Now that I’m older, fewer and fewer believe me when I tell them I got my back surgery scar in a bar fight.
I’m not the only one who’s not taken seriously because they hit the white hair mark. Age was already being weaponized before Thursday’s debate, but Joe Biden’s performance not only failed to defuse it, he accelerated it.
If the chorus of post-debate calls for Biden to step aside for a younger candidate don’t move him, then Florida seniors face a challenge of their own. How we think about our own age, and how many of us buy the idea of a one-size-fits-all expiration date, will follow us right into the voting booth, either as a factor in the presidential race or dozens of other races where candidates are older than 65. And what moves the needle in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, home to about one out of every four Floridians 65 and older, can move the needle for Florida.
We don’t think rationally about age in America. We don’t acknowledge how physiologically idiosyncratic getting older can be. We brush off science showing that changes in workplace productivity don’t equate to losses in productivity. We don’t confront “Doddering Dearie” stereotypes, the soft bigotry of our own low expectations for ourselves.
When Clint Eastwood chatted up an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, the under-50 cognoscenti gave the incident a hushed-tone treatment typically reserved for advanced funeral planning. Two years later, Eastwood’s film direction was nominated for six Academy Awards — at age 85.
My own mother regularly cleaned up at Texas Hold ‘Em, was working her way through Harry Potter on a Kindle, and still found time to dissect the evening news — she liked ABC for the cute anchor — until her death. Age 98.
Even as we rave over 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi’s stiletto heels and 80-year-old Mick Jagger strutting across an Orlando stage, we’re drawn in by viral Twit-bits calling the old-guy-in-chief Captain Poopy Pants.
In other lying news, a doctored video made it look as if Biden had wandered off at a summit in Italy. He hadn’t. But the video fix was in.
Youth is not a guarantee that a politician will stay put. In 2015, the entire Florida House of Representatives, led by Speaker Steve Crisafulli, wandered off and went home three days early, peeved at the Senate. Age at walkout: 44.
Crisafulli might have been following the example of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who in 2009 hopped off the grid and said he was going to hike the Appalachian Trail. Maybe he forgot he was in Buenos Aires with his mistress. Directional confusion and elopement from safe premises. Age 49.
Many of us may have whizzed past our sell-by date without noticing. Some studies suggest mental acuity peaks at 30, and it’s all downhill from there.
This may help explain U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s argument that the U.S. should not provide humanitarian aid to women and children in Afghanistan because it’s not in the Constitution. Age 33. (That was fast!)
On the other hand, there’s Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who seemed perfectly compos mentis in 2010, when he said of the federal Medicare fraud case leading to $1.7 billion in fines and 14 criminal counts against his hospital company: “There’s no question that mistakes were made, and as CEO, I have to accept responsibility.”
But in Manhattan last month, at Donald Trump’s trial, Scott garbled his words, saying politically persecuted when he really meant to say “fairly prosecuted.” Gray-cell word salad. Age 71. Tsk tsk.
As for old-people-run-the world handwringing, Congress is less a gerontocracy than a late middle-age mosh pit. The average age in the 118th Congress is 58, and it’s falling.
Sure, you’ve got your 80-somethings raging against the machine. Bernie is still burnin’ at 82. You’ve also got bright-eyed whippersnappers like Rep. Matt Gaetz, whose 42-year-old brain cells labored mightily and came up with a plan for continued bombing of an endangered whale’s Gulf of Mexico habitat; “one of the most exquisite places in the world for weapons testing,” he reportedly told a congressional committee.
His father, former Florida Senate President Don Gaetz, has made enough millions and is now making a bid for his old state Senate seat. Age 76. Why not?
In Colonial America, when life expectancy topped out at 38, 71-year-old Thomas Jefferson moaned to his best frenemy John Adams that sadly, their fate was now aches and pains: “Here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way.” Jefferson then trotted off to build the University of Virginia.
Not to be outdone, George Washington grabbed his wooden teeth and came out of post-presidential retirement to rejoin the Army and go to war. At age 66.
The father of our country had been complaining about being old since he was in his 50’s.
Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at pbeall1@gmail.com.
