"We don’t know these men...."

We don’t know these men. We’ve never broken bread with them, or shared beers with them. We’re not in the room when the late nights calls come….when life and death decisions need to be made while still wiping sleep from the eyes. We see what we’re allowed to see. (In some cases of course, if the man in the office is a child with no self-control, we see it all. Our current President is a monstrous historical aberration, so I speak instead of the Presidents who could actually read, write, and feel the pain of others. Each of these men was alternately fascinating, frustrating, and flawed. Each could be the star in his own movie.)

But even before our current occupant came along, we’d search out the words that bolstered our biases, and largely filter out the rest. After a while these men start to feel familiar, at least. Perceived foibles can be mocked on SNL. Mannerisms are exaggerated. What we’re left with is largely a caricature. Chevy Chase falling down the stairs. A portrait hanging on a wall, perhaps touched up by an illicit magic marker.

Joe Biden seems a good man. A kind, empathetic soul who spent 50 years in government, doing his best to fix things that might not be fixable. A loyal husband. A loving father. He has endured personal tragedies that would have destroyed a weaker soul. He managed to overcome a crippling stutter. Nobody ever gave Joe Biden anything. He worked for it all. He’s relatable. He’s human. He’s made his share of mistakes. He wanted most of all to become President. Finally, after multiple attempts, he made it. By then age had slowed him down considerably, the same way it’s going to slow me and you down if we are fortunate to get as far, but he surely deserved better than the mess he inherited. And of course more credit for the large swaths of that mess that he managed, mostly quietly and diligently, to clean up. He just so happened to reach the pinnacle of politics in an era when the nation had been dumbed down to the nub. Here was an old-fashioned grandfather who used words like “malarkey” and “poppycock”, now forced to deal with roving packs of social-media hyenas, and constantly in the media-shadow of his predecessor, a grifting gangster with a cult following and an entire faux national news network at his disposal. It was the equivalent of 4 years of having toilet paper stuck to your shoe. That Joe Biden did as well as he did in the face of such a blitzkrieg of shameless liars and traitorous jackals is one of the great feats of modern political history. He’ll be treated much better when he’s gone than he was when he was here.

He deserved better now, and deserved better then. It’s hard not to think that the United States turned on itself, and Joe Biden was its collateral damage. But then again, if he was not there in 2020, at the rate things are going now, I might be in jail for being disloyal next to Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen. If it turns out that Joe Biden didn’t save the republic, he at least gave it another few years. He had the balls to get in the arena. And despite the odds, he was prepared to enter it again.

Cancer has its hooks in him now. It has spread to his bones. What little I know about cancer tells me this is not good. I’m not an oncologist, so I’ll refrain from joining the currency cacophony of sudden medical experts with high school diplomas on what his sudden diagnosis means. Right now the same medical folks who signed off on Trump being 6 foot 3 inches tall and weighing 224 pounds, and dead silent on Trump gutting cancer research, are braying for Biden’s medical records, desperate to prove that Biden’s cancer was known and kept secret….suddenly jettisoning their “he has dementia” talking-point with a new one. Aghast that a President would….GULP….LIE! The pearl-clutching is worthy of a John Williams score.

Joe Biden will be dogged to the actual grave, and if at all possible these fools will dig him up again to blame him for their Dear Leader’s next disaster, whether it be the price of groceries or the newly gifted Air Force One nose-diving into the tarmac.

In a normal environment, a human being receiving a devastating cancer diagnosis would be met with universal sympathy. Ours is not a normal environment. Trump did manage a non-vile post, but since all the words were spelled correctly and placed in the correct order it’s universally acknowledged that he didn’t write it. His son more than made up for the gesture however, suggesting in a tweet that Dr Jill Biden was covering up the cancer of her husband, Don Jr apparently unaware that Dr Biden’s doctorate is in education, not medicine. It was the type of breathless ignorance that has become normalized in this country. The type of stupid that Joe Biden had to contend with for his entire term. The type of stupid that probably took years off his life.

The type of stupid that, quite frankly, he deserves an apology for.

I wish we were better but we’re not. I wish the calvary was coming but it’s not. I wish honorable men like Joe Biden could live long enough to knock on the triple-digit door, able to rest weary heads on the collective bosom of their loving families. I wish cancer would fuck off. I wish a lot of other people, places, and things would fuck off, too.

In a bit…

—tf