Category: Ageing

Another Useful Idiot Crosses My Path

I'm the chess guy hereabouts. A year and a half ago I got a call from an 86-year-old retired chemist with an interest in the game. A meeting was arranged, a game was played, and then the talk turned to politics. The old man told us that he had voted for Biden out of revulsion at Trump. He said he had been a Republican all his life but lately became a Democrat. Brian and I were gentle with him, drawing him out to see how deep he'd dig his hole. It was deep enough for us to write him off as an utterly clueless old man living in the past.

Part of the problem with such people is that they live by a code of civility that will get you killed in the present-day political world should you dare to enter it.  They don't understand that the Left is at war with us, and leftists no longer hide the fact. Their stealth ideologues of, say, 10-15 years ago are now out in the open and brazen in their plans and proclamations. Leftists see politics as  war, and if we don't, we lose.  Clueless oldsters such as the retired chemist are also, most of them, unaware that the Democrat Party is now a hard-Left, successor-commie, outfit that is trying to achieve under the sign of the Jackass what the CPUSA failed to achieve under the hammer and sickle.

Brian and I are a couple of patzers which is not to say that we won't clean your clock at the local coffee house. We are 'B' players (1600-1800) in the USCF hierarchy. The game with the old man turned into a training session. He acquitted himself so poorly that we never heard from him again despite our welcoming manner. 

That is another fault of old men. Their outsized egos make them impermeable to instruction. They cannot stand to lose. But life is hierarchical and you will lose again and again and again. Wokesters with their promotion of 'equity' (equality of outcome) and their assault on merit rail against life's natural hierarchy, but to no ultimate avail. In the end, reality wins.

With apologies to Ron DeSantis, reality is where 'woke' goes to die.

Consolations of Late Adulthood

Despite the fact that the Grim Reaper, the ultimate 'Repo man,' is hot on my trail, I wouldn't go back to being a child, an adolescent, or even a young adult for anything. What is that makes childhood and adolescence so rotten for some of us?  In a word, powerlessness, and in a three-fold sense.

One is first of all physically undeveloped and weak. But grow tall and strong, brisk of stride and stern of visage, and you project a secular analog of Christ's noli me tangere,  don't touch me. (Cf. John 20:17.)
  
The child is also psychologically without defenses, overly impressionable and suggestible, and at the mercy of anyone who cares to launch an attack. But as the years roll by one develops the requisite filters. One learns to hold people and their attitudes at arm's length, psychologically speaking. Reading the Stoics helps, as does blogging. One develops a thick skin given all the bottom-feeders and scum-suckers that patrol its vasty deeps. But mainly it is just living day by day and dealing with the world's tomfoolery that has the requisite desensitizing effect. One becomes self-assured and sufficient unto oneself. Validation by others becomes less and less important.

In third place comes the financial weakness of childhood. Money buys freedom, freedom from the wrong environments and the wrong people. A little thought discloses that money is negatively related to happiness. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy the absence of misery. Or to put the point precisely, it can buy that without which most of us will be miserable. It can put one in a position where the pursuit of happiness is likely to succeed. It doesn't take much by way of money and what it can buy to be happy. But happiness does require a modicum, with the possible exception of a few enlightened sages.

So adulthood has its advantages, and for some of us they outweigh its disadvantages. But your experience may vary, and a fool's errand it would be to argue against another's experience.

Biden Too Old?

Wrong question! despite its being asked repeatedly by lemming journos.

Not too old, unfit for office. Physically decrepit. Non compos mentis. Morally corrupt to the core. A fraud and a phony. Rooted in no principles of his own. A mouthpiece for deleterious leftist doctrines. A disaster for the republic and for the world. Those who support him are beneath contempt.

Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, is 94. Listen to his assessment.

Billionaire Donors Withholding Loot from Leftist Seminaries

Long-time donors are finally waking up to the wokeassery* of once-great universities that have for decades been transmogrifying into leftist seminaries. ('Seminary' is etymologically related to 'semen' and in the seminaries in question the origin of the jism is masturbatory: nothing productive comes from these seed beds.)

I predicted the donor revolt on 13 October about a week after the Hamas savagery of 7 October. Case in point: Leon Cooperman.  He's given some $50 mil to Columbia but will give no more citing the cranial feculence (my polite phrase, not his) of the Hamas-supporting  students. 

What is astonishing to many of us, however, is how the Cooperman cohort could be so clueless for so long. Cooperman just now discovered what has been going on since the '60s, namely, the "long march through the institutions"? Only now you decide to stop funding the anti-civilizational scum?

Better late than never, but no fool like an old fool.

Copperman's 80. The elderly tend to live in the past.  They tend to be fat, lazy, complacent, inattentive, and lost in the petty particulars of their self-centered quotidian round, even if they are not, like Joey B., physically decrepit, non compos mentis, morally corrupt to the core, and a disaster for the USA and the world.

___________

*A coinage of mine which I am sure has occurred to others. Modelled on jackassery, a word recognized by Merriam-Webster. The donkey or jackass is the symbol, an aptro-symbol if you will, of the Democrat party in the USA which, once respectable, is now hard-Left and destructive of our republic as she was founded to be.

Why I Want to Live Long

I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?" 

And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not possible before. The young man's dong is a magic wand that conjures and weaves the web of maya the better to ensnare him and keep him tied to the transient. The old man who makes good use of his old age sloughs off the illusions of earthly love that were always more hydraulic in provenance than pneumatic.  He now has a good shot at moral and spiritual improvement. But will he take it?

Or will he essay to prolong his dong and with it the web of lies it weaves? Nothing is more pitiful than the decrepit oldster who keeps himself jacked up Hefner-style.  But despite the Viagra and the nubile nymphs cavorting for his delectation, poor Hef could not rise to the occasion and was reduced to manual mode. 

Live long for the end of life's day in wait for the the owl of Minerva who spreads her wings at dusk.  There are still things to be learned and things to be done that can only be learned and done here below.   As for you workers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft,  "Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät," as I once heard Hans-Georg Gadamer say.  "A scholar's harvest years come late."

Another Advantage of Old Age

The abandoning of your vices becomes easier as they abandon you.

The mechanism of flight of the vices of the flesh is powered by the mortal coil's decline, which is why the old man out for spiritual gain should rejoice, not rue, his libido on the wane. 

The old man, unlike the young, has a good shot at freedom from lust's subornation even in the decadent West if freedom he wants, the wanting standing in inverse relation to the subornation.

Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.  (St. Augustine, City of God)

The Long and the Short of It

The young, their lives ahead of them, think life is long; the old, their lives ending, know that it is short. Why knowledge in the second case? Because the old, some of them anyway, are surveyors of life and not mere livers of it.  This suggests that the old who lose themselves  in the quotidian round  may avoid the view from above and cultivate thereby a life-enhancing illusion.

Not filed under Sage Advice, but under Art of Life.

Compensations of Old Age

Philosophers in dialogueYou now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit:

     Brief light's made briefer
     'Neath the leaden vault of care
     Better to accept the sinecure
     Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauan transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

Grim ReaperThe Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

 

JanusWhat is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

No Fool Like an Old Fool

Ed is an 80-year-old neighbor of mine. We've been casual acquaintances for years, running into each other on the trails, exchanging greetings and snatches of conversation. The other day politics came up for the first time, and to my surprise I learned that Ed, originally a Republican, had become an Independent, and was now a Democrat. I said, perhaps with a bit of surprise, "How can you support the Dems, given their current leadership?"

Ed, the quintessentially nice guy, said, "Let's stay friends, Bill, and avoid politics." I agreed that this was the wisest course, and we parted amicably. But my opinion of old Ed had dropped, and I resolved to limit my contact with him, limited as it already was. I knew there was no reaching him.

What explains the utter political stupidity of otherwise good, intelligent, and basically conservative people? Doesn't Ed understand what is in his and his family's interest?

One factor is mindless Trump hatred. A second is that old people live in the past and simply cannot see what is happening. A third is a life too much absorbed in the private and the quotidian. Luckily, old Ed probably won't be around to wake up to the day when the private life is no more.

No fool like an old fool.

Just a Number?

Some say that age is just a number. Well, is temperature just a number too? In Phoenix in July, say? Or is it a number that measures something?

"It's 115!" "That's just a number; you are only as hot as you feel."