Cross posted at Daily Kos
It was painful to watch Joe Biden last night, as he read from the teleprompter, as he struggled to speak with cadence, to find pauses, to use his voice to emphasis where emphasis belonged. His face was mostly frozen, masked; there was no warm smile, no cocking of the head, no basking in the limelight, only the words spilling out, wonderful words, historic words, uplifting words that were delivered as if from within a deep vault weighed down with a heavy lid.
I felt badly for him, and for us.
Joe Biden, whose whole schtick was warmth, touch, empathic looks, an ease with children, caring and compassion for the disabled—Joe Biden had always been a real man who carried his insides on his outsides and his emotions on his sleeve. Where is that man now?
I’m sure he’s still there, inside; that Dr. Jill can see him, and all those close to him can see him given some time and patience and a quiet room. On the TV last night, that Joe Biden was hard to see.
There’s some irony in that, because Joe Biden is a man who lived and worked through this whole television era, the era you can say began with the Nixon-Kennedy debate, in 1960, the first televised Presidential debate, when Joe Biden was just 17. As time went on, public life became more and more about communicating an ineffable sense of being genuine, of being real and integrated, to the camera and the airwaves and to make that ineffable thing come through, via pixelated rendering, to people’s living rooms. Joe Biden had it mastered; when he said the ACA was big fuckin’ deal, you knew he believed it was a big fuckin’ deal, and when he told that boy not to worry about his own stutter, you knew Joe was bringing forward oodles of love and encouragement from somewhere deep in his heart.
There’s more irony. We’re living in a time where words matter a lot less than they used to, especially the words of politicians, because nobody believes what anybody says anymore; anything anybody says has to be filtered by the way they say it. “That’s so real,” kids will say—as if they are aware that most of what they hear, day in and day out, is not real.
Which it isn’t.
The real is our weapon, our ace in the hole, because the other side—the Republicans, Republican politicians, and dyed-in-the-wool regular Republican people, whether they are the kind of Republicans who brag that they walked their high school graduation when they actually didn’t, I mean rural drug users like my neighbors, or whether they are the other kind of Republicans, well-coiffed polyester-clad old people driving their Lincolns—those people on the other side don’t have access to real, because their own real (the real they have deep inside them) is encrusted in an impenetrable shell of white privilege, which is so impenetrable they’ve never experienced their own real themselves. So when these Republicans cheer each other on, and cheer on Trump, the whole noisy business of it resounds with fake, fake, fake, and it’s the same— boring and predictable—regardless of whether it’s Representative TalkingHead on CNN or somebody being interviewed at the town diner and acting like they seriously had a real opinion, which they don’t, or somebody’s drunk uncle riding shotgun in the pickup truck with his head hanging out the window. Fake.
Real is, in fact, our ace in the hole because so-called swing voters are people who are inured to logic or anything that involved parsing words, anything that would require thinking through propositions such as: Are Nazis bad? Or: Should hungry kids should be fed lunch? and who live as if any and all facts can simply be dismissed with shrug and a redirection of their attention to the immediate needs of the day. And these people respond—if they respond at all—to that feeling of real, the feeling that cuts through the words, and decide whether they like Candidate A or Candidate B based on that feeling, regardless of whether Candidate A is a felon who wants to inject them with bleach vs. Candidate B who has spent their whole life trying to protect vulnerable people from felons armed with hypodermics. The swing voters don’t believe anything either way, and they don’t really care about anything either, but they know who how they feel and who gives them that warm feeling of connection, of mutual identification. Joe could give them that, but he can’t anymore, because he has a progressive neurological disease that’s only going to get worse, even as he has good days and bad days.
Which brings me to the unreality—by which I mean a lack of empathetic understanding—that characterized most Democrats’ reaction to poor Joe’s condition. Most Democrats didn’t see the man and his suffering; they saw only his role with regard to the election, like he wasn’t a human being at all, like he should continue, for everyone else’s benefit, to play the role of the candidate we needed even as it was clear he couldn’t do it anymore, which was something that he didn’t want to admit and those closest to him didn’t want to admit (they’d lose their jobs, or their power, or both) and that most of us minor players didn’t want to admit either. Finally, Joe had to admit it to himself, although he couldn’t admit it in the speech last night, because then he’d have to resign the Presidency too, so he said something about passing the torch, a pat phrase which served adequately, even if it wasn’t really believable and wasn’t really real.
Last night I found myself wishing he didn’t have to do that, and that we all didn’t have do that. Wishing that we could all just share our appreciation and love with him and with each other, as in Joe, what a great job you’ve done, and we’re sorry to see what’s happening to you, but it is happening; we see it, and you know what? You rest and take care, and we’ll be fine. Joe’s embarking on a new part of life’s journey; he’s going to learn things about himself and when he learns them he’ll wish he’d known them all along, because that’s what happens when the flesh weakens and the cacophony of thoughts slows. I’m getting old, and I’m experiencing it myself. It’s not bad.
I’m wishing we all didn’t have to do that—the posturing and pretending that most everybody here at dKos demanded we all do, the whole time from June 27 to last Sunday—because when you allow yourself to feel the real, to see the human there, in each of us, see, you get a little of that superpower Joe had, or maybe still has but can’t express so well anymore, and that Kamala Harris has—god love her and keep her safe—that superpower to change somebody. Not to change their mind, but to change their feelings, so that they can change their own mind.
And that, in significant part, is how we’re going to win this election.
