WAGERS: Did staffers decide to take a chance?

TUESDAY, JULY 2, 2024

Who sent the president out there? Will history show that a Russian strongman engaged in a type of wager?

If so, historians—to the extent that such people still exist—may call it "Putin's wager." Such people will declare that Vladimir Putin, the Russian strongman, decided to put all his chips on this proposition:

Government of the people, by the people and for the people may indeed be induced to "perish from the earth."

At one time, President Lincoln was willing to bet that government of and by the people could in fact be preserved. Then again, one thinks of the wager someone decided to take leading up to last Thursday night:

Someone decided to let President Biden take part in an ersatz "debate." 

For ourselves, we had long come to believe that President Biden wouldn't be able to engage in some such event. For that reason, we were surprised when it was announced that the campaign had sought such an event, and had agreed to participate.

For a while, we kept thinking that the campaign might find a way to back out. When the event in question took place, we sat down and watched.

On what basis had we come to believe that such an event couldn't happen? We had seen a lot of tape in which the president seemed to display the unmistakable signs of a certain tragedy of advanced age—a tragedy which visits some people while sparing certain others.

We had seen a lot of tape in which the president seemed to convey that vibe. During that period, the invisible people behind the scenes apparently settled on their own wager:

They must have decided that President Biden actually could function well in some such event.

We don't know why they would have thought that; they may have had decent reasons. But after the debacle occurred, the dissembling followed.

The dissembling came thick and fast. Staffers and family members began to utter the ultimate cry:

Who are you going to believe, us or your own lying eyes?

Staffers stood in line to accuse us the people of being "bedwetters." They said the president had a cold that night. They even attributed what we'd seen to the president's stutter.

They pretended that other presidents have performed comparably in other presidential debates. This claim is baldly absurd, but staffers took numbers and stood in line, awaiting their chance to make it.

This too could be described as a type of wager. But as the staffers (and family members) engaged in this wager, Putin's wager advanced. 

Briefly, let's be honest. For reasons we'll start to outline below, "government of the people" has always been a somewhat unlikely wager.

Perhaps in line with such doubts, various citizens have fallen in line in the past few days, repeating the mandated talking-points in various comment sections.

That doesn't make them bad people; it doesn't even mean that they're "wrong." But as they repeated the mandated scripts, we thought again, as we often do, of the angry, unpleasant poem E. E. Cummings once published.

In this interview, Cummings said the poem's bitter outlook was generated by his arrest in France, where he was serving as a medic, during World War I. At any rate, the angry, bitter poem in question starts off exactly like this:

Humanity I Love You

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you 
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

The Old Howard was a Boston vaudeville / burlesque house which Cummings frequented as a Harvard undergraduate. The famous old house was a bit of a Boston cultural landmark.

In his well-written memoir, Harpo Speaks, Harpo Marx said he got his first laugh onstage at Boston's famous Old Howard. 

(The laugh in question had been unintentional. The boys were still performing as "The Nightingales" at that point in time.)

According to Susan Cheever, Cummings once said that he based his unconventional approach to poetry on the structure of his favorite joke at the Howard. 

(The joke in question would barely qualify as a "joke" today. But it apparently triggered Cummings' decision to alter the rules of his format.)

At any rate:

In the lines presented above, Cummings bitterly described the tendency of us the people to defer to patriotic script when war is coming on. As he continued, so did his unpleasant portrait of the ways of us the people:

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Oof! The portrait is not complimentary.

Rather plainly, Putin's wager aligns itself with the view Cummings expressed. Putin's wager is built upon such assumptions as these:

We the people just aren't especially sharp. In fact we're easily misled. 

According to Putin's wager, government for and by a collection like us is surely destined to fail, and especially so at complexified times like these.

(We need a strongman to lead the way. On our own, we the people will squabble and fight and fail.)

At any rate, a three-way clown show took place last Thursday night. At least fifty-one million people saw it happen, unless you're prepared to pawn your intelligence in favor of what the staffers and the family members are saying you actually saw.

(An historical aside: In September 1960, 65 million people watched the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. At the time, the nation's population was just a bit over half what it is today. The candidates delivered eight-minute opening statements.)

The Cummings poem continues along from there. It ends with a bitter denunciation of us the people writ large, of the ways of "humanity" in general. 

Yesterday, an assembly called "the Supreme Court" issued some sort of a ruling. Given the way our discourse works, warring groups of tribal elders swung into action, distributing alternate talking points concerning the ruling in question.

This afternoon, we'll briefly discuss that new debacle. For now, we'll end with this:

Someone seems to have made a wager about the president's ability to take part in a debate. Disastrously, the president crashed and burned last Thursday night. An obvious question might go something like this:

What sort of medical analysis might explain what happened? Also, what sort of medical analysis might explain the 90 minutes of crazy statements issued by the other candidate on the stage that night?

More broadly, what might a carefully selected medical specialist tell us about these guys? At present, our nation doesn't enjoy a discourse which addresses such obvious questions as these.

Instead, three days before last Thursday's debate, the New York Times published a guest essay beneath this promising headline:

I’m a Doctor and a Voter. Here’s How I’m Thinking About the Health of Trump and Biden.

We'd be inclined to describe that essay as an imitation of life. Putin's wager assumes that such tapioca is the best we the people can do.

As a general matter, our struggling nation's national discourse is an imitation of life. Tomorrow, we'll offer excerpts from the essay in question—an essay which comes to us, live and direct, from the general vicinity of Cumming's portrait of what we the people are like.

Did staffers decide to take a gamble last week? How about family members? Also, what explains the crazy statements the other guy has persistently made, down through the many long years?

(Are we sure this nutcase is "lying?" What makes us think we know that?)

With respect to President Biden, was Thursday's debacle some sort of unpredictable anomaly? Alternately, have staffers perhaps been whistling past a (metaphorical) graveyard? 

What explains what everyone thinks they saw last Thursday night? Inevitably, also this:

What happened last night was a major event. Whas the New York Times said?

Tomorrow: Also, Brooks interviews Steve Bannon