Old Years in the New Year

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “God Save the Gerontocracy!”

Two summers ago, I praised our wiser and more wrinkled trustees for “keeping the wokeshivtiz at bay.” How does my hailing hold up as we move into the silvered season?

After a wildly unpredictable and unprecedented 2024, I’d say my bravos were bang on. The United States elected its oldest presidential candidate ever. Sure, Donald Trump acts more seventeen than his seventy-eight long years. (Some might even contend that his puerile hijinks are what secured his election.) But America opted to stay cuddled in the warm, comfortable, Social-Security-funded bosom of the Boomers.

The alternative: Kamala Harris, who, while technically born during the last year of the midcentury cradle kaboom, embraced Gen-X trappings like Converse and dark blazers. Yet Kamala flopped worse than a Milli Vanilli comeback tour. Voters opted for a president too old to ask his college-aged son how to attach Word docs to emails because he has no idea what Microsoft’s Office suite even is.

“Sword outwears its sheath,” please. Why does our country, so renowned for vitality, inventiveness, and what Saul Bellow called “real modern action,” keep settling for wrinkled Boomerocracy? How did a nation fought for and founded by a bunch of under fifty idealists transform its government into The Villages, complete with bespectacled, badgering Karens and frequent hip fractures?

Let’s consult America’s next powerbrokers, the laptop-tethered, phone-addicted, Spotify-spoiled, irony-poisoned Millennials. Despite an upbringing of Nickelodeon cartoons and Disney sitcoms that undermined parental authority, plus that little economic snafu that wiped out a generation of wealth because some financiers got a little too high on their own supply of mortgage-backed securities, we Millennials pulled the MAGA lever in November. A Brat election this was not. Even Biden’s college debt payola didn’t translate into Harris ballots.

The Boomers have kept their tight grip on America’s power center, refusing to relax any torque in their clutch, as if public office was an expired half-off coupon for a Chinese buffet. And the determined demo dynamic goes beyond the White House. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ grand matron, just engineered a counterattack against her Millennial counterpart, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 35-year-old AOC, as she’s acronymed herself in style of her lazy texting peers, ran for ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, only to be bested by Gerry Connolly, a congressman twice her age who’d revealed an esophageal cancer diagnosis two days after his reelection. (Northern Virginia Democrats have a mendacious habit of announcing debilitating maladies after securing another term.)

Connolly, who puts the backache in backbencher, wouldn’t have outdistanced the younger, leaner Ocasio-Cortez were it not for Marchesa Pelosi, whose scheming is, in our political lore, legendary. The Speaker Emerita learned her lesson for shoving poor, toddering Biden down the staircase in exchange for an empty vessel with fewer liver spots. One blown bout later, Pelosi is back to crushing fledgling upstarts under her orthopedic kitty heels.

Democrats aren’t our only blue-plate-special party. Republicans have historically been the home of gaffers, koots, fogeys, graybeards, early-bird risers, and pensioners who profess a tight-fisted hankering to cut every single government program down to its last penny, except for Medicare. The party, of course, is now led by the ripest runner in U.S. history. Past GOP stalwarts include such spry whippersnappers as Mitch McConnell, an actual polio survivor, Chuck Grassley, a ninety-one-year-old corn crone who brags about his Eisenhower-era vacuum cleaner, and Dan Crenshaw, whose 40 years of age is deceiving because his ideology is as old as Herbert Hoover.

Then there’s Representative Kay Granger of Texas who has reportedly been playing hooky for months due to being a resident in an assisted living facility. Initial reporting from Dallas Express revealed that Granger is housed in the “memory care wing” of the Tradition-Clearfork rest home. That report was contradicted by Granger’s son, who beneficently assuaged his mother’s constituents’ concerns by letting them know that their elected representative isn’t languishing away in a dementia ward—she’s actually in the independent living section. HA! Take that, muckrakers!

Granger begging off work because she doesn’t realize she’s a duly elected congresswoman should be more scandalous. Hiding cognitive decline from the ignorant vulgus, not bothering to show up for bill considerations, employing interns and low-level staffers to abet the deceptive screen—who did Granger think she was? The President of the United States?

So far, the good taxpayers of Texas’s 12th Congressional District aren’t hitting the streets with signs, sandwich boards, and bullhorns demanding recompense for the six months they paid Granger to drool into her pudding cup. Perhaps, they, like most Americans, are habituated to the senescent fumbling of the elderly, and are fine smiling and shrugging it off, like when grandpa overdoes it on the Maker’s during Sunday dinner and demands to know what “libtard” designed the four-foot-high black Santa Claus statuettes at Walmart.

Just before Christmas, investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein tried to break what he views as the journalistic taboo on candid reports of congressional dotage. He pointed to Democrat Representative David Scott as a prime example of walking—or rather, wheelchair-rolling—dementia. Rep. Scott had apparently chastised a photographer for snapping a picture of an aide wheeling him into Congress. “Who gave you the right to take my picture, asshole?“ Scott demanded to know, even though he was on Capitol Hill, arguably the most public-access place in the country.

Rep. Scott’s angry inquiry was perfectly sensible—we accept far too easily the shutterbug voyeurism of the smartphone age. Klippenstein’s analysis differed: “He’s senile. There, I said it. I’m going to get dogpiled for saying it. I’ll be called ‘ageist’ and the self-appointed deans of journalism will tut-tut me for commenting on his cognitive state when I’m not a doctor (an impossible evidentiary standard since doctors can’t comment on these things publicly).”

Klippenstein was wrong—and not on Scott’s slipping mental faculties. There was no collective fourth-estate spasm over a rogue journo decrying congressional coup de vieux. Everyone knows Scott is a Tourette-prone vegetable. Voters are either fine with gerontocracy because they have a healthy skepticism of the youth’s callow judgment, or they accept the hierarchy of hoary because, one grey day far into the future, they’ll take the place of those leaders who will go soundlessly to the grave.