IN YOUR OWN TIME, JOE

Remember Kamala Harris laughing throatily on the phone to Biden after they’d dumped Trump in 2020? ‘We did it, Joe. We did it. You’re gonna be the next President of the United States.’

Erotic, I thought. The hottest words a woman could ever speak to a man. ‘We did it, Joe.’

It roused and upset me all at once. Here was a moment I would never experience. No woman would ever tell me I was going to be the next President of the United States.

I can’t speak for Donald Trump, but I guess he must have been pretty upset too. Not only because Biden winning meant that he had lost, but because no one was ever going to say ‘We did it, Donald.’

‘We’?

Is there such a word as ‘we’ in the small, cruel Trump lexicon? With whom would Trump ever share a victory? There, in one brief clip, as Kamala Harris’s joy exploded into the phone, was the tragi-comedy of Donald Trump’s whole existence: the thing his crazed-egoism would exclude him from forever - the sound of warm companionable laughter. The music of sharing.

At the time I half-wished the world would end there and then. Not only so that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden would be spared the inevitable anti-climax of what ‘doing it’ entailed, but so that we too could go to sleep with the sweet smell of success in our nostrils. ‘If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy,’ says Othello when he is reunited with Desdemona. Some moments are so incontestably happy - seeing a beloved’s face after a long absence; writing the last words of Middlemarch or Little Dorrit; beating Donald Trump - they should not be spoiled by any aftermath. See Naples and die.

To ask for Biden to step down is to remember him as he was and conserve his past victories against the havoc wreaked by time. You would think that very thought must have crossed his own mind more than once. Only losers wants a re-match. Tell him that, Jill. Tell him to sit in his chair, put his old feet in a bucket of Radox therapy soak, smoke a cigar, sip an Irish whisky and drop off, savouring the glory that was. Tell him not to give Trump even a sniff of getting the last laugh. Unless, of course, there is some jealousy of Kamala Harris in play and this time Jill wants to be the one who says ‘We did it, Joe.’

But there is another way of looking at this. The reasons Biden should not go on are, if we choose to take the world ironically, the very reasons he should stick it out. Even slurring his words at eighty-one he makes more sense than Trump ever did at forty. Despite his lapses and confusions, with Biden you feel his words had meaning once upon a time. They reach back to a world of intelligibility he once moved in. They are what’s left after a catastrophe. They are the noble ruins of an edifice that once stood proudly. With Trump, on the other hand, nothing is forgotten because nothing was ever there. He is not the trace or ruin of anything grander. He is the ruin of a ruin.

So how about staying with Biden for the sake of keeping faith with what he no longer is? I hold this to be a principle that should guide us with the old generally. Yes, their slowness of gait is exasperating if you happen to be behind them on a crowded street; and yes, waiting for them to form a coherent answer to a question you haven’t asked can make you feel your own life blood is ebbing away. I know. I am one of the slow myself. But if the alternative is the young pushing you aside as they run marathons in the park, whizzing past on e-bikes which they discard when they’ve run out of places to speed through, like children throwing toys out of the window and, when it comes to serious matters, jumping to conclusions which are invariably erroneous, then give me the old any time.

Where is the virtue of youth if it’s wasted on acceleration and where is the virtue of acceleration if there’s nowhere we want to go tomorrow let alone today?

When the young know nothing, we have a duty to revere the old who at least took the time to know something once.

But it’s not only for lacking youth and urgency that the 81 year-old Biden matters. We value him, no less, for the absence in him of a single oratorical gift. In a world of shysters and liars, Biden can proudly boast he is neither mountebank nor rabble -rouser. Ask yourself what heart Joe Biden ever quickened into rash action. That’s right - you can’t recall one. Neither can he.

Consider the times we live in. On marches and in protests all over the world the gullible gather, mouths open, eager to be told what extremist position to take up next. Did any good ever come of a political rally? The public speaker who can’t be heard, who freezes and forgets his lines, is a Godsend in an inflammable world. ‘So I ask you, comrades, to join me in condemning . . . something or other, I can’t remember what. Good night, go home, love one another, and don’t forget to feed the cat - or do I mean the dog.’

Armageddon’s only round the corner whatever we do. So let’s shut the jabbering world up and send time into reverse. Let’s pretend that the words ‘We did it, Joe’ haven’t been spoken yet. ‘We’ll do it, Joe. One fine day we’ll do it.’ This way, at least, we’ll have something to look forward to.