Riding Into the Sunset
On the universal resonance of Biden’s struggle to accept the reality of aging.
My grandma picked up the phone like she had many times before.
“Who is this?” she asked skeptically.
“Grandma, it’s me, Ethan, your grandson.”
Before she could trust the voice on the other end of the phone, I had to give a detail that proved it was me. All I wanted was to catch up and ask her what she thought of the movie Thelma. And already it felt like we were living out a scene from the movie.
Thelma is a summer comedy, released last month, about a grandmother who falls for a phone scam. A stranger pretends to be her grandson and an accomplice tricks her into mailing them $10,000 in cash. Preying on older people like this is all too common these days. But rather than throw up her hands, Thelma grabs a scooter and a gun to take her money back. It’s the ultimate revenge flick for older people, a coming-of-age film made for them. That’s why I hoped my grandparents would see it.
But my grandma said she didn’t like the film, and she said it made my grandpa depressed.
“It was about this woman who had a lot of different personalities going on. I didn’t know what the hell she was trying to prove,” he said to me when grandma passed him the phone.
Thelma didn’t want to be told she couldn’t live alone and had to be put in a nursing home. She wanted to prove that she could handle the world as it is, and didn’t need the help of her family to get her money back. But she was in over her head. She took a fall in a sketchy area at night and had no one to help her back up until an old friend whom she had insulted offered out his hand. And together, they get her money back.
To me, the film was saying that older people are not limited, that they can do courageous things. They just need help. But my grandpa didn’t see it that way.
“She showed a lot more resistance and determination to be someone she wanted to be, more than where she was at,” he said. “You need to be realistic with your age and what you’re capable of.”
Of course, our conversation turned to the president. This was a few days before Biden announced he was stepping down. The more the polls and Democratic insiders implored him to bow out of the race, the more he dug in. On Morning Joe, he blasted “the elites” and said, “Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me.” On NBC, he told Lester Holt: “my mental acuity’s been pretty damn good. I’ve gotten more done than any president has in a long, long time.”
My grandpa wasn’t having any of it. Granted, he’s a loyal Trump supporter, but he also just didn’t think Biden could win. “Biden is too old. There’s no contest,” he said. “If he has any brains he should disqualify himself.”
My grandpa’s rule: “You have to be wise enough about what you can do and what you can’t do.”
While he may give good advice to others, my grandpa has a harder time applying the rule to himself. And here lies the crux of the problem that came to the national fore over the past weeks.
It’s a whole lot harder when you are the one who needs help. Biden’s bravado and defensiveness reminded many of Trump—but he also sounded just like my grandpa, or honestly anyone being told they are not who they once were, that they can’t do what they always have done.
The day we spoke, my grandma had asked my grandpa to hand over the responsibility of paying the bills to a financial advisor. “I don’t care who she’s talking to,” he said, “because the bills get paid.”
Grandpa came from a working-class family in Brockton, Massachusetts, a former shoe manufacturing town. He didn’t go to college and started out selling vacuum cleaners at a department store. He married into a successful Italian immigrant family and worked in the family construction business for a decade before starting his own. By the end of his career, he had built hundreds of houses in Massachusetts and started a business that supported his family and helped pay for his grandchildren’s college education, including mine. He has worked hard his whole life. And now, at the age of 86, he is experiencing cognitive decline.
Grandpa knows he’s not the young man he once was. “You’re not the same as you age. I don’t care who you are,” he said. He takes a pill to help with his memory and has relinquished responsibilities that he no longer can do safely. “I’m not out painting boat bottoms,” he said.
Still, there are limits. Grandpa has done the bookkeeping his whole life, and doesn’t intend to stop just because others tell him that he should.
It’s easier to see flaws and weaknesses in people other than ourselves.
It may pain my Trump-supporting grandpa to hear it, but he sounds all too much like Scranton Joe.
Biden is a man who read poetry with pebbles in his mouth to overcome his stutter, who fixed up the mansion in Wilmington for his family, who defeated an incumbent to become one of the youngest Senators in American history, who looked after his two sons after his wife and daughter were killed in a tragic car accident, who ran for president three times before finally winning, and who has overseen perhaps the most significant overhaul of the American economy in decades.
After a lifetime of hard work and defying the odds, it’s no wonder that when asked whom he listens to on personal matters like staying in the race, Biden responded, “Me.” Facing insistent questions from the media about his competency, Biden understandably resisted. He wanted to do what he did before and beat Trump. He wanted to overcome the odds again, all on his own.
He wanted to pull a Thelma.
But last weekend, Biden finally woke up. He didn’t hold out simply because he wanted to cling to power, as the cynics claim. The more fundamental challenge was accepting his own limitations, that his body and mind do not work the way they used to. He overcame one of life’s greatest obstacles: human pride.
Tonight, Biden will appear on TV from the Oval Office for the first time since making his announcement. It’s an opportunity to share the deeply personal nature of this decision, and I hope he takes it. It would be an example to us all.
Ethan Dodd is a writer interested in populism, economics, jazz, and film. He’s written for outlets including Washington Monthly, Baltimore Sun, and The Economist.
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For reasons that are all too common, and all too human, Biden can be forgiven for not recognizing that he was in no shape to run against Trump. But what about his advisers? What about Harris? What about the media? They all knew and kept their mouths shut. Had it not been for the debate, he would still be running for president.
Like another commenter, I thought this was a lovely, meaningful, sensitive piece, but I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of Biden having overcome human pride. It's possible, and the most flattering explanation, but it seems more likely that he was forced out by a revolt from donors and the rest of the party leadership. He made a point of emphasizing in his Oval Office address that he thinks he's done great, is doing great, and deserves to be reelected without any acknowledgement that he's lost a step or what legitimately alarmed people about his debate performance.