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The Decline and Fall of Everything (Including Me)
What Goes Up Must" Well, You Know"
I find nothing strange in Joe Biden, at 79 (going on 80), being the oldest president in our history and possibly planning to run again in 2024. After all, who wouldn't want to end up in the record books? Were he to be nominated and then beat the also-aging Donald Trump, or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or even Fox News's eternally popular Tucker Carlson, he would occupy the White House until he was 86.
Honestly, wouldn't that be perfect in its own way? I mean, what could better fit an America in decline than a president in decline, the more radically so the better?
Okay, maybe, despite the Republican National Committee's clip on the subject, when Joe Biden had to be guided to that red carpet in Israel, it wasn't because he was an increasingly doddering old guy. Still"
I mean, I get it. I really do. After all, I just turned 78 myself, which leaves me only a year and four months behind Joe Biden in the aging sweepstakes. And believe me, when you reach anything close to our age, whatever White House spokespeople might say, decline becomes second nature to you. In fact, I'm right with Joe on that carpet whenever someone brings up a movie I saw or book I read years ago (or was it last month?) and I can't remember a damn thing about it. I say to any of you of a certain age, Joe included: Welcome to the club!
It's strange, if not eerie, to be living through the decline of my country " the once "sole superpower" on Planet Earth " in the very years of my own decline (even if Fox News isn't picking on me). Given the things I'm now forgetting, there's something spookily familiar about the decline-and-fall script in the history I do recall. As Joe and his top officials do their best to live life to the fullest by working to recreate a three-decades-gone Cold War, even as this country begins to come apart at the seams, all I can say is: welcome to an ever lousier version of the past (just in case you're too young to have lived it).
Since the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the arrival of us, tell me that decline hasn't been among the most basic stories in history. After all, every child knows that what goes up, must" I don't even have to complete that sentence, do I, whatever your age? Thought of a certain way, decline and fall is the second oldest story around, after the rise and" whatever you want to call it.
Just ask the last emperors of China's Han dynasty, or the once-upon-a-time rulers of Sparta, or Romulus Augustulus, the last head of the Roman Empire (thanks a lot, Nero!). But here, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, that ancient tale has a brand-new twist. After all that time when humanity, in its own bloody, brutal fashion, flourished, whether you want to talk about the loss of species, the destruction of the environment, or ever more horrific weather disasters arriving ever more quickly, it's not just the United States (or me) going down" it's everything. And don't think that doesn't include China, the supposedly rising power on Planet Earth. It also happens to be releasing far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other country right now and suffering accordingly (even if the falling power of this moment, the United States, remains safely in first place as the worst carbon emitter of all time).
So, unless we humans can alter our behavior fast, it looks like only half our story may soon be left for the telling.
The Rise and Fall of Tom Engelhardt (and So Much Else)
To speak personally, I find myself experiencing three versions of that ultimate story: that of my own fall; that of my country; and that of an increasingly overheating planet as a habitable place for us all. With that in mind, let me take you on a brief trip through those three strangely intertwined tales, starting with me.
I was born in July 1944 into an America that had been roused from a grotesque depression, the "Great" one as it was known, and was then being transformed into a first-rate military and economic powerhouse by World War II. (My father was in that war as, in her own fashion, was my mother.) That global conflict, which mobilized the nation in every way, wouldn't end until, more than a year later, two American B-29s dropped newly invented weapons of disastrous destructive power, atomic bombs, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more or less obliterating them. In those acts, for the first time in history, lay the promise of an ultimate end to the human story of a sort once left to the gods. In other words, V-J (or Victory over Japan) Day instantly had an underside that couldn't have been more ominous.
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