July 28, 2006

I love older men. And it's not for the reason the beauteous Jennifer Marlowe once offered on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati: "They're so sweet. And they tire easily."

I prefer older men because they know what they are and they don't lie to you or to themselves about it. They have had years to think about whether they want to stay that way or do the revolutionary thing and become kinder, better people.

So I don't like it when people mess with my, what shall we call them, erotic preferences.

When older men disgrace themselves, I feel betrayed. This does not apply to older men like Dick Cheney, who were born vile and honed that quality for a lifetime. We're talking about older men who started out right and then slid to perdition. Or else they discarded a lifetime of learning and reverted to childhood.

It is starting to look like a fashionable new disorder, like borderline personality disorder. Let's call it senescent infantilism syndrome.

This week, I watched Senator John McCain interviewed by Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show. McCain performed a moral self-autopsy. He tiredly removed his own spine. Even Stewart was embarrassed for him.

Stewart began the interview with: "President Bush says he has made the world a safer place." Pause. "How much safer can the world afford to have him make us?"

McCain looked intensely uncomfortable and began blithering: "Before I answer that …" and didn't answer it.

"Don't dodge the question," Stewart said, somewhat shocked at how badly McCain dodges these days.

Stewart then asked McCain if Dick Cheney saying he stood by his year-old statement that the Iraqi insurgency is in its final throes meant that Cheney was an idiot.

McCain babbled some more. He said Bush was doing things right. "Mistakes have been made," he said. "Things are very tough," he conceded, but said Bush knows that.

Beware the use of the passive tense

Always watch out for a politician using the passive voice. It spares him from listing the mistakes and naming the people responsible for making them, as well as brushing off the number of people these mistakes killed.

McCain was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for more than five years. He attempted suicide several times rather than be used as a PR tool by his captors. The same man now he toadies to the same hard-right Republicans who lost him a crucial primary by telling voters he had an illegitimate black child (McCain and his wife had adopted a baby from Bangladesh). He praised Bush, whom he despises and accepted a degree from Jerry Falwell's "university," which he had previously scorned. And now he tells Stewart: "I appreciate the president's leadership on this. The president has been excellent on this issue."

McCain wants to be president so badly that there isn't a boot he won't lick.

How does this happen to a grown-up, especially when his degradation takes place in public, like a prisoner visible from every corner of his cell?

From cool to fool, to rule?

The same is true of Tony Blair, a rapidly ossifying middle-ager whose transition from idealistic defender of Cool Britannia to national laughingstock was not even based on secretly being a right-wing God-botherer aiming to abolish Magna Carta. He wanted to rule.

He thought toadying to Bush would make him an international statesman. Instead, Bush treats him like a school kid. Blair takes it without complaint and lashes out, not at Bush but at the British public.

Blair told Britons this week that they are to blame for the underfunded National Health Service. This isn't underfunding that can be solved by, say, funding, he said. It is overused by citizens who smoke, drink and eat too much. Seriously. Their heart attacks, cancers, liver ailments, diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases and bad knees are not part of aging or plain old modern life, but part of an immoral lifestyle that he, for one, will not shell out cash to cure.

This is quite unreal. If the fact that I am a thin non-smoker pleases people like Blair, give me ciggies and great collops of fat on my haunches, although I draw the line at syphilis. I want to be liked by normal people, not priss-faces like Blair.

Retreating to a 'second childishness'

The common theme in both political meltdowns is spectacular childishness.

McCain wants to be Bush's bestest friend, even though the American public wants Bush expelled from school. Blair wants to be liked by absolutely everyone in school and that includes the cool kids, the geeks and the teachers. As a result, he is the most teased kid in the playground. His wedgie is permanent.

Time to call up the big guns, Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

McCain and Blair are "the whining schoolboy, with his satchel/and shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school." They were men once. Now they have retreated to what Shakespeare called a "second childishness." It signals death, he says.

Corinthians reads: "When I became a man, I put away childish things."

These men have become children. It's as if power is a toy, and they must have it, they must. No, the other boys cannot play with this. No, they won't share.

These are grown men behaving childishly out of a petulant longing for a big shiny toy called power. And what do they do with the toy when they wrench it from another child's hands? They destroy it.

You want to smack a child like that, though you won't. But as a responsible voter/parent, you do take away his toy.