Both ends of the age spectrum have come into focus on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the US presidential debate, President Biden came across as Patient Biden. The poor man stumbled over words, lost the thread repeatedly, went through an obvious agony trying to remember his aides’ instructions – and even his golf handicap.
It’s easy to sneer at that sort of thing, but, as a man only five years younger than Biden, I sympathise. Just yesterday, I had to default in a tournament tennis match I was winning.
Unfortunately, it was played during the first heatwave of the summer, with the temperature at 32C (about 90F) – and quite a bit higher on the red-hot court. Having won the first set, I had to call it quits in the middle of the second. Carrying on seemed dangerous, and a tennis match isn’t the kind of noble cause one should sacrifice one’s life for.
Two lines from American films flashed through my mind as I shook hands with my delighted and astounded opponent: “I’m getting too old for this shit” and “A man should be aware of his limitations.”
Now, I have more energy and stamina than Joe Biden had even five years ago, but still not enough to occupy a high political office, never mind one of the Leader of the Free World. Moreover, I don’t think I show too many signs of cognitive decline, while Joe croaks senility with every word he struggles to get out. But, unlike me and the object of Clint Eastwood’s scorn, he isn’t aware of his limitations.
Everyone else is though, and even Democrats are beginning to realise that having an obviously demented man in the White House would be playing with fire, possibly the kind generated by a nuclear blast. There’s talk about getting Joe out of his misery and replacing him as a candidate at the last moment, though no one is sure how to do that.
Crossing over to our side of the pond, one is smacked in the face with another age concern, this one caused by youth rather than senescence. This morning, Sky News scaled new heights of idiocy by hailing a political travesty called ‘Our generation. Our vote.’
They devoted a long segment to a mock election among children under the voting age of 18. Dozens of British youngsters were interviewed, not a single one of them white. As the founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity, I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more, well, diversity there. I’m also worried that foreign viewers might get a wrong idea about the demographic makeup of British society.
That aside, the interviewed youngsters, most of them around 16 or so, were more articulate than Joe Biden, which might have determined their selection for the programme. Sky News probably found it hard to locate enough white children able to enunciate a coherent sentence in an intelligible accent.
However, what those children – and their Sky interviewers – were saying so articulately still didn’t make sense. They all insisted that children of 16, for starters, should vote because they are the ones who’ll bear the brunt of the policies put forth today.
This doesn’t add up even at the level of basic logic. Following this line of thought to its logical conclusion, babies should be given the vote. After all, statistically speaking, they’ll have to suffer the consequences of today’s politics for longer than the 16-year-olds.
Now Labour is pledging to lower the voting age to 16, using the same crepuscular logic demonstrated by Sky News. If you think their motives are disinterested, just look at the outcome of the ‘Our Generation. Our Vote.’ rehearsal ballot.
Labour came in first, Greens second, LibDems third, Tories a distant last. Labour outscored Tories four to one, which should give you a fair idea why the Lefties of the world constantly want to expand the franchise ad nauseam. People whose brains aren’t yet wired properly are more likely to swallow the socialist gibberish passed for serious political thought.
“No one is listening to us,” complained one young lady of Subcontinental descent, and the grownups in the Sky studio nodded their sympathetic agreement. They couldn’t get their minds around the idea that listening to children isn’t the same as letting them shape a nation’s life.
How many Sky presenters will let their children decide serious issues in their own households? A lot fewer, I’d suggest, than those who’ll support any woke idiocy as long as it keeps the Tories out.
Sorry to carry on about age so much, but it is a concern. Yes, William Pitt the Younger became a pretty good PM at 24, and Konrad Adenauer was still a commanding Chancellor well into his eighties. Yet Pitt still didn’t vote as a child and, even when Joe was young, his own mother would have agreed he was a pygmy compared to old Konrad.
One way or another, a nation should make an individual decision on whether or not an old man is sufficiently compos mentis to run its government. On the other hand, the issue of voting age has to be based on statistical probability, not case-by-case assessment. And anyone who thinks children must vote should himself be barred from the ballot box.
And… er… age… I like, you know, whiskies of some age… at least sixty… or maybe six, like my golf handicap… and you’re not getting younger… you’re getting better… or is it worse – but enough of my Joe Biden impersonation.