Patrick Lawrence: Exeunt, the Man from Scranton
By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost
I honestly do not think Joe Biden ever had a chance to make sense of his four years as president. It is not merely his native stupidity, and Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s execrable record on the foreign side seems evidence enough that he is through and through, all-over stupid. This does not distinguish Biden among American presidents, after all. No, the matter to hand is larger. If you assume the task of running an empire and the empire has profligately abused the world’s once-considerable reservoir of goodwill, anyone short of a philosopher king was bound to fail as America’s No. 46.
But American presidents do not fail and America altogether never fails. We all know this. The Success God has always reigned supreme in our republic, and it reigns without mercy now, even as our republic teeters. This creates a big problem when a president who has failed so miserably as Joe Biden takes his leave. You have to change the subject. You have to distract the great broad masses with matters of no consequence. You have to make things up and keep making them up at least until No. 46 is back home playing with his Corvette.
It becomes a little ridiculous, but Americans, of course, are well used to ridiculous at this point. We are not, I strenuously insist, a ridiculous people. It’s that those purporting to lead us, ridiculous themselves, have made the nation wherein we dwell act ridiculously and, so, look ridiculous.
Ridiculous! I come upon the word I seek. I read somewhere the other day, and if my editors will excuse me, I am not going to waste time looking it up, that Nancy “Look At All My Ice-Cream” Pelosi remarked that Joe Biden now “takes his place in the pantheon of American democracy.” See what I mean by making things up? See what I mean by ridiculous?
Joe Biden has hankered ardently after a “legacy,” the leaving of some lasting mark on America, something to get him some lines, maybe a chapter, in the history texts. He has succeeded on many fronts, even if this is upside-down to his intent. America is now complicit in a genocide that has us invoking President Jackson’s Trail of Tears. He bequeaths the danger of nuclear war and an economy—near to a magic trick, this—that clocks well in the statistics but has most of the citizenry in one or another way desperate.
These are the big, obvious features of Biden’s legacy. But, awful as they are, America’s plunge into unreality during Biden’s watch seems to me just as consequential for its enduring consequences. Joe Biden has led our nation so far out to sea we can no longer see the shore. We have lost contact with the world — a thought so inconceivable even a few years ago I find it odd to type these seven words.
The myths of America’s success and supremacy and goodwill collided head-on during Biden’s years with failure, America’s malintent, and the reality of a multipolar world neither Biden nor the policy cliques he commands (or that command him) can accept. Again, no other White House occupant could have done any better these past four years. Biden’s stupidity simply made the mess worse.
And so we witness Biden’s farewell amid a parade of ridiculousness.
■
David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, wrote a notable piece the other day under the headline, “We deserve Pete Hegseth.” He was remarking on the confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee of President-elect Trump’s nominee for defense secretary. Right up top Brooks lists the questions with which the next Pentagon chief will have to contend: the threat of another world war; the prospect of fighting multiple conflicts at once with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea; America’s hollowed-out industrial base; the military’s overall “insolvency,” a RAND Corporation term for the armed forces’ inability to match the tasks policy sets for it.
“Now, if you are holding a hearing for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues,” Brooks writes. “If you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearing, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.”
Wow.
Brooks continues with piercing acuity:
We do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing—by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.
Brilliant, especially given it appears in The Times’s ordinarily wooden opinion pages. A soap-opera country is a country out of touch with reality, just as I say. It is a ridiculous country, the soaps being famously such.
Pete Hegseth, who failed to answer the most elementary questions about how the world is organized, is preposterously unqualified to serve as defense secretary. But never mind all that. His attacks on wokery, along with his boozing and dalliances with women, whatever the nature of either, made him the perfect blackboard for all the Bidenites on the Armed Services Committee to scrawl their credentials as virtuous culture warriors.
American ridiculousness: O.K., we have lived with this for years. But I simply cannot believe it has come to this level of irresponsibility. It is another feature of the Biden legacy, let us not miss. Brooks nailed this well.
But for all the pith he put into this piece, Brooks failed to address a couple of key points.
One, if we consider the potential crises Brooks listed, we must conclude Biden is responsible either for creating them — the danger of a new world war — or for making them greatly worse, as in the potential for multiple conflicts.
Example: One of the policy pursuits Biden et al. boast of most vigorously is the strengthening and expansion of U.S. military ties in the Pacific — with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia. They got this done, certainly. And the working assumption in this exercise is that China is fundamentally a hostile power and must be dealt with, at the horizon, militarily.
Tell me, does this count as diplomacy? Is this the wisest, most imaginative way of dealing with China? Do these revitalized military alliances, to put the point another way, make the world safer or more dangerous? How do they fit with the Biden–Blinken commitment, professed incessantly during the 2020 campaign season, that their foreign policy would put diplomacy first and leave military response as a last resort?
Two, Brooks would have done well to consider another reason, and the more important, the Armed Services Committee spent so little time examining Hegseth for his views on policy. To put the point simply, there is very little to discuss, as it does not matter terribly much, or not as much as it should, who runs the Pentagon. If the Biden regime made one thing clear above all others, it is that presidents and cabinet members are not much more than ritualized figures, the Deep State’s front men, whose function is not to determine policy but to present it to the public and the rest of the world. The imperium’s foreign policies do not change, one administration to another, if you have not noticed. Nothing to talk about, then. To me this is a feature of America’s post-democracy that manages to be ridiculous and frightening all at once.
■
Legacy. The grandeur of epochally significant insight. The sage old man offering the republic his guiding hand as he steps gracefully aside in the late autumn of a life given honorably to public service: Biden’s minders must have whispered these thoughts into the addled man’s ear when they got him to tell us, in his farewell speech last Wednesday evening, of an imminent oligarchy overtaking America.
The long-attempted FDR comparison didn’t stick, after all: Biden to Roosevelt, if my editors will again excuse me, is chicken shit to chicken salad. Let’s try Eisenhower, I can imagine those who invent Biden up from day to day must have said. Let’s warn of something. Ike is well remembered for his farewell speech, his now-famous military-industrial complex speech, delivered on Jan. 17, 1961. Techno-industrial complex! Yes!
And so we have Biden’s wave goodbye, delivered Jan. 15, two days short of 64 years after Eisenhower’s. There are all kinds of knick-knacks in this thing — lower drug prices, veterans’ benefits, the infrastructure spending, the (still-to-prove-out) spending on semiconductor plants. All fine, but lacking in magnitude, I would say. And so to the grand theme:
… In my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is the dangerous concer- [the mind wandered here] — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead ….
And a little later, in case anyone missed the reflected glory, the claim to a place in history:
You know, his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,” end of quote.
Six day lec- [another lapse here]— six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the p- [another] — potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.
I tell you, this man cannot do anything but for self-serving political effect. If he has, I have missed it. On one hand, Biden wants the techno-industrial bit to make him look wise, prescient. On the other, it is little more than a final brag about his regime’s small-bore achievements and, if you read the text, a cheap-shot attack on President-elect Trump. The presidential president who cannot act presidentially even as he finishes up: This is Biden in a few words.
First of all, everyone in America knows this nation has long been beset by oligarchic parasites, even if the mainstream media do their best to keep this kind of talk out of our accepted discourse. To take aim at an American oligarchy at this stage in the story is like shooting at the side of a barn. Second, Biden has been intimately involved in the reigning oligarchy, not least among Silicon Valley’s princes — an appendage, a reaper of its benefits, certainly an enabler—for most of his political career, if not all of it.
And now Biden speaks of this monster’s potential rise? The ruse is too obvious: I don’t have anything to do with an oligarchy or those rich techies in Silicon Valley and Seattle. I’m for a fair shot for everyone. But my successor, a few ultra-wealthy….
We are, I had better remind you, supposed to take this stuff seriously, as in “Not a joke,” except it is. I happened to walk past a television with an MSNBC news program broadcasting on the evening of Biden’s speech. And there were the guilty, pictured as if in a police lineup. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos: Yes, they are all in bed with the president-elect. This is it, a real, live oligarchy. Who knew, etc.?
I decided to look up a few statistics and found them on Open Secrets. Among the top contributors to the Biden campaign, as inherited by the Harris campaign, were Alphabet, Google’s holding company ($5.5 million), Microsoft ($3.2 million), Amazon ($2.9 million), Apple ($2.5 million), and a lot of “Etc.” after these.
Where does American ridiculousness end?
There was one occasion last week when the intervention of people whose great virtue is their authenticity managed to explode the pretenses of the Biden regime’s exeunt, and I will mention it but briefly. This was Antony Blinken’s farewell press conference, held in the State Department briefing room last Thursday. It was absolutely delightful to watch as this event, its own kind of ridiculous, collapsed into chaos—which it to say evolved inexorably into reality.
By all appearances—see the above-linked video—Blinken expected this event to go off as routinely as all others during his tenure as Biden’s secretary of state. He began to speak, the government clerks posing as journalists for mainstream media sat quietly, doing their usual bit by taking the scene seriously. Then the excellent trouble started, the trouble that is absolutely necessary if we are to find our way back to reality. This was when the irrepressible Max Blumenthal, publisher and editor of The Grayzone, erupted in utterly honest indignity even before the ritualized time allotted for questions. Blumenthal’s remarks in part:
Three hundred reporters in Gaza were on the receiving end of your
bombs. Why did you keep the bombs flowing when we had a deal in May [a
ceasefire Israel scuttled under the Biden regime’s cover]? … Why did you
sacrifice “the rules-based order” on the mantle of your commitment to
Zionism? Why did you allow my friends to be massacred?…. Are you
compromised by Israel? Why did you allow the Holocaust of our time to
happen? How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?
Blumenthal posed these last questions as Secret Service agents escorted him out of the room. Then came the interventions of Sam Husseini, a freelance Palestinian–American journalist who writes for, among other publications, Antiwar.com. Like Blumenthal, Husseini began peppering Blinken with questions, but then he went quiet. As Blumenthal later recounted the scene, Matt Miller, Blinken’s notoriously arrogant press secretary, then ordered the Secret Service to eject Husseini anyway — presumably to spare the secretary further embarrassment.
“Answer a damn question!” Husseini began to shout as he was forcibly pulled from his seat. “Do you know about the Hannibal Directive? Do you know about Israel’s nuclear weapons? You pontificate about a free press!”
When Blinken protested repeatedly that Husseini should “respect the process”—wait until question time—Husseini exploded:
Respect the process? Respect the process? While everybody from Amnesty International to the ICJ says Israel’s doing genocide and extermination, and you’re telling me to respect the process? Criminal! Why aren’t you in the Hague?
A senior official whose every syllable is an _expression_ of the ridiculous regime of which he has been a part, government goons dragging out those who pose good, perfectly ordinary questions, mainstream reporters supinely silent throughout: This was a superb tableau. What do we see in it?
We see two people rejecting that soap opera country, that social media/cable TV country David Brooks so well described. Two people insisting on an authentic, altogether equal exchange with someone in the business of constructing such a country. I also see what is asked of those who decline to go to sleep under America’s blanket of unreality. This requires commitment, courage in our moments of truth, a willingness to pay the price of one’s refusal to live ridiculously.
These are basic equipment for any life lived in a failing imperium that insists it never fails.
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Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.