The old man at the gate
By The last 25 days have been filled with much bitterness at LGM and elsewhere, as people debated how severe (or not) Joe Biden’s physical decline had been over the last several months, and its possible causes.
In the end, I think, the answers to those questions didn’t even matter much in practical political terms. The June 27 debate was a catastrophic event, that cemented a narrative that was going to be impossible to escape, with potentially devastating consequences for an election that could be, under different circumstances, a comprehensive repudiation of Donald Trump, and all his works, and all his deeds.
Because of a rare act of immense character and courage, those different circumstances are now here. Joe Biden has done the hardest thing:
The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.
Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters. . .
On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.
A few notes:
(1) It seems clear that the immense of wave of relief, gratitude, and affection that welled up in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s announcement will allow his endorsement of Kamala Harris to quell any serious attempt to have the nomination go to anyone else. I expect Harris will become the party’s presidential nominee eleven days from today, which is the earliest date that the current DNC rules allow that event to take place.
(2) Today is an absolute disaster for Donald Trump and the Republican party. The fear and panic that Biden’s decision to withdraw and endorse Harris has inspired can be seen in such things as Mike Johnson’s genuinely insane suggestion that lawsuits might force Joe Biden to be the Democratic party’s nominee, even in the wake of his decision not to run. To call that argument frivolous is an insult to frivolity. Any halfway decent judge should visit severe professional sanctions on any licensed attorney who should have the temerity to argue such a thing before a court.
(3) Kamala Harris is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare. Prepare for a wave of misogyny, innuendo, and attempted slut shaming that will make the 2016 election look like a garden party. It will be disgusting beyond belief, but I also believe it will backfire spectacularly, with an electorate already primed by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to understand the threat Trump and Trumpism represent to the idea of treating women like equal citizens.
I was driving near the top of a Colorado mountain pass when I got a text from my brother with the news. This passage came into my mind, as an epic thunderstorm suddenly descended on us from the summer skies:
In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.
All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.
‘You cannot enter here,’ said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ‘Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!’
The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.
‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’ And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.
Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.