The Immortals

American Gerontocracy and a 46,000 Year Old Worm

There was no way to satirically title this issue of the Freakshow without coming off as heartless and cruel. I was going to call this The Undead. I did not, but that’s our topic.

This week brought fascinating science news: the melting Siberian permafrost freed up some 46,000-year-old living worms. The organism is among a few known species capable of existing in something called a cryptobiotic state, somewhere between life and death, in which metabolic rates decrease to an undetectable level. Organisms in a cryptobiotic state can withstand “the complete absence of water or oxygen, high temperatures, as well as freezing or salty conditions,” one of the scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden said.

Scientists revived some of the worms by putting them in water. They have since reproduced, and so we have welcomed a new worm species, capable of something like eternal life, to our planet.

News of the 46,000-year old worm happened to coincide with a reminder, from the U.S. Senate, that our gerontocracy teeters on the cryptobiotic, existing in a state between life and death. On Wednesday Kentucky Republican and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, stopped in mid-sentence on live TV and had to be led away and revived. Doctors who spoke to reporters but who had not examined McConnell speculated he suffered an “ischemic” event or seizure.

A day later, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 90, was recorded on video in an addled state. During a Senate Appropriates Committee vote on defense appropriations, she had to be prodded to say “Aye.” From the CNN coverage:

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state tried to prompt her.

“Say aye,” she said, repeating herself three times to Feinstein.

Feinstein then started to read from prepared remarks, and was interrupted by an aide whispering in her ear.

“Yeah,” Murray said once again. “Just say ‘aye.’”

“OK, just,” Feinstein replied.

“Aye,” Murray repeated once more.

Then Feinstein sat back in her chair. “Aye,” she said, casting her vote.

Mind you, this was a vote on whether to blow another $886 Billion dollars on the Pentagon and private contractors whose yachts and gated McMansions we have already paid for. This vote matters. Should it really be left up to people who forget the difference between Aye and Nay? (Bernie Sanders - no spring chicken himself - was the only Senator of any age compos mentis enough to stand up to this abomination.)

Neither Senator’s office made any statement to suggest that stepping back is an option.

Modern medicine plus lust for power equals the American gerontocracy.

Besides Bernie, who seems to be doing just fine at 81, on the other end of the political spectrum we saw 100-year-old Henry Kissinger over in China, meeting with President Xi Ping, on what was billed as a private trip. A photo of the event showed the former Secretary of State, tiny, bent, formally dressed in suit and tie, hunched in a chair across from a grinning Chinese leader. Kissinger is very popular with Chinese leaders, who, besides a tradition of ancestor worship, apparently revere the old realpolitik death-squad butcher-master for having opened relations with their country in 1970s.

The average age in the Senate is the second oldest since 1789. Congress as a whole has aged significantly in the last four decades, with the average age in the House rising by 9 years and by 12 years in the Senate. And of course, the leading candidates for President in 2024 are grampas, Trump 77 and Biden 81.

McConnell was re-elected to a six year term in 2022. Feinstein was last elected in 2018, and after suffering a severe case of shingles that took months of recovery late last year, she announced that she will not seek another term next year.

The oldest Republican Senator, Iowa’s Charles Grassley turns 90 this year. He decided to run for another term in 2022, at the age of 88, won and will serve until 2029. He will be 96.

As our electoral system requires ever-larger piles of money to play, these powerful oldsters cannot be defeated. Feinstein raised more than $24 million for her re-election in 2018. McConnell raised $75 million and spent more than $68 million between 2017 and 2022. Having spent decades lining up donors, they control piles of concentrated wealth and patronage fiefdoms that go back multiple generations. Few dare challenge them and those that do are on a fool’s errand. Over repeated six year terms, they amass a deathless power, eventually existing like the Siberian worm in a state between life and death.

The McConnell and Feinstein spectacles provoked a bump of discussion about our gerontocracy. “For years, like so many children of aging parents across America, politicians and their advisers in Washington tried to skirt that difficult conversation, wrapping concerns about their octogenarian leaders in a cone of silence,” New York Times political reporters wrote in an article headlined Reluctant to Retire, Leaders Raise a Tough Question: How Old is Too Old? “The omertà was enabled by the traditions of a city that arms public figures with a battalion of aides, who manage nearly all of their professional and personal lives.”

The "difficult conversation” that children of aged parents have, about, say, when they should stop driving or move into assisted living, is not one that the Congressional staffs are inclined to have with their bosses. The US Senate especially is a kind of luxurious nursing home.

Many countries impose mandatory retirement on workers, as early as 50 in places like Iran, and into the late 60s in the Scandinavian countries. The U.S. doesn’t, but de facto mandatory retirement is common, according to studies cited by the AARP. Older American workers are pushed out of jobs all the time.

More than half of all workers age 50 and older lost their long-held jobs because they were laid off or otherwise forced to leave involuntarily, a new study says. The research suggests that many older workers will encounter unexpected financial setbacks during the period when saving and planning for retirement is most important……The Urban Institute — a Washington, D.C., think tank — and ProPublica examined data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a national study that since 1992 has followed a representative sample of nearly 20,000 people from the moment they turn 50 through the ends of their lives.

Mandatory retirement seems terribly cruel, and in fact, scary to anyone, including your Freakshow tour guide, for whom the unwanted AARP card has already arrived in the mail.

A more compassionate suggestion is mandatory mental competency tests for office-holders at age 75. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, 51, suggested this when announcing her candidacy for the Republican nomination earlier this year, “In the America I see, the permanent politician will finally retire,” she said. “We’ll have term limits for Congress. And mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.”

It is not clear that such tests would cure the problem of doddering leadership. There will always be a Dr. Ronny Jackson, wearing the white coat, but reporting that a sedentary lifetime of cheeseburgers and rage has left a 75 year old borderline obese man the very picture of health,

Some ancient societies both revered the elderly and disposed of them cruelly, practicing senecide, leaving the old behind or encouraging suicide. The 2021 horror movie Midsommar depicts the mythical Norse practice of Ättestupa - ritual senecide. In one scene, spectators watch an old guy (the same actor who once played beautiful boy Tadzio in the Visconti film of Death in Venice) leap off a cliff. Since the fall doesn’t quite do the trick, a villager finishes him off with a mallet.

Today, Ättestupa is considered by historians and linguists to be a myth.

University of Chicago philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has considered these questions. She comes down on the side of the olds. She calls mandatory retirement “one of the great moral evils of our time.” She identifies the root cause of age discrimination in “disgust,” related to the horror younger people feel about their own bodies declining.

I have aged parents, and I’m on the dark side of middle age myself. As our parents decline, many of my friends and I have started to have conservations about how to avoid that fate ourselves. We’ll have pacts, we say: you’ll put a pillow over my head when I start to forget my name, or we will all go to Switzerland together for that painless exit module. But a doctor friend who has heard all this before warned me that when push comes to shove, the survival instinct in our DNA isn’t so easy to overcome. As hard as it is for me to imagine, I suppose I too might close my fist around the car keys and have to be dragged away from my my desk kicking and screaming, raging against the dying of the light, not going gently into that good night.

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