Many old men, including Henry Adams, have experienced their later years as if it were the end times, the collapse of civilization. (For Henry, it was 1914, the beginning of WWI.) Sometimes it is, but we usually don’t come to understand it as such until many years later. And even then, however significant or traumatic the demise, life goes on. I do not mention this truism in consolation for our recent moral and political debacle. Life can be going on badly, bigly badly indefinitely. But it goes on, and you go on in it.
Our presidential election, in which a ridiculous old gasbag, Donald Trump, whose most serious flaws don’t include his age—though age should be included among his lesser flaws—has more or less explicitly threatened the end of the republic under the Constitution. There is rightful concern, even rightful alarm. But reading old men like Henry can help to remind us that even the most discerning cannot see the future with any certainty. It must be lived in and through, and resisted, if need be, because resistance is a form of living.
Paraphrasing H. L. Mencken: Democracy is when 75 million people elect Donald Trump to the Presidency, again! Mencken is also reputed to have said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” or something like it. I guess we’ll see.
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