Brezhnev and Biden

Leonid Brezhnev, one of the last leaders of the old Soviet Union, was 75-years-old when he died in 1982 – although he looked near death for several years prior. Those old enough to remember Brezhnev will remember him standing (just barely) atop the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, gazing through watery eyes and (just barely) waving at the crowd below.

Joe Biden is currently five (going on six) years older than Brezhnev was when he died, back in 1982. If he is re-selected in 2024, he will be 85-years-old at the end of his second term. Assuming he makes it that far.

The Left used to rail about Ronald Reagan being “tool old” to be president when he was elected back in 1980.

Reagan was 69 that year.

Biden’s age is appropriate, though, in that he is much like Brezhnev – and America has become much like the Soviet Union. It (America) is an ossified, stultified, bureaucratized failing state, ruled by dead-handed gerontocrats who won’t give up the power they spent a lifetime scrabbling for until they are, finally, dead.

And have killed the country.

Jefferson had some wise things to say about the dead hand of the past exerting control over the living. It was his opinion that a kind of plebiscite ought to be held every generation (that is, about every 20 years) so that those who got governed were, at least, governed by some of themselves – the actually living rather than the already (or nearly) dead.

It is confessional that the latter cling so tightly to power, even as their life force slips away. After all, power is everything to them. Not family. Not friendship. Not the normal interest most normal people have in hobbies, interests and pursuits that do not center on being the center of attention – and other people being forced to pay attention (keeping in mind Lenin’s dictum that while you may not be interested in government, government is always interested in you).

Without power they are nothing.

Of course, they have never been anything. It is why such people are attracted to power. It endows them with the false – forced – prestige enjoyed by people who have produced or created something and specifically something other people are willing to reward them for having done.

What has Joe Biden done?

After just barely graduating from law school he went into the kind of work that suits a person who wasn’t able to make it work (or pay) as a lawyer. He became a proto-Brezhnev. A party apparatchik, that is.

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