Yeats was referring to Ireland when he began Sailing to Byzantium with that line in 1933, and the Coen Brothers used it as the title for their 2007 Western about an old sheriff trying to make sense of a brutal and ambiguous world.
Last week, of course, its meaning had changed again, to “Joe Biden.”
This week it means something else entirely, “Donald Trump.”
We blame old men with money and power for not handing them back when asked nicely. As a result, many don’t. Most don’t. So when an old man with more power than anyone else on earth decides his time has come, the speed and scope of change can be head-spinning.
In the space of two days, Donald Trump is now the halting old man. A convicted felon also found guilty of sexual assault in a separate case, he will now face an opponent who has put dozens of men like him in jail. A …younger…. Black…woman. Can there be a worse nightmare?
This got me thinking about how we view old age, and especially old men in power.
The day after Biden’s disastrous debate exactly one month ago, Michael Moore wrote a telling blog. “This is not about whether he’s fit to serve another four years — this is about whether he should serve another four days in the toughest job in the world. If he offered to drive you from Flint to Detroit tonight, would you get in the car?”
Hiding the leader’s frailties is a political art thousands of years old.
But that too will change. As Moore notes: “The slow decline of your elders…[is] all quite normal and to be expected, and will visit all of us one day. It won’t feel good. It won’t look pretty. But more than likely, that feeble, humbling moment will not be televised LIVE to an audience of 2 billion people around the world, with Jake Tapper’s hot breath breathing down your neck and telling you, ironically, that your time is up.”
So we can look forward to compulsory mileage checks on politicians, the way Ontario doctors have mental competence tests once they reach 70 and every five years after, or pilots, every six months after they turn 40.
And since some corporations are bigger than some national governments, we can look forward as well to shareholders voting for an annual mental competency test not only for the CEO but for the Chair of the Board, who invariably is older.
But the biggest change of all to come out of Joe Biden’s resignation will be to our view not of political leaders, but of ourselves. If we stop thinking of our minds and bodies as ‘engines’ that can be sent to the garage to be fixed, but as software that needs to be updated, our inevitable decline and fall will feel a little less cataclysmic.
Chas Gillespie spelled this out in “Your Body’s Updated Terms of Service.”
Read it. More importantly, act on it, because Donald Trump shouldn’t be the only person to duck a bullet.
Meanwhile…
1. Love who you are. But now you can love who you were, and at least like who they are. And speaking of virtual regeneration, would you clone your dog? Plus, Trump prays in church. Plus Kate Winslett gets real. And…a world long ago and far away.
2. Still bowling alone. In 1995, Robert Putnam wrote an essay in The Journal of Democracy. It soon became the wildly best-selling book, Bowling Alone, and now its 83-year old creator is the subject of a documentary, Join or Die, whose theory is that social capital is everything, i.e. “your chances of dying in the next year are cut in half if you join just one group.” As the film’s co-director Pete Davis notes: “There is no America without clubs. But what happens when a nation built on associations stops saying: ‘Sign me up’ and starts saying ‘I’m not really a joiner?’”
3. The World’s Best Universities. The annual ranking by London-based Times Higher Education ranked 1,907 universities worldwide. #1 is Oxford. Top among Canadian universities and #21 in the world is The University of Toronto.
4. Special summer camps. Two caught my eye: Camp Chateau, a viral summer camp for women in the French countryside. And, grief camp.
5. Are human rights too important to be left to human rights groups? Danielle Haas thinks so. “For too long, human-rights groups have been granted a free pass to serve as society’s watchdogs without first proving they are fit to bark.”
Meanwhile, another contrarian thought: radiation may not be that bad for you.
And, why fly to Mars to colonize new land when there are hundreds of thousands of hectares of Canadian and US land under federal management where 20,000 hectares could be carved out to create ‘frontier cities?’
6. A beginner’s guide to the Paris Olympics. Here’s the Cole’s Notes video version of the 33rd Olympic Games. Plus, how LVMH has turned it into the Luxury Games. Not to mention the River Games. Oh, and 9 things to know about Olympics past. And…AND…Celine Dion! Finally, how many medals will Canada win? 20.
Speaking of sports, Nike’s asking “Are you a bad person”? Also, Adidas really put their foot in it over the Munich Olympics.
7. Upperclass rulz! Don’t think the Brits have abandoned aristocracy. Their Bible, Debrett’s, has simply morphed into a coaching and marketing firm.
8. Who has the best Mat and Pat Leave? We know America has the worst among the top 40 industrialized countries because it offers no paid maternity or paternity leave at all. Canada is among the best, with up to 40 weeks of paid time off work. But Sweden is the North Star. It just passed a law that lets new parents transfer a portion of their paid child care benefits to grandparents who step in to help.
9. Two writers you’ll want to get to know better. Stephen Marche has been writing for The New Yorker, The New York Times and Esquire for years. The Torontonian (married to Sarah Fulford) has just written adazzling obituary, a murder mystery actually, about our ‘so-called Canada’.
Martha Nussbaum is America’s take-no-prisoners philosopher who thinks her peers should be lawyers for humanity. Among her 26 books is Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility.
10. Mural mural on the wall: the fairest ones of all. Plus some amazing old photos.
11. What I’m liking. A new book on The Phelan Feud, the story of the family who made Swiss Chalet and Harvey’s household words in Canada, and whose power and fortune blew apart amid years of quarrels. But what makes this tale different from other real-life Succession stories, including the recent battle for Rogers, is…the girls, Rosemary Phelan and her sister Gail Regan, won.
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ON SEPTEMBER 23, TANYA TALAGA STANDS CANADA’S PAST ON ITS HEAD. BE THERE.
The Knowing reshapes our sense of Canada in a way only Tanya Talaga can.
The famed Anishinaabe journalist and Massey Lecturer reveals how all-embracing our mistreatment of our founding people was, and offers a way forward to real reconciliation.
Big new ideas like hers are rarely comfortable, and The Knowing is the big new book of the year. So it deserves a big hall to hear what’s vital to us all.
Tanya will also be interviewed by Mark Sakamoto, author of Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents. 
Date: Monday, September 23, 2024
Time: 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (Doors open at 6:30 p.m) ET
Place: Koerner Hall, 273 Bloor St. West, Toronto, just west of the ROM
TICKETS HERE
Please pass this invitation on to like-minded friends and family.
Cheers,
Bob Ramsay
In partnership with
