The cover of a recent New Yorker was a cleverish Barry Blitt caricature of four old folks running a race while pushing the kind of aluminum walkers used by mobility challenged people of all ages. Since I’m currently one of them (having been in bed with a broken ankle for a month) I sympathize. Apparently we’re supposed to snicker at these runners because they’re still involved in electoral races even though they’re kinda sorta (OMG) old.
Otherwise, they’re not that much alike.
From left to right:, visually, not politically:
Donald Trump. No need to say more about him—we know too much already.
Mitch McConnell: A canny political operator, wrong on most issues by my standards, but clever.
Nancy Pelosi: Another super clever politician, but good on most important questions.
Joe Biden: In his current incarnation, quite adept at identifying and promoting effective policies. He hasn’t always been so great, but he’s learned a lot on his journey.
A diverse set, but the common denominator is that they’re all now, well, old.
Luckily, Dianne Feinstein was not part of the group, which could have proved embarrassing.
New Yorker Editor David Remnick’s Talk of the Town comments in the same issue are headed “This Old Man” in print, “The Washington Gerontocracy” online. Pretty clearly, Remnick (b.1958) views with alarm some data he’s selected from assorted polls. He worries that “more than seventy per cent of respondents suggested that Biden is too old to be effective in a second term”.
The New Yorker, even before Remnick, has traditionally hoped that it caters to the youngster market, but I doubt that’s true. I only have anecdotes to support my opinion, but these are sometimes better than the data-lite often featured in glossy magazines like The New Yorker.
Harold Ross, its original editor, is often quoted in an urban legend as saying that his brainchild was “not for the little old lady in Dubuque.”
Well, maybe, but I learned to read it from my mother, born 1914 in St.Louis, which is probably more sophisticated than Dubuque ever was, but is not Manhattan, She missed out on college because of the Depression, but made up for it by being a voracious reader of the kind of snappy prose that the New Yorker has always favored. She claimed that the main advantage to not being employed outside home most of her married life was having first crack at the latest issue when it came in the mail, before my father got home from his office. She read every one of them until she died, finally a little old lady at almost 99,
I (b.1940) was rumored to have taught myself to read when I was about 5 with New Yorker cartoons, in those days funnier than the dreary self-centered ones in the current issues. I’d moved on to the heavier stuff by 1958, which was the year I started college and Remnick was born.
New York City has always been populated by the impecunious young and the rich old, and the magazine has reflected that, especially its ads. I would not be in the least surprised to learn that a stunningly high percentage of the New Yorker’s readers,young and old, poor and rich, have voted for Biden and will do so again.
John Lanchester in the latest London Review of Books in a great piece about how numbers are weaponized in politics says this::
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