keep calm and gobble on
Keep calm and gobble on and May God protect our troops make fitting slogans for the departing President, mawkishness and hawkishness delivered in his signature teleprompted shout. The first, Keep calm and gobble on, is an inane throwback to an Obama-era meme—itself a throwback to a WWII-era poster—befitting a Presidency that was much the same.1 It also quite literally describes what the President has been doing in the wake of Trump’s win and all the sinister rumblings of his return to power. The President is calm and gobbling, doing all these symbolic, belated things. The first sitting president to visit the Republic of Angola! The first sitting president to visit the Amazon! They seem funereal rather than pathbreaking, a handful of firsts crammed awkwardly into his term’s last days. After his remarks in Manaus, Brazil, which touted his administration’s efforts on climate and clean energy, and announced millions of dollars for the protection of the Amazon, he turned around and shuffled down a trail into the rainforest. That weird, doddering joviality—how can you watch it without grimacing? The Amazon has been so torched and degraded that large swaths of it no longer absorb carbon at all.
The second Biden catchphrase—May God protect our troops—is apparently a tribute to his eldest son, Beau, who served in Iraq and died of a brain tumor that Biden has linked to his military service. But more than that, it serves as a tagline for Biden’s career-long support for American interventionism abroad, as well as the Democrats’ long history of trying in vain to out-jingo the Republicans. Israel’s US-sponsored carnage and the grinding proxy trench war in Ukraine have complicated breezy patriotic taglines about troops and empire, but even Biden’s infirmity can’t compromise that bipartisan consensus. In his excellent diagnosis of the American political scene, written before the election even happened, Anton Jäger captured one thing that would endure despite the results: “Both parties are still committed to preserving American hyperpower abroad, with minor inflections in modality,” adding that “The term ‘party’ is perhaps too flattering for these loose coteries of elected officials, donors, publicists and would-be candidates, with no formal membership models and little to no civil-society infrastructure, except for NGO personnel.”
Last Christmas, Biden gave Architectural Digest a tour of the Oval Office. It is one of the strangest videos I have ever seen in my life—which, to be fair, is something I could say about practically every video I see online. The President drones on in a low, low whisper about how he loves the color blue, how his brother picked out the rug, how there’s an exact replica of the Oval Office in Maryland. He points at a rock in a glass display case, like some hypnotized Don DeLillo character: “This moon rock, it’s pretty cool. It’s literally a rock from the moon.” At one point, he indicates a table display crammed with medallions. “Here are what they call command coins,” he says, though technically they’re called challenge coins, tokens given out in the military to commemorate achievements or mark membership in a unit. “Command coins are given in the battlefield and the President has a command coin and my command coin has on the back of it Beau’s unit who went into Iraq for a year,” he says, handing one to the camera, “so I’m gonna give you a copy, give you one.” The low whisper is the feeble counterpart to the strained shout of official speeches. They are seemingly the only two registers he has left.
The mental deterioration of the President and his inner circle’s smug dismissal of it will only continue to be fodder for pundits and historians seeking reasons for the Trump redux. Even more than that, it has allegorized a larger problem with the Democrats, the American liberal elite, and American political rhetoric. Pankaj Mishra summed it up perfectly in his piece in the New York Review, also written before the election, which pointed out that “hardly any resources for a renewal seem to exist among an aging liberal American political and media class. Its global prominence, as is clear now, was earned with raw power, during decades of unimpeded American hegemony, rather than superior intelligence and creativity. Not even the challenge of China, long predicted and now formidable, compels policy- and opinion-makers to shake off complacency and articulate a novel political and cultural vision.”
In the Architectural Digest video, Biden sits on the Resolute Desk and whispers to the camera crew, “I’ve spent more time with the Chinese leader than any other head of state. And he asked me, Can I define America? I said, Yes, I can. In one word. And I mean it. Possibilities. Possibilities. We Americans think anything is possible when we do it together.”
Perhaps it is fitting that the man once billed as a great comforter, marked by his own immense personal loss, will be remembered as the one who refused to see the losses mounting all around him; who sought to extend his own plausibility as a politician by insisting on grand possibilities that everywhere were being visibly, at times violently, foreclosed.
His own loss was embedded in his language: in his proclamations, in the legislation he championed, in the tokens he handed out, in the ever-widening gaps in his syntax and his memory. Even the pardoning of Hunter had the shape of grand tragedy: the aging patriarch losing his favored son and shamefully granting clemency to the prodigal. But the moment it becomes language, grief is often mere charade. The repeated reminder of his own loss will not console the losses to come, both at home and abroad, which will keep falling into the harsh light of the present like dead birds from the sky. These losses will not have a grammar or a man to meet them, let alone a President. They will not be possibilities but realities. And they will be borne, as they always are, by someone else.
ben tapeworm
1 In the London Review of Books, Adam Tooze noted the Biden Administration’s fondness for “Second World War revivalism,” writing that “One of Biden’s favourite phrases, ‘arsenal of democracy’, is straight out of the World War Two dictionary. As Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi liked to note that her father had voted for the first Lend-Lease bill to aid Britain in 1941 and she was now doing the same for Ukraine. In a mindboggling throwback to the 20th century, the NDIS hails America’s effort to revive the production of 155 mm shells. These, it turns out, are the common denominator in the two major wars of the moment. It also tells us something about the technological level of those conflicts.”