Enjoy your trip, Joe?

“How the mighty have fallen!” is an Old Testament phrase that yet again proves the prophetic power of Holy Scripture.

For there’s no denying that, as president of the United States, Joe Biden is as mighty as they come. Nor is there any doubt that POTUS fell climbing the steps to Air Force One. Moreover, he outdid the biblical Samuel and Saul by falling not just once, but thrice.

Joe’s detractors are having a field day with his little mishap – well, three little mishaps to be exact. Refusing to give the president the benefit of the doubt, they talk about his senility, loss of motor and cognitive abilities and other such failings. One can almost sense the 25^th Amendment wafting through the air.

Naysayers! Imbeciles! Gloaters! Republicans! Pharisees! Your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness… but I should stop waxing biblical, even though, as you’ll soon find out, such references are appropriate in this context.

What Joe’s detractors don’t understand is that his actions are full of hidden meaning. They convey an elaborate lattice of intersecting symbols, unravelling for the initiated Joe’s deep thought and political acumen.

For this ostensibly awkward incident must be analysed on different levels. First, it’s wrong to blame the wind for Joe’s misfortune. He may have wind problems, but they are unlikely to make him clutch the railings on the way up.

And yet the wind mustn’t be ignored. For in spite of it Joe did manage to get to the top of the steps, thereby sending a subtle message. The wind of change is picking up, he was implying. It may cause initial discomfort, but it’ll never blow Joe off his charted course towards turning America into a kinder, fairer, more socialist country.

Then Joe’s opponents, especially those who continue to aver that Jesus Christ isn’t just a superstar, attack him on being a rotten Christian. That charge would be defanged by Joe’s admitting that, rather than being a rotten Christian, he’s no Christian at all.

Any one of you simpletons would opt for this copout. Yet Joe insists, stubbornly and truthfully, that he’s a Catholic in good standing. On first glance, that position seems hard to reconcile with his willingness to finance abortion clinics domestically and internationally.

Yet no one grasps the fundamental nature of presidency, the weight of the cross a president has to carry. Some stumbles along the way will happen, but Joe will always pick himself up.

Now who else stumbled three times when carrying his cross? Do you get it now? Joe only pretended to trip thrice, creating thereby a deep symbolic impression of his commitment to carrying his cross in spite of the odd stumble (such as paying for millions of babies to be killed). Those in the know realised that his was a statement redolent of Christian symbolism.

Then of course Joe has a reputation of being a faceless, humourless apparatchik, whose idea of a joke is passing Neil Kinnock’s speech for his own and seeing if anyone would notice. Not so!

Joe exudes knee-slapping humour, except his is of the slapstick, rather than verbal, variety. He is a master of the pratfall, giving Chevy Chase a good run for his money.

In case you forgot (or are too young to know), Chevy, a star of the old Saturday Night Live show, was famous for his opening sequences invariably ending with an acrobatic tumble down the stairs. Having hit the floor, he’d smile and shout: “Live! From New York! It’s Saturday Night!”

I have it on good authority that Joe has always found Chevy to be his inspiration. However, in the planning stages of his own pratfall sequence, his aides talked him out of falling all the way down to the tarmac and screaming: “Live! From DC! It’s POTUS night!”

For one thing, they said, only people close to Joe’s age would get the cultural reference. For another, that would be pushing the joke too far. Just stumbling three times would do the trick, Joe, they insisted. Everyone will see you’re a funny guy. Joe reluctantly agreed to rein in his devastating sense of the absurd and only limited himself to a comic salute at the top of the steps.

Then those pygmies who can’t see the sparkling facets of Joe’s personality, accuse him of senile dementia on the most risible of pretexts. Yes, he, seemingly unintentionally, promoted Kamala by referring to her as “President Harris”. ‘Seemingly’ is the key word there, for this slip was as deliberate as those on the steps.

Joe was simply reinforcing Kamala’s status as both his heiress apparent and his boss actual. For Joe is too busy with metaphysical and thespian pursuits to sully his hands with actually running the country.

He leaves such trivia for Kamala to sort out, and sort them out she does, with flying colours. Some troglodytes hiss that those flying colours feature hammer and sickle superimposed on the stars and stripes, but they would, wouldn’t they?

What else? What other vitriol will those ill-wishers splash out of their acid vials? Oh yes, they make a big deal of Joe’s apparent error in introducing his living and breathing granddaughter Natalie as his late son Beau.

Yet again those vipers fail to see the whole story. Joe was simply commenting on the metaphysical continuity animating the Biden family. All its members share particles of the same soul, which guarantees collective immortality. Beau is dead, Joe was implying, but his soul lives on in Natalie.

Some will sneer that this vision is more Buddhist than Christian, but then a POTUS has to be ecumenical by definition. As the leader of the whole nation, he can’t afford obtuse, Bible-thumping parochialism.

I hope Congress will see fit to amend the Constitution yet again by inaugurating the post of President Emeritus For Life and bestowing this distinction on Joe. Meanwhile President Kamala will continue to do a sterling job running America into the… upper reaches of liberty and prosperity, is what I mean.