The Dementia Of A Liberal Politician - Progressive Things Being What They Are, Nobody Noticed

Much has been made of the mental decline of former President Joe Biden, on display again months after leaving office in what he hoped would be a rehabilitating interview on The View, a media claque who had championed the man's intelligence, acuity, perception, and vigor despite his obvious decline. 

In the recent interview Biden clattered on as incomprehensibly as he  had before, cheered on by his wife Jill. Whatever the Bidens had hoped would happen - the return of a bright, snappy, alert man ready to take back the leadership of the party - did not.  It was a sad, dispiriting performance, far worse than the disastrous debate Biden had with Donald Trump, but according to news reports, the former President 'felt good about himself'. 

This is but a preamble to the story of another elderly politician who had for many decades served his constituency and the American people well.  He had been a longtime champion of progressive causes, and in fact there was no cause that he did not embrace. One critic called him 'a brimming stew of rancid ideas' which pretty much summed up the heady mix of environmentalism, black supremacy, gender fluidity, and income equality which characterized him.  

Unlike Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, a man who never turned down an opportunity to speak, our politician demurred, kept his own counsel, and chose to work behind the scenes to engineer important legislation for his district and to join others in more national and international issues. 

The fact of the matter was that he made as little sense as Joe Biden, but because of his low profile, he was never under the same spotlight as the former President had been. More importantly, because of his pat and practiced endorsement of familiar liberal causes, and his party's insistence on 'ethos, meaning, and purpose' rather than weedy details, he could stick to generalities and still be cheered for the insightful politician that he seemed.  Take this recent speech in Dayton for example:

My fellow Americans, I stand here before you as a representative of this great nation of ours to warn you of dark clouds on the horizon, dark, ominous, portentous clouds. The climate is warming at an alarming rate, and it is the bulldog capitalists of Wall Street who are fueling it with their avarice and deformed individualism.  I stand before you as a man of the people, not the bloated caricatures of prosperity sitting high up above the crowd in their penthouses, top floor boardrooms, and luxury suites.  I am with you, among you, for you...  

All well and good up to this point, for the speech had been written for him, the metaphors, similes, and ironic references cooked up by Abe Silberstein who was known for his glibness and way with words.  Working exclusively with progressives, he knew how to craft speeches of emotional impact without getting lost in details.

If the teleprompter had a glitch and went all wavy and unreadable, the politician would stare out over the crowd and point to one or two of his familiar supporters, and wait until his handlers ushered him from the podium, so seamlessly and elegantly that the audience had no idea that anything was wrong.  

Why would they, for Silberstein was such a master of speech prosody that a talk could end in medias res without notice.  A emotive speech, one designed to create an image, a feeling, had no real beginning or end.  In Silverstein's hands it was a prose poem. 

Silverstein had read Jerzy Kosinski's book Being There whose main character, Chance, a retarded gardener working on a wealthy estate who could speak only in the simplest, childish way and whose entire universe was the lawns, flowers, bushes, and trees of his garden.  When his patron dies and he leaves the estate, he captures the attention of politicians who find his observations insightful.  When he speaks of cultivating a garden, trimming the rose bushes, or tilling the soil, the politicians hear metaphor, ruminations about life. 

 

Chance possesses only scanty information picked up from TV, but his naïve and sometimes disconnected responses to questions and conversation are interpreted as oracular by his hearers, who seemingly go out of their way to provide context and ulterior meaning to his statements. Specifically, his statements regarding gardens and gardening (the only subject he knows) are interpreted as powerful metaphors for economic growth and cycles.

"In the garden growth has its seasons.  First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter; and then we get spring and summer again, and as long as the roots are not severed, all is well", he says, and the politicians assume he is talking about the business cycle, the inevitable turning and returning of economic growth.

The more he speaks, the more those around him think he is a man of particular insight and intelligence.  Even when introduced to him as Chance, the gardener, they hear only Chauncey Gardiner. 

He rises in political stature thanks to the willing suspension of disbelief of the ambitious politicians who hear only what they want to hear, and he is even mentioned as a possible candidate for Vice President.  Kosinski writes:

Facing the cameras with their un-sensing triple lenses pointed at him like snouts, Chance became only an image for millions of real people. They would never know how real he was, since his thinking could not be televised. And to him, the viewers existed only as projections of his own thought, as images. He would never know how real they were, since he had never met them and did not know what they thought.

And so it was with our politician whose increasing dementia was overlooked by his colleagues who saw in him man passionately devoted to the progressive agenda and who could communicate the simple, essential messages of social reform, justice, and the inevitable utopia to come to a waiting public. 

They, like the politicians in Being There took his words for granted, marvelous confections of emotional impact and resonance.  Few even bothered to look for a script writer let alone the genius Abe Silberstein, and gathered more and closely around the politician as he became the darling of the progressive Left. 

Energy, ah energy...where would we be without it, the infinite, eternal energy of the sun turned into useful power for our lives.  Aeolus, God's winds, blowing north, south, east, and west, turning the turbines that generate electricity to warm and brighten our homes.  There is enough energy in the world around us without having to despoil God's green earth with despoiling efforts to pull oil out of the ground.  Wind and sun are part of Creation, and we share it with them.  It is our destiny, our path...  

Once again, not one reference to detail, for who needed it? The entire progressive platform was magically chimeric, a beautiful comic book fantasy of a better world and the politician was a master of conveying such poetic reality to the voters. 

Even when his mental vacancy became painfully obvious, his supporters ignored it.  In a way, like Chance, the gardener, it was a source of his inspiration.  Silberstein's words, so elegantly crafted were what the politician would have said had he the versatility as the speech writer.  It was serendipity which brought the politician and Silberstein together in complete, understanding, symbiosis.  Silberstein's words needed a vacuum in which to thrive. 

So the politician, thanks to his eloquence, modesty, and obvious commitment, rose in prominence, and like the empty-headed Chance the gardener, was considered for high office.  Of course Silberstein wouldn't be around for ever, nor be with the politician on his rise; but at some point the words would sink in and become his own; and by that time they, the politician’s colleagues, would be well on their way themselves. 

It was the perfect storm - a totally vacant, mentally absent politician, a brilliant speech writer who knew the progressive canon and the way a simple man would make its simplemindedness meaningful, an ambitious claque of colleagues who would ignore the most obvious if it served them, and a gullible, credulous public who would swallow anything that sounded like heaven. 

Eventually of course, the teleprompters broke down, metaphorically of course, and no one could ignore the politician's dementia, now so severe that not only did he make no sense when left on his own, he had no sense at all.  Some around him were convinced that his childishness was still an asset, for the progressive following did not want some reflective, parsing exegete but a simple man like the politician; but they were in the minority, and the politician, no longer useful was left on the curb. 

'A good run', said one who was sure, given the persistent adherence to the fancy swirls and brushstrokes of his progressive colleagues, that another one like the politician would soon appear.