Unpleasant Stuff

Joe Biden and the semiotics of old age

July 18, 2024
President Joe Biden on July 16, 2024. (AP Photo/David Becker)

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In the coverage, last month, of Joe Biden’s debate performance, journalists confronted the pitfalls of writing about aging. There was a panoply of attempts: The descriptive. (“He stammered. He stumbled,” per Politico. “He stood frozen behind his podium, mouth agape, his eyes wide and unblinking for long stretches of time.”) The sadly passive. (According to NPR, “He simply couldn’t deliver the kinds of happy-warrior blows with that toothy smile audiences have seen from Biden in years past.”) The rhetorically stirring. (Biden appeared, to the New York Times editorial board, as “the shadow of a great public servant” who “struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.”) The disappointed and confused. (“A tongue-tied octogenarian,” Doyle McManus wrote for the Los Angeles Times, “ended one tangled explanation of his tax proposals with the puzzling phrase: ‘If we finally beat Medicare.’”) Common adjectives included “dismal,” “brutal,” and “stunning.” In the days since, the press has made old age its focus, as Biden’s closest allies call on him to step aside.

Old age is everywhere: by 2029, there will be more than seventy million people in the United States over the age of sixty-five, accounting for around 20 percent of the overall population. It is not invisible, and yet it is not often looked at directly. For all the obsessive coverage of politicians’ age—Biden is eighty-one, Trump seventy-eight—the conditions of being an older person are relatively unplumbed in public discourse. After the debate, I called Christy Hire—a woman in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who works as a caregiver for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, and who is also a longtime occupational therapist to older people. “I don’t think the media show the real dirty gritty side,” she said. “Let’s show the dirty-gritty, because it’s reality. Oh, look at this graceful aging! I don’t like that. That does happen, sometimes, but not real often. Let’s talk about the people who sit on the toilet for an hour and their legs go numb.” She felt sorry for Biden, she said—despite not liking his politics or, really, politics at all.

Writing about older people is a minefield, though, because “oldness,” when viewed as a fixed category, immediately begins to dissolve; age looks different from person to person. A popular working definition of aging has something to do with separateness, in the form of retirement, potential debility, perceived out-of-touchness. Beyond that, we are left to look rabidly for signs; we know it when we see it, and yet are hard-pressed (like Justice Potter Stewart) to name the specifics. Perhaps the difficulty arises from our tendency to set such matters aside. According to a KFF survey last year, fewer than half of adults “have ever had a serious conversation with a loved one about who will take care of them if they need help with daily activities in the future (43%).” Stephen Katz, professor emeritus of sociology at Trent University, in Canada, has long studied “the aging body” and the social construction of older age; when it comes to the management of aging, he told me recently, “It’s sort of like, well, that’s kind of the unpleasant stuff. I’ll just move that off.” He added, “It’s almost like the future diminishes. And you no longer really belong to it.” 

There is not even a good standard term for people over sixty-five. “Don’t use words that may have negative connotations,” the National Institute on Aging advises, including “the aged,” “elderly,” “senior,” “senior citizen,” and “boomer.” (“Older,” which I have settled on, is also extremely imperfect, as it is clearly relative to some supposedly normative younger group.) Even when trying to get the story right, a journalist can easily tilt toward ageism and ableism. There’s also the near-compulsory, optimistic, and profitable “graceful aging” paradigm that Barbara Ehrenreich once skewered (“It’s not enough to stay alive; you have to become better than you were in your youth”). There is a theory of the “third age”—a post-retirement span of supposed personal fulfillment and activity, as defined by a historian named Peter Laslett—that helped solidify contemporary ideas around “positive aging.” As Katz explained it, “You’re still kind of an active adult, you’re just doing things a little differently or enjoying life in a retired kind of milieu.” But most people don’t get a third age; they keep on working, without a pension, until they die. “Those diverse experiences are left out of this imagination of a glorious, golden time,” Katz said. “Where, then, is the fourth age? What happens in real old age? When does it come? And how do we know that it’s coming? And how do we deal with that part?” 

There has been a degree of horror in the coverage around Biden’s public oldness, reminiscent of what Katz and others have called the “black hole” of the “fourth age,” which Biden may be seen to straddle. For a long time now, journalists have reported on his numerous slip-ups, shufflings, gaffes, falls. “Some consider it taboo to ask whether a candidate is too old to serve as president,” Jack Shafer reported for Politico. “Not the press.” Brian Stelter, writing for Vox, observed, “Journalists aren’t doctors, and shouldn’t pretend to be.” But they should continue to demand answers, he added. “Questions of age will come up over and over again. Reporters who push past hostile press offices and recalcitrant readers to get to the facts will have met the moment—and delivered to the public what it deserves.” The idea, to Stelter and others, is that younger generations in particular deserve age-focused reporting—and, more largely, a future ruled by a non-gerontocracy. 

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, the author of Aged by Culture (2004), has noted how the word aging “usually refers to decline.” The facts of aging “have to be explained over and over,” she said. “Nominal aphasia—trouble with proper names—does not mean I don’t remember everything else about the person I have in mind.” Gullette’s forthcoming book, American Eldercide, focuses on the experiences of older people during the worst ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, pointing out how “journalists almost never interviewed residents of nursing homes, at a time when the main story across the country was that they were locked in, without access to friends and relatives, in understaffed buildings, and dying in clusters, prematurely and unnecessarily, alone.” Biden’s own recent COVID diagnosis, and his campaign’s “I’m sick” fundraising tweet, sparked disbelief—and yet the timing seemed all too perfect, after he granted an interview with BET News, saying the one thing that would draw him out of the election would be “if I had some medical condition that emerged.”

Recently, Rachael Bedard, a geriatrician and writer, published a Times op-ed about Biden’s public experience of oldness. “As a country, we are not having a complete or accurate discussion of age-related debility,” she wrote; clinical frailty, she argued, is a standard part of a person’s movement from one late stage to the next. “A shifting ratio of good days and bad days is often how clinical frailty appears. The pattern of decline in frailty is a gradual dwindling of a person’s health, a line sloping slowly downward.” (She stopped short of diagnosing Biden.) But most journalists, unlike Bedard, are not also doctors; most assessments of older people come from the outside, as they are not often trusted to narrate their own experiences.

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Is there a way to write frankly on older age, from a distance? “How hard could it be, really?” Ceridwen Dovey asked in The New Yorker, before narrating her own doomed attempt. If there is a needle to thread, it is very skinny: How can a writer describe a politician such as Biden within the framework of “too old” while also remembering the realities of most older people in this country, who, upon needing specialized treatment, are often “not going to be able to afford it,” as Hire told me, “unless they have a pretty fat nest egg.” Possibly, they wind up in a care home, if they are on Medicaid. (“You’ll never see Biden in a nursing home,” Hire said.)

This is all to say that the structures around older age in the United States encourage a sense that there is such a thing as “too old” to be a part of society, on the basis of productivity, disability, and capacity. Biden seems, now, a symbol of oldness; he is giving the “semiotics of old age,” as Katz put it. What is being signified, of course, remains murky. Old age can be everywhere and nowhere, vivid and background, difficult and graceful, a lucky privilege and an eventuality, a biological reality and a social construct. “The real elders are the proper judges of the stages of life, since those who are young judge things without being experienced,” wrote Petrarch, in the fourteenth century. Of course, we have all been hearing some version of this idea forever. Perhaps any serious thinker’s work is not to accept “oldness” for the easy meaning it is typically assigned in this country, but to interrogate how it is built, how it is used, and the variations inside it, while also remembering any number of other ways to evaluate a person’s past, present, and future.

Lucy Schiller is a professor of nonfiction writing at Texas Tech. Her first book, on older age in the United States, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books.