lizzo, Pink, Debbie Harry, Steve Perry, Steven Tyler, Stevie Nicks, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, John Fogerty, Miley Cyrus and Ann and Nancy Wilson on other songs.

Aside from what promises to be an instant classic album this Dolly Parton collaboration is a celebration of geriatic musicians. All except Miley Cyrus (30) and Lizzo (35) are 70 (Pat Benatar) or older.

A geriatric music icon who is missing is Mick Jagger who is still rocking and on tour at the age of 80, but then again you can't have everything.

Reading about this led me to take the lazy route to writing a blog for today and republishing with a few revisions my May 30 piece about ageism and how it relates to politics.

 Biden and Trump's candidacy and ageism

WaPo column "3 reasons we’re stuck with Trump and Biden" led me to write about ageism in America and say humbly that at almost 80 if it was between me and Trump I'm more cognitively capable of being president.

This is the opinion column that jumped out at me when I looked at The Washington Post online on May 30, 2023:

Megan McArdle is described by Wikipedia as a right-leaning journalist. 

The question I pose is whether this column by McArdle and the polls she cites reflect ageism. I will turn 80 in January. I live in a senior community where while I know many residents who succumb to dementia or demonstrate cognitive decline in their early seventies, I also know many who are cognitively sharp well into their nineties. 

Ageism, which is defined as prejudice or discrimination towards elders, is prevalent in America. This is in contrast to Asian countries, some African countries, Native American culture, and other societies, where elders are revered for their wisdom. (See "The Wisdom of Elders" in Psychology Today and "7 Cultures That Celebrate Aging and Respect Their Elders" in HUFFPOST. )

McArdle begins her May 30 column, which if you subscribe to The Washington Post you can read here, as follows:

In an April NBC poll, nearly two-thirds of voters said they did not think Trump should run for president again — and more than two-thirds said the same thing about Biden, in large part because they think he’s too old. How did a once-great nation end up facing an election between two very old, very unpopular White dudes?

I can sketch out the proximate causes. On the Republican side, just as in 2016, a massive primary field is splitting the votes of the moderates, giving Trump plenty of room to consolidate his ultra-MAGA minority. Democrats, meanwhile, have no good options as long as the vice presidency is occupied by the hapless Kamala D. Harris, whose impolitic blurtings, inability to hold staff and tendency to choke under pressure make her an even less appealing candidate than her boss. Every Democratic operative I’ve asked blanched at the thought of running her — and also agreed that for reasons of coalition management, she cannot be pushed aside.

Aside from using the word "stuck" which in context is a pejorative, I found this paragraph problematic:

Yet that only describes the problem; it does not explain why we seem stuck with two broadly disliked candidates, one already in his 80s and the other turning 78 before Election Day 2024. Nor does it explain America’s broader problem of political gerontocracy, as embodied by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who seems too cognitively impaired to fully carry out her duties or to realize she ought to retire.

Biden is only disliked by the GOP. He may be disliked as a candidate by Democrats because of his age but he is not personally disliked the way Trump is.  To include both Trump and Biden with Feinstein as emblematic of what is wrong with having seniors in political power, which McArdle calls a political gerontocracy, is patently unfair. Feinstein is an outlier because she has a serious cognitive impairment. With the average ages of 117th Congress at 58.4 years for Representatives and 64.3 years for Senators we are stretching it to call this a political gerontocracy. Being 58 or 64 is not being old. Sure it is reasonable to say Trump and Biden are old, but of those two only one has his reality testing impaired which is a sign of cognitive impairment.

Both Trump and Biden statistically have a higher chance of dying than if they were, say, in their fifties or sixties, but because as far as we know neither has a life threatening medical condition both could live into their nineties and, while risk of dementia increases as one ages, many elders never develop the disease. 

A poll of Democrats should include a question asking whether assuming Biden will live with no impairments until he is in his nineties would you favor him as a candidate.

Calling Trump and Biden "relics of an era when America was more stratified by race and gender but less polarized by income, education, ideology or party" McArdle's concluding paragraphs shift focus from a critique of Trump and Biden's age to the way they speak:

Perhaps more importantly, they also talk like it. For both the Wharton transfer student and the guy who graduated near the bottom of his law school class, lower-middlebrow is their native language. In the mouths of the younger products of the high-intensity meritocratic rat race, this register of the American dialect sounds foreign — and given that only about one-third of U.S. adults have a college diploma, this matters a lot. In fact, it is in many ways the most compelling of the three explanations. It is also the most depressing, not so much for what it says about Biden and Trump, but for what it says about younger politicians: They don’t think like non-college voters — and therefore can’t communicate so well with them.

It’s very risky to be so dependent on people who are well into their golden years, who will not be with us forever. And what will American politics look like when the front-row kids who can’t speak lower-middlebrow are the only ones left in the room?

My impression is that when the 50 year old McArdle writes "golden years" she isn't really being complementary. Perhaps I react this way because I will be 80 in January and although to function well I generally need a 45 minute mid-afternoon nap I am both cognitively and physically unimpaired and if the choice was between myself and Donald Trump in all humility can say that political positions aside I would be more capable of carrying out the responsibilities of being president.

Biden and Trump's candidacy and ageism

By Hal Brown

WaPo column "3 reasons we’re stuck with Trump and Biden" led me to write about ageism in America and say humbly that at almost 80 if it was between me and Trump I could be president.

There's a Harry Trump campaign button that I could use with a few changes. Click image to enlarge.

This is the opinion column that jumped out at me when I looked at The Washington Post online this morning:

Megan McArdle is described by Wikipedia as a right-leaning journalist. 

The question I pose is whether this column by McArdle and the polls she cites reflect ageism. I will turn 80 in January. I live in a senior community where while I know many residents who succumb to dementia or demonstrate cognitive decline in their early seventies, I also know many who are cognitively sharp well into their nineties. 

Ageism, which is defined as prejudice or discrimination towards elders, is prevalent in America. This is in contrast to Asian countries, some African countries, Native American culture, and other societies, where elders are revered for their wisdom. (See "The Wisdom of Elders" in Psychology Today and "7 Cultures That Celebrate Aging and Respect Their Elders" in HUFFPOST. )

McArdle begins her May 30 column, which if you subscribe to The Washington Post you can read here, as follows:

In an April NBC poll, nearly two-thirds of voters said they did not think Trump should run for president again — and more than two-thirds said the same thing about Biden, in large part because they think he’s too old. How did a once-great nation end up facing an election between two very old, very unpopular White dudes?

I can sketch out the proximate causes. On the Republican side, just as in 2016, a massive primary field is splitting the votes of the moderates, giving Trump plenty of room to consolidate his ultra-MAGA minority. Democrats, meanwhile, have no good options as long as the vice presidency is occupied by the hapless Kamala D. Harris, whose impolitic blurtings, inability to hold staff and tendency to choke under pressure make her an even less appealing candidate than her boss. Every Democratic operative I’ve asked blanched at the thought of running her — and also agreed that for reasons of coalition management, she cannot be pushed aside.

Aside from using the word "stuck" which in context is a pejorative I found this paragraph problematic:

Yet that only describes the problem; it does not explain why we seem stuck with two broadly disliked candidates, one already in his 80s and the other turning 78 before Election Day 2024. Nor does it explain America’s broader problem of political gerontocracy, as embodied by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who seems too cognitively impaired to fully carry out her duties or to realize she ought to retire.

Biden is only disliked by the GOP. He may be disliked as a candidate by Democrats because of his age but he is not personally disliked the way Trump is.  To include both Trump and Biden with Feinstein as emblematic of what is wrong with having seniors in political power, which McArdle calls a political gerontocracy, is patently unfair. Feinstein is an outlier because she has a serious cognitive impairment. With the average ages of 117th Congress at 58.4 years for Representatives and 64.3 years for Senators we are stretching it to call this a political gerontocracy. Being 58 or 64 is not being old. Sure it is reasonable to say Trump and Biden are old, but of those two only one has his reality testing impaired which is a sign of cognitive impairment.

Both Trump and Biden statistically have a higher chance of dying than if they were, say, in their fifties or sixties, but because as far as we know neither has a life threatening medical condition both could live into their nineties and, while risk of dementia increases as one ages, many elders never develop the disease. 

A poll of Democrats should include a question asking whether assuming Biden will live with no impairments until he is in his nineties would you favor him as a candidate.

Calling Trump and Biden "relics of an era when America was more stratified by race and gender but less polarized by income, education, ideology or party" McArdle's concluding paragraphs shift focus from a critique of Trump and Biden's age to the way they speak:

Perhaps more importantly, they also talk like it. For both the Wharton transfer student and the guy who graduated near the bottom of his law school class, lower-middlebrow is their native language. In the mouths of the younger products of the high-intensity meritocratic rat race, this register of the American dialect sounds foreign — and given that only about one-third of U.S. adults have a college diploma, this matters a lot. In fact, it is in many ways the most compelling of the three explanations. It is also the most depressing, not so much for what it says about Biden and Trump, but for what it says about younger politicians: They don’t think like non-college voters — and therefore can’t communicate so well with them.

It’s very risky to be so dependent on people who are well into their golden years, who will not be with us forever. And what will American politics look like when the front-row kids who can’t speak lower-middlebrow are the only ones left in the room?

My impression is that when the 50 year old McArdle writes "golden years" she isn't really being complementary. Perhaps I react this way because I will be 80 in January and although to function well I generally need a 45 minute mid-afternoon nap I am both cognitively and physically unimpaired and if the choice was between myself and Donald Trump in all humility I can say can say that political positions aside I would be more capable of carrying out the responsibilities of being president.

If you don't see the Disquis comment section below click here.

The malignant megalomaniac's Memorial Day message

 By Hal Brown. MSW

I wonder if Trump pays attention to the meager number of people who "like"
his posts considering that 3,020 people is about 1/100,000th of the US population.
Caricature: DonkeyHotey

Above post:

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, BUT ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WHO GAVE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THE COUNTRY THEY LOVE, AND TO THOSE IN LINE OF A VERY DIFFERENT, BUT EQUALLY DANGEROUS FIRE, STOPPING THE THREATS OF THE TERRORISTS, MISFITS AND LUNATIC THUGS WHO ARE WORKING FEVERISHLY FROM WITHIN TO OVERTURN AND DESTROY OUR ONCE GREAT COUNTRY, WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN IN GREATER PERIL THAN IT IS RIGHT NOW, WE MUST STOP THE COMMUNISTS, MARXISTS AND FASCIST “PIGS” AT EVERY TURN AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Trump couldn't even manage write an entire, albeit run-on, sentence which any rational American leader could have written  in a way that truly honored those who this holiday is meant to honor. Take President Biden, for example. He was also up early today and this is his tweet:

Here are the first two paragraphs of "A Proclamation on Prayer For Peace, Memorial Day, 2023" issued on May 23rd:

On Memorial Day, we honor America’s beloved daughters and sons who gave their last full measure of devotion to this Nation.  We can never fully repay the debt we owe these fallen heroes.  But today, we vow to rededicate ourselves to the work for which they gave their lives, and we recommit to supporting the families, caregivers, and survivors they left behind.

 For generations, stretching back to the formation of our country, these courageous people answered duty’s call, willing to give their lives for that which we all hold dear.  They fought for our Independence.  They defended our democracy.  They sacrificed for our freedom.  And today, as they lie in eternal peace, we continue to live by the light of liberty that they so bravely kept burning bright around the world.

One would have to be really cynical and a Biden hater to suggest or believe the president was playacting when he was at the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier today:

A number of reasons why Trump spends the wee hours of the morning (this one was posted later than most, at 4:43 AM) on his Truth Social platform venting his spleen (or whatever organ) have been proposed. Some have attributed this to dementia (even Steve Bannon) and a few have even suggested this is because he has late stage syphilis. The explanation is really simple: he's human. 

What!

How can I say he's human?

This is because no matter who anyone is one of two things will happen when they are under extreme stress. The stress may be conscious or unconscious or something in between. Evil people may be facing the hangman's noose or an imminent natural death and have what religious people sometimes call a "come to Jesus moment" and ask God forgiveness, while others may escalate their, again with a religious metaphor, worst angels or inner devils.

I am not going to relitigate the case which I and many other psychotherapists have made for diagnosing or calling Trump a malignant narcissist.  You can Google it here to see what others besides me have written or Google it with my name to see what I've written. Suffice to say he meets the criteria for this assessment of his psychopathology. For more applicable to what is happening to Trump Goggle narcissistic rage and injury here.

What I see as occurring now is an escalation of his rage reactions and lashing out against people he see as attacking him. Jack Smith, Fanni Willis, Alvin Bragg, Leticia James, and E. Jean Carroll are examples. He even raged against Judge Arthur Engoron who is hearing Leticia James' New York State case calling him a "Radical Left Lunatic Judge in New York City" who is "refusing to let go of the case. He is a partisan disaster. A Rigged & Corrupt System!"

We may never know whether any of his lawyers told him that this is recklessly self-defeating behavior for someone who is in a legal predicament. Even a lawyer who graduated last in their class from the worst law school in America and was handling nothing more consequential than traffic tickets they thought were unfair would tell their impulsive clients not to insult the judge.

As a bad legal client Trump and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, the eyepatch guy, have a lot in comment besides their personality in that they are a defense lawyer's worst nightmare. Rhodes, who his ex-wife described as cruel and abusive, might have avoided the 18 year sentence if he had shown a modicum of remorse. Instead he raged about how the system was corrupt and he was justified in everything he did.

The best judges and prosecutors don't let their emotions influence their adherence to the law, but I assume some of them struggle not to let their feelings get to them when they deal with defendants who are accused of committing horrendous crimes or who behave with outrageous disrespect whether in public or in the courtroom. When a judge holds someone in contempt it shouldn't be due to hurt feelings but because their behavior met object criteria for contempt. 

Common sense would dictate that someone whose future depends on the total dispassionate objectivity of judges and prosecutors should try not to piss them off since, after all, they are only human. They'd be as stupid as a critically ill or injured patient rushed to the hospital who insulted the emergency room doctors and nurses.

.

Addendum:

From Barack Obama:

From Vote Vets: 

One doesn't have to pronounce that Trump has one or another actual psychiatric condition. For example, in "Understanding Donald Trump's Narcissism" a psychotherapist really diagnoses him without making a diagnosis.

Update:

Not to gush over President Biden, but his powerful and poignant Memorial Day remarks were one of his best speeches ever. While most of it was probably written for him and it was on a teleprompter you could see he was considering the meaning of each and every sentence as he spoke them. There were references that I am certain he added and while delivering the speech he seemed to add extemporaneous comments including to a mother and daughter ho were in the audience whose husband and father was killed in action. Not that I was looking for a stumble or stutter but I could count only three times when his delivery was anything but flawless. At the 40 minute mark you can watch the video of the speech here.

If you don't see the Disquis comment section below please click here.

It's redundant to say crazy cuckoo MAGA people but it also insults Sonny the cuckoo bird

By Hal Brown, MSW,  Retired psychotherapist. More about me.

Fair Use, General Mills

Maybe I needed a second cup of coffee to clear the cobwebs out of my mind this morning but the first thing that caught my attention in the title of the following article was the first four words:

Reading this made me think of the original crazy cuckoo.

In context below these words were used by Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella explaining how Biden outmaneuvered McCarthy on the debt ceiling deal as follows:

So if this goes down because Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or any of those crazy cuckoo MAGA people decide to tank the US economy, it is one hundred percent going to be at the feet of the Republican Party and not the president."

Cocoa Puffs is a classic American cereal known for being marketed to children and for its sugar content. It was introduced in 1956. 

While the name "Sonny" may be the answer to a trivia question, the bird's catchphrase, "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" has become iconic. How deeply impeded in American culture it is can be demonstrated by the 2011 story about  a sword-swinging samurai declaring himself 'Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs' when he was arrested. In another case a man was arrested for indecent exposure when he was walking naked down a street in Tulsa and he claimed it was due to eating Cocoa Puffs.

Here's Sonny's "bio" from Wikipedia:

The mascot of Cocoa Puffs, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, was introduced in 1962. In television commercials, Sonny attempts to concentrate on a normal task but ends up coming across some reference to Cocoa Puffs themselves (usually described by the adjectives "munchy, crunchy, chocolatey") and bursts with enthusiasm, exclaiming his catchphrase "I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!"^[5] Sonny was voiced by Chuck McCann from 1962 to 1978, and has been voiced by Larry Kenney since 1978.^[6]

The line "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" has entered the vernacular as a term for somebody who is irrational.^[7]

Sonny's name comes from the original format of the commercials, in which he was paired with his grandfather (also voiced by McCann). Rather than proper names, they always referred to each other as "Gramps" and "Sonny." When the grandfather was dropped from the ads, "Sonny" remained as the character's name. In 2010, Gramps returned to the Cocoa Puffs ads, with McCann reprising his role as Gramps and Kenney continuing to voice Sonny.

Sonny was designed by Gene Cleaves. Animation pioneer "Grim" Natwick (of Fleischers' Betty Boop team) also contributed to the early images of Sonny and Gramps, according to then-contemporaries who collaborated with Natwick.^[8]

Sonny was originally depicted as wearing a pink-and-white striped shirt, then in 1995 was redesigned, this time wearing 1990s "extreme" clothes and being given a more Disney-esque appearance. In 2004, he was redesigned in a more simplistic fashion, this time without clothing.

Sonny, of course, was the original crazy cuckoo. He wasn't crazy in the sense of being mentally ill, he was crazy in sense of being extremely enthusiastic.

As far as being a cuckoo bird he didn't look anything like real cuckoos.

Here's something I didn't know until I read about cuckoos in Wikipedia:

Cuckoos have played a role in human culture for thousands of years, appearing in Greek mythology as sacred to the goddess Hera. In Europe, the cuckoo is associated with spring, and with cuckoldry, for example in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. In India, cuckoos are sacred to Kamadeva, the god of desire and longing, whereas in Japan, the cuckoo symbolises unrequited love.

Not to get too serious, oh crap, this all is very serious... but between having Donald Trump who was merely a malignant narcissist who expressed delusional beliefs to having legislators influencing policy who very well may be clinically delusional, and having so many people in MAGA world being unmoored from reality, this country really does need some intensive psychotherapy.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's most famous lunacy was suggesting that California wildfires were caused by George Soro and his space laser. I wish it was possible that the ghost of Sigmund Freud, another famous Jew, could tell NASA and the NIMH how to make mental health space lasers.

Addendum: 

Freud didn't really say this, but he might have....

If you don't she the Disquis comment section below click here.