A personal account of aging, memory, and loss
LAST JULY 24 -- it seems many years ago -- Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee about possible Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
He entered the hearing room with a remarkable reputation. Former former FBI director (2001-2013). A straight arrow. A man of integrity. Competent. Fair. A man who could be trusted to investigate Russian interference and possible Russian collusion with President Trump or his campaign.
You can decide for yourself whether his report was accurate and whether his investigation was fair. What is beyond debate, however -- at least in my mind -- is that whatever his testimony proved or demonstrated about Russia and the president, it raised serious questions about him, as a fully functional human being. He struggled visibly to understand simple questions and to formulate halting answers. Kevin R. Brock, writing in The Hill, said Mr. Mueller's performance eroded his trust.
Mueller came across as hesitant, uncertain and ill-prepared. He seemed unfamiliar with his own report, which led to some gross inconsistencies in his testimony. Couple this with his unusual request to have his deputy counsel along for backup and suddenly there was a very real perception that Mueller was not fully in command and control of the special counsel effort.
This was amplified by his efforts to heavily redact himself. It’s one thing to stand by your report; it’s quite another to hide underneath it and swat away even innocuous questions. It’s not a good look and leads reasonable people to wonder what’s being concealed. Trust seemed to erode.
(Brock, "Mueller lost much of our trust -- and that's a shame, for him and for us," The Hill (thehill.com), July 29, 2019)
I was shocked. In appearance and demeanor, he looked the part of a government official from Central Casting. But this impressive-looking 73-year-old man clearly suffered from decay of memory and mental acuity. Could his competence still be trusted? Was his storied integrity any longer relevant?
I'm not qualified to diagnose his problem, but I am qualified to recognize that he has a problem. I'm 74 and suffer from what my doctor calls age-related cognitive decline. I suspect Mr. Mueller suffers the same condition. If not, he suffers something similar, potentially even worse.
You have better uses for your time than to hear about my symptoms, tests, diagnoses, and treatments. They are what they are.
The short version is that in the late spring of 2018, I confessed to myself and others that I could no longer do common (for me) cognitive tasks that had long defined my identity and made my living -- namely writing.
For example, I taught Christian Bible classes. I always spent many hours preparing. Now, however, I could not get the 40-minute lessons done by Saturday evening. Muscling through the project often took all night. Even then, the writing was neither crisp nor well-organized. It wobbled here and there.
So I stopped teaching Bible lessons, which I loved. I also resigned from serious outside writing projects for a client I loved.
Stepping away was painful, but stepping away was the right thing to it. It was my responsibility to do these things well or not at all. My customers were better off finding more competent teachers and writers.
(I did continue work on a third-party photography exhibition that I curated and mounted last January on the Rice University campus. I found it difficult to organize and write, but it was stall a success, I believe. Sadly, however, my speech, meant to crown the event with a serious look at the backstory of the photographs, was weak at best, embarrassing at worst.)
Robert Mueller should have stepped away too. If his condition at the beginning of the investigation was anywhere near his condition at the end, he should never have accepted the invitation to serve as special counsel for the Russia probe.
My condition and Mr. Mueller's set me to thinking about the problem posed by our aging political class. How old is too old?
On election day 2020, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., will be 77 and Donald John Trump, 74. Leaving aside all questions of party, policy, and character, I doubt either man is fully competent, cognitively, to serve as president of the United States.
If you disagree and believe former Vice President Biden is cognitively sound, God bless you. I hope you are right. My view is that the evidence suggests otherwise and that the evidence is that he cannot be expected to do the job.
President Trump is a tougher call. His sometimes bizarre words and deeds suggest a long-term disability, not recent decline. Whatever the case, do not look to me to defend his cognitive abilities, other than this: If he is indeed charting his course by intuition rather than facts or logic, his intuitions are often right.
Why can America not cannot produce better candidates than these two men? Our system of selecting candidates is in need of repair.
There being no practical alternative to these candidates, however, how does one choose one cognitively impaired candidate over the other?
I will vote for President Trump. He has done a better job as president than his vicious and sometimes deranged critics will admit -- far better -- and his policies are considerably more congenial to me than those of his adversary. (God willing, I will write more about the case for Mr. Trump in future posts.)
I also believe Mr. Biden, were he to win, could do little more than serve as caretaker president of a government staffed top-to-bottom, and run, by hardcore progressives bent on destroying the American experiment.
My condition has been bettered by diet and exercise, a CPAP machine to overcome sleep apnea, and a pharmaceutical regime designed to slow cognitive decline.tThough I must take far greater care in attending to my personal affairs, I I am still capable of doing so.
But what lies over the horizon? Is the day coming when my mind slips a gear and leaves me susceptible to the first thief who calls asking for my account numbers?
Driving and other practical tasks are not a problem, so far as I can tell, but how long will that be true?
Should I continue, even for my own amusement, posting Unca D -- even if I am now limited, mostly, to copying and posting useful essays by others, rarely speaking in my own voice?
Or should I toss my concerns to the wind and do what the leaders of our two major political parties have endorsed by the testimony of their deeds -- run for president of the United States?
Probably not.
All else being equal, I wouldn't vote for me.
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