It's Just Joe

This is my birth month, so the issue of how the aging are viewed hits much closer to home than it used to. Is ageism in the Presidential race a thing?

It has certainly focused attention on Joe Biden in particular, largely because of his occasional verbal stumbles and his seeming to be not quite fast enough on the draw when responding to challenges such as that presented by fellow candidate Kamala Harris in one of this summer’s debates. Some feel that these are signs that he’s a bit past it now.

Like anyone with a long track record in politics, Mr. Biden has his share of twists and turns in position to explain. If he now demonstrates a change of heart or mind, is it evolution or a flip-flop? We can only go back to that long track record for clues. As for the gaffes, they have been going on for a long time, perhaps well before anyone would link them to getting older.

Among those qualities we appreciate in a President are authenticity and the ability to absorb new information, especially from experts focused on a particular knowledge base. But we also appreciate a President who chooses words carefully, mindful of the enormous impact they have on the country’s mood and that of the rest of the world. I am not endorsing Joe Biden nor discouraging support for him here,  I’m just saying that occasional gaffes are his thing.

The media are merciless. Remember when President Ford, at a considerably younger age, said in a debate that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe? He was also famous for a physical stumble. George W. Bush was infamous for  “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” after Hurricane Katrina, and the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the ship after the invasion of Iraq. When it comes to unfortunate utterances or phrases associated with Presidents, this list is longer than we like to think. The point is, it’s not about aging. It’s about being human, and sometimes, being just plain wrong.

At my age, I have some issues. I repeat stories I have told before. I try to tell them to new people or audiences, but am not always successful. People I have known for a while have blanket permission to cut me off if they’ve heard something already, and they do.

I’ll leave you with this little story. Some years ago, my wife and I were out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a colleague of mine, who is white like me, but his wife is Asian. The restaurant brought us many dishes, and she graciously served us from them. She served me first, which was a surprise. “You are the wisest,” she explained, which I wanted to take as a compliment, but that’s not quite it. In her native country, the custom is that the oldest one at the table is served first. By the way, I apologize to those of you who have heard this one before. I’ll shut up now.

Send Out the Clowns

 The flap over the now infamous Missouri State Fair rodeo clown’s spoof of President Obama is not just a simple tempest in a teapot.  It only adds to my wonderment at the nature of humor. For years, I have asked myself why some who make one quip perceived as racist have to quit their jobs, weep and gnash their teeth in eternal banishment while others get away with it, even make a way-more-than-comfortable living at it.

For decades, Don Rickles packed auditoriums in Vegas. Bill Maher would seem to be his logical successor, with shtick full of comments about blacks, Asians and others that are clearly racist -- but most of us laugh anyway. On the female side, there are Joan Rivers and perhaps her successor, Sarah Silverman, whose main goal seems to be to shock us.

Many comedians work “dirty” these days, with shtick full of f-words. Personally, I think Robin Williams is a stitch without the injection of such language, but he does it in concerts. Maybe that’s just me. When I was young I laughed very hard at Red Skelton, from whose lips a dirty word never issued on stage or screen.

In one of those famous Woody Allen movies whose titles all run together in my head, Alan Alda, playing a TV star, is seen telling a group of up-and-comers, “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny!” Sometimes it’s about the material. The joke just doesn’t work. Or the comedian can’t make it work.

Is it about conscious – or even unconscious – intention? The Missouri rodeo clown could have been just plain mean. But were those who made fun of Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, Clinton or Carter any less mean? Does Obama “deserve” it any less than they? I return to Bill Maher, who makes jokes about Obama’s race on practically every show.

Maybe it’s about the comedian internally laughing along with us, bringing to the surface attitudes many of feel we have to suppress or are afraid to recognize in ourselves. Prejudices, if you look at them from a distance, are actually fuuny, largely because they make no sense. But there’s a chord that has to resonate someplace in us to bring out the laugh.

As you can see, I haven’t begun to figure this out, but I’m not sure the myriad of minds out there better than my own have figured it out either. Don’t even think about applying concepts like fairness or consistency to this problem. You will fail miserably, as I have.

Out of the Barn 2

The nightly cable new outrage festival was in full swing last night amid reports by the Washington Post and The Guardian that federal agencies had “back doors” into the servers of Silicon Valley companies to spy on Americans, ostensibly for collecting information on us to protect us against terrorism. I’d like to be able to tell you I’m surprised, but am not, and can only get outraged up to a point.

The story, of course, is bad news for the Obama administration, and casts the President himself as something of a hypocrite. While campaigning for office, he was critical of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program, but the Post report reveals that he certainly can’t pretend he’s a champion of privacy.

While the government’s PRISM program is intended as a national security tool and is supposed to make us feel safer, in many respects it does exactly the opposite. If the government can collect information on all of us for national security reasons, the obvious fear is, suppose at some point down the road, the government decides to use this capability for other reasons?

That said, the civil libertarians can burst their blood vessels about big government, but they and the rest of us don’t get nearly as exercised about the data mining that’s already going on by the private corporations we all connect or deal with and what’s being done with that information about us. There is just as much potential for harm, if not more.

We do have to ask ourselves about our own complicity in all of this. Most of us carry devices that report exactly where we are at all times. Every time we use the Internet to look something up – maybe on a site we wouldn’t care to have others know we visited – that visit is being logged someplace, and presumably could come back to bite us later on.

And, I just can’t wait to hear the screams after private aerial drones go into widespread use. We’d better start thinking about getting ourselves fitted for lead-foil suits.

Although the Post story doesn’t surprise me, I certainly recognize the beneficial effect of investigative reporting like this. More than a year ago, I observed here that the privacy horse had long since left the barn. There may not be a lot we can do about that, but at least some entity is telling us where the horse is headed. And though it may be inconvenient, we still have a fundamental individual choice about whether we go along for the ride.

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Following the Rules

A number of states now have laws prohibiting drivers from using hand-held cell phones in vehicles. But researchers are saying even that’s not good enough -- that any use of a cell phone by a driver increases the chance of an accident, so more restrictions may be coming some day.

Why does this behavior need to be regulated? Because of abuse. Those who use their heads know that engaging in a long or complicated phone conversation while driving can be a distraction. If people limited the use of cell phones to necessary communication while operating heavy machinery, there wouldn’t be a need for these laws.

Not everyone needs the penalty imposed by a law to do the right thing, or avoid doing the wrong thing. Sad to say, most of us do need these rules and regulations, and the people who think laws weren’t made for them still need the protection they afford. No one is above the law.

For decades, conservatives have been trying to convince us that free markets regulate themselves. Indeed, they would if some people weren’t dishonest or greedy. Seems like these economic systems are all foolproof – too bad that human beings have to be involved.

Former President Bush and some in his administration were pretty good at coming up with reasons why the laws didn’t apply to them. One of President Obama’s challenges will be restoring respect for the law. The best way to accomplish that is through leadership by example.

But I do hope Obama’s new Secretary of the Treasury gets his taxes right this year.

There, now I’ve said it.

No Apology Necessary

Some of you may have been disappointed at not hearing more mea culpas from President Bush at his final news conference this week. Not that you’re going to get a sitting President to apologize for mistakes – but sometimes it’s better to leave things alone.

Did you really want to hear him admit the Iraq war was a mistake? He did express disappointment that there were no weapons of mass destruction there. But for Mr. Bush to actually admit the war was a mistake would have been hard to take for many. If I were a member of a family that had lost a loved one over there, I certainly wouldn’t want to hear the President say he screwed up – even if I were absolutely convinced he had. It wouldn’t make me feel even a little bit better.

You could pile on a lot of other things: “Mission Accomplished” (he admitted to that one), Gitmo, torture. FEMA after Katrina, the stem-cell decision, even No Child Left Behind. But even when he was dead wrong, he believed he was acting according to his best light, so you can go only so far in faulting him. I never believed that selfish motives were involved, other than self-defense.

History is always the best judge, and there hasn’t been quite enough of that yet, of course, to give us a crystal-clear video of Mr. Bush’s years as President. And as the saying goes, when you point the finger of blame at someone, three are pointing right back at you. You can fool me once, another old saying begins, but a majority of us did elect him to a second term.

The President says don’t plan on seeing that much of him after next week – he’s happy to leave the stage, and I say, let him go in peace. The challenges ahead of us will need every bit of our energy and attention. Looking backward will only slow us down.

There, now I’ve said it.