Explainer

Ageing

Comment

Politics

3 July 2024

3 min read

Jonathan Aitken: I’m in my 80s and here’s what I’d tell Joe Biden

Don't succumb to this politicians' fantasy.

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan is a former politician, and now a prison chaplain.

President Biden sits at a desk, holding his balled hands to his mouth.

Biden in the Oval Office, 2022.

The White House.

I am the same age as President Biden. So part of my heart went out to him as I watched his catastrophic confrontation with Donald Trump last week.

As we octogenarians know, or should know, our physical and mental faculties simply don’t work as well as they used to. If tested in the white heat of a Presidential debate, or at a multitude of far lower-level challenges, it is all too easy to slip, stumble or fall.

These human weaknesses have been almost unchanged for time immemorial. They were painfully if poignantly expressed some 2,500 years ago in the Psalms of David:

“The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.”

Modern optimists may try to argue with the ancient psalmist. In our 21st century era of vitamin pills, workouts in the gym, macrobiotic diets and intermittent fasting, we are all too willing to believe that we can postpone the arrival of the grim reaper or at least prolong our youthful vitality.

Politicians are particularly susceptible to the fantasy that they can stay on their best form into old age longer than anyone else. “Age shall not weary us” they whisper to themselves, citing elderly successes such as Winston Churchill who became Prime Minister in 1940 aged 67, leaving Downing Street at the age of 80; William Gladstone who formed his last administration when he was 82; or Ronald Reagan who rode off into the sunset aged 77.

There are many reasons why political leaders have a tendency to hold on to power beyond their sell by date. Their egos make them believe they are indispensable. Their courtiers, their staff and their appointees like to stay in power too. When the White House changes hands approximately 30,000 people lose their jobs, from mighty Cabinet Secretaries in Washington to humble rural postmasters in Hicksville. So there is a built-in bias for preserving the status quo, by fair means or by flattery.

What President Biden now needs is loving, personal advice from his nearest and dearest, and wise political advice from disinterested friends whose candour he really trusts. Will he get it?

My late wife, Elizabeth, was brave in giving what she called “frank notes” to all three of her husbands when she watched them perform on stage, on screen, or, in my case, in pulpits.

Her movie star spouses, Rex Harrison and Richard Harris, were not always pleased when her notes criticised them for forgetting their lines, failing to sound consonants, or dropping their voices at the end of sentences. I, too, was sometimes less than appreciative, but I always took Elizabeth’s advice. Would that Jill Biden might now imitate such similar Elizabethan candour.

In his perceptive article on this subject for Seen & Unseen, young Bishop Graham Tomlin (he’s about 20 years younger than me!) made excellent points about the calling of old age. To which I can cheerfully shout, as if I was still in the House of Commons: “Hear! Hear!”

For, since being ordained at 74, I have found enormous fulfilment in the calling of prison chaplaincy, pastoral care, and preaching. These are not to be compared to the fastest tracks in competitive careers like politicians or investment bankers. Yet they have brought me great joy and I hope they have sometimes helped my prisoners and parishioners.

The race is not always to be swift.

Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

9 July 2024

6 min read

When America presses in on you

A returning American feels the heat generated by contesting ‘realities'.

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A runner passes a church and a flag in an America suburb, under billowing clouds.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

There’s a man. Running. My eyes snap into focus. Time slows - I catch his pace. Then, my eyes start widening. An odd feeling. Being forced into it. Seconds stretched out into minutes. Taking in more, looking for more, looking down that sidewalk, on a street corner in New Jersey.

Before? I was sitting there. In the backseat of my Uber. Winding our way through New Jersey. And I’m sitting there, tired, mindlessly scrolling my phone until that moment. He’s there running.

And I see him. T-shirt. Running shorts. And I’m sitting. And—a nervous flash—he’s running. Why?

And my eyes adjust, widening, scanning, checking detail, and I’m almost seized. My mind shaking itself, coming online, no more automation. My consciousness catches up: “you’re in America,” I tell myself.

Right. I’m not in Scotland. And that man is running. Here in New Jersey. In America. And I’m talking back to myself in this silent car. I’m watching him run. I’m asking why am I slowing this down? And—it flashes—“running from what?”

And I catch up to myself. To what I was trying to say, that people in America run from shooters, too. A wave crashing, sitting in the back of the Uber, and look. Now I’m really looking. Not forced. But naming. There’s other pedestrians passing him, walking. Slowing. On the other side of the street— no fast movement. No screaming. No pops.

I start breathing. I didn’t know I stopped. He’s out jogging. The automated safety check ends. The tranquility of tyranny resumes. I’m sitting in the back of an Uber. I make a note. Be more alert at the train station.

—

People ask me how the relocation back to America has been. And I don’t know what to tell them. There’s a wide gap between the visceral sense of it all pressing in on you, and more common—but also abstract—analysis.

The experience of coming back has been oddly particular. I lived in Scotland for three years, and most of it was spent studying America. From that distance, the broad strokes of American life, the larger trajectories and dangers of our shared political decisions and religious extremism, well, they’re a bit clearer.

But coming back, America presses in on you. And the only way of talking about that, maybe, is specificity. Kerouac was always good at articulating this. His America wasn’t the rise of the military industrial complex in the 50s. It was the road, the gas station on the way from Denver, it was jazz, the dim doorways of San Francisco bars. I’m thinking of Kerouac, but also Langston Hughes. Poets and artists who in their own time, held a mirror up to America, helped us move from the “I” to the “we” as Steinbeck said.

We’re all asking a version of “what’s wrong in America?” (And, do keep asking.) But to ask that question often assumes the broadest strokes, the ones that are most clear from a distance. Which means they are, in one at the same time, the most abstract.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.”

Asking after democracy, after the election, and the increasingly nebulous “the church” — I’m convinced that answering “what’s wrong in America?” in the biggest of terms is leading me to (wrongly) believe that responsibility lies among the gargantuan free-floating concepts which we use to narrate our world. As if solving the “crisis of democracy” is a conceptual problem. When in reality, it is concrete, and involves more than coalition building or political activism.

Why more? Because the choices Americans have made over the last 10 years originate from imaginations which limits the scope and scale of what is possible. This is what I mean by “America presses in on you.”

Coming back to America has made this clear. I’m more aware than ever that we can produce good answers and generate compelling analysis about America without ever asking in what way these answers or analysis are sharp enough, concrete enough to puncture the bubbles of social reality in which people choose to live and in some cases are forced to live.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.” They press in on us all in their own way.

In some cases, they dull our senses. We say, “as long as our Amazon deliveries continue, as long as the streaming services work.” In some cases, they don’t just press in on us, but press down and perpetuate injustice. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, “where are the responsible ones?”

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes.

Do I care about democratic machinery? Yes. Am I concerned about whether or not the church is, in fact, the church, and not a gear in a partisan machine? Yes. But I’m increasingly convinced that responsible living in the American situation becomes most clear, most evident as we consider the large in terms of the small.

Responsibility emerges with attention paid to the concrete and intimate. January 6 is the subject of my dissertation. But before that, in the months leading up to January 6, I was a pastor just 40 miles from DC. For me, January 6 was a local event. That particularity, that specificity, is a window into a concrete responsibility.

And now, back in this same community, I found myself distracted in a church this weekend. The man in front of me raised his hands in worship, revealing a revolver hanging on his belt. What America is this? But also, what Christianity is this?

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes. And I wonder what it will take to break the spell of our most cherished illusions, of a certain type of freedom — one that tells us it is Christian to raise our hand in surrender to a god who we say is loving enough to save the world, but seemingly not strong enough to deliver us from our evil.

In the end, perhaps it’s best to say that it’s been proof of a good ruining. After all, we’ve experienced nothing short of a conversion, a move closer towards peace, towards hope, that unsettles all our strategies of security and comfort underwritten by violence and oppression. This is the kingdom of Heaven. Something Jesus announced that continues to unsettle and disrupt the likes of T.S. Eliot who put it well in Journey of the Magi:

We returned to our places, these

Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old

dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods

I should be glad of another death.