The Anxiety of Age

I know what it's like.

- MARK JACOBSON

I know that look on Biden's face, the lost-in-space gait, the way the words appear to hover just beyond reach.

IN 1965, WHEN JOE BIDEN was 22, still seven years away from being elected the youngest senator in the country, Bob Dylan wrote, "Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked." Now, nearly three score later, the prophecy appeared to be fulfilling as Biden stood onstage in Atlanta, as white as a sheet, as frozen as an oil painting, rummaging through frayed neural pathways for the words, any words, to escape the linguistic corner into which he'd stumbled.

Words! Where were the words? Detoured in the transition, stuck to the tip of his tongue under a gob of Poligrip? How long did it last, two seconds, three? It might have been forever: Scranton Joe, the workingman's friend, in stop motion on one-half of the split screen, Trump on the other with his silver-spoon-sucking smirk, a sadist calmly watching a drowning bug.

He didn't even have to say "I told you so." In front of millions of people, Joe Biden, president of the United States, all 81 years of withered mortality, was standing naked.

It wasn't pretty. Naked old people rarely are-all that sagging skin, the lumpy bottom, hair on their ears, toenail fungus, the inevitable way of all flesh, as if Dorian Gray's Polaroid is developing before your eyes. The mere glimpse of demise sent the entire New York Times editorial board into panic mode and scared the bejesus out of the members of the president's feckless day-late-dollar-short party, who are now racking their brains about how to get rid of him. Considering the stakes, nothing less than the onset of the New Dark Ages, the rancorous despair was justified.