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SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES

Four days after his 71st birthday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins was scheduled to play a concert in Boston. The date was September 11, 2001, and before he could leave his apartment in lower Manhattan, the planes crashed into the World Trade Center.

The concert was postponed, but five days later he played to a crowd trying – like the rest of us – to recover from the trauma. The recording of that album, “The 9/11 Concert,” is another Rollins masterpiece.

Recording masterpieces is what Rollins continued to do for another decade plus – until his pulmonary problems forced him to retire. This week, he died at the age of 95, after sharing his musical genius with the world for 65 years.

As a septuagenarian myself, I fully subscribe to the idea that creating – whether it’s music or writing – is something I can do until either my mind and/or body fails. 

The mental faculty it takes to process the world and present your view of it probably diminishes with age. But it doesn’t completely go away. Bruce Springsteen, at 76, still performs three-hour concert in multiple cities to packed houses. I just a saw a video of Robert Caro, age 90, working on the final volume of his Lyndon Johnson master opus – 983 pages are written so far and he still has a ways to go.

But there’s another mental process that does fade and become compromised as we get older.

That’s the ability to make decisions.

Making decisions is hard work. And especially if you have to make a lot of them – and those decisions are literally life and death for some people.

Barack Obama used to say that – other than the tan suit brouhaha – he never picked out his own clothes. Someone else went through his closet and set out his wardrobe for the next day. It was one less decision he had to make and he needed to save his energy for the choices that mattered.

I get it. I’ve been making decisions about all kinds of things for 72 years. And, having been an editor and desk manager in a real-time newsroom, I’ve had to make multiple decisions about what’s a story and what’s not, what belongs in a story and what needs to be left out, what’s a fact and what’s a mistake, and what word best conveys the idea.

It’s tiring. For me, I developed mental blocks that caused me to make mistakes. When I screwed up a monthly housing report at age 59, it made me question whether I needed to stop doing what I was doing. As it turned out, I did.

There’s one other thing about an older mind. It’s kinda stuck on ideas of what’s what.

Jon Stewart points out that Trump only seems to go after the late-night guys who are network TV – Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. It seems as though he has no idea who Stewart or John Oliver are. They’re not on legacy networks.

Trump knows there’s cable – he is, after all, the backbone of Fox News, Newsmax, One America and other right-wing outlets. 

Unfortunately, this country has decided that age is no obstacle to leadership.

For the first 26 years of my life, the oldest president in U.S. history was William Henry Harrison. He was 68 when he was inaugurated. He was also 68 when he died. Immediately after his inauguration, Harrison contracted pneumonia – he died a month later.

It was until Ronald Reagan that anyone older became president who was older than Harrison. And Reagan was 69 when he took office in 1981.

Our last three presidential elections have seen our nation elect men who were older than 70. In both 2020 and 2024, the winner was 78. Joe Biden turned 80 in the White House and Donald Trump turns 80 in the next month.

The problem here is that the presidency is a conflict. You can’t be inaugurated unless you’re at least 35 years of age.

But as we’re seeing, there’s a possibility that you can be too old. I thought Biden was a tremendous leader. But Jill Biden’s new book is probably going to make a lot of people think he aged too quickly and lost his way – as demonstrated in that godawful debate in June 2024 when Biden seemed lost and befuddled.

In Trump’s case, his incompetence at making decisions and his outdated notions of what the world is doing these days is compounded by his basic narcissism and inability to think about anybody other than himself.

Those are traits that also get worse as you get older, and stop caring about what other people think. I’m 72 – or, in his case, 80 – and I’m going to do as I damn well please. I’m not here that much longer anyway.

The point of all this is that if there’s ever been a time for a generational change in leadership, it’s now. The initial success of 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani as New York’s mayor is proof that a younger generation, one that’s attuned to contemporary ideas and sees how important the future is, needs to get control of the works.

And it’s not as if old people should be put out to pasture. Sonny Rollins created great music into his 70s. Paul McCartney still writes songs in his 80s. I’m going to see James Taylor in a few weeks – he can still do great concerts.

It’s time for our generation to leave the hard work to the youngsters. Because we’ll screw things up with our old, faltering ways of thinking.

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MAKE AMERICA GREATER

There are just four days left in the Biden administration and it is my intention to enjoy each one as a gift.

A decent, hard-working man – perhaps a bit too old for the job but still good at it anyway – graced us from noon ET on January 20, 2021 to this coming Monday at noon. Like every other presidency, Joe Biden’s wasn’t perfect. But it came as close as any in my lifetime.

Joe Biden guided us gently out of the gloom of the COVID-19 debacle inherited from the guy who’s replacing him. They might be a pain in the butt, but all those highway construction projects you see are making our roads – along with the rest of our infrastructure – more suited to the century we’re now a quarter of the way into.

He stood for Ukraine when Vladimir Putin got frustrated by waiting for his imperial dreams to come true. He combatted climate change and showed respect for people who have been traditionally belittled in American society.

The American economy is the strongest in the world. He managed to blast America’s way out of the pandemic-induced recession and then brought the growth lower with a brief spike in inflation.

That spike, however, did in both him and Kamala Harris. And so we get Trump again for four years – assuming the blowhard makes it to age 82.

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Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama spent way too much of their presidencies cleaning up the messes left by their predecessors.

Biden, of course, had the aftermath of the pandemic. Obama faced both the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and an American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I suspect just about everyone reading this and liking it agrees there will be an equal or worse clusterfuck to deal with four years from Monday.

And yet, that’s the mistake we make and the other side doesn’t.

We concentrate on fighting them. They fight us – don’t get me wrong – but they also develop new, crueler, stupider ideas to foist on both the left and the cucumbers who voted for them in November. 

There will be a lot of angst to go around. But part of their gameplan is to frustrate us – to make us concentrate on their latest perverse idea or vendetta.

Right now, you’re seeing it with the wildfires in Los Angeles. How California is a failed liberal experiment and the disaster is due to a combination of its godlessness, diversity and economic initiatives. Just check out some of the comments from Wyoming Sen. John Horsesasso.

It’s meant to drain our energy. And it has to, at least to some extent. You can’t claim to be a decent human being and then deny aid to Los Angeles, or just uproot millions of people living and working here peacefully because they didn’t get the documents you demand. Or tell women they risk prison or worse if they try in any way to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy.

But we need to be better this time. And the way to do that is to think about what we want to do to make America greater.

See, I think Peruvian restaurants and Hmong gymnasts and Somalian-born soldiers make this country great. Not McDonald’s or Walmart or Tesla – or not by themselves, anyway. 

And it certainly is not a hateful convicted felon who is absolutely clueless about what it takes to lead an amazing land.

So we need to advance our agenda. To come up with ideas we think will improve our country and, maybe with it, the world. 

They don’t have to be popular now. Some absolutely won’t be. But we need to advance the case so that we can sell them from conviction and evidence. And begin the process of educating and converting some of the just shy of 50% of American voters who actually chose Trump over a really smart, energetic woman.

Over the next five weeks, I’m going to put forward some ideas I’ve thought about as ways we can show how we’re looking toward 2100, not 1900.

The ideas:

— Universal basic income: This is what Andrew Yang promoted when he ran for president in 2000, and then got weird. 

Both liberals and conservatives have reasons to like this idea. But Trump and his supporters will see it as free money (that they don’t think they’re getting) and squawk.

— Police reform. I bristle every time I see a car with one of those black versions of the American flag and the blue stripe in the middle. As if policing in this country should go unquestioned and unfettered. 

But when you see three or four cops together, do you feel safer? Or nervous? And do the answers depend on what you look like? Frankly, few things are in more need of improvement in this country than how we police ourselves.

— Immigration reform. Trump and his minions don’t want to reform immigration. They want to abolish it – unless you can make a considerable donation to the GOP after you get here. The question of how we treat people coming here, for more than four centuries, is one of our greatest dilemmas. 

We should aspire to be better than that – this doesn’t seem like that intractable a problem if we come up with creative and humane solutions.

— Getting around. It’s believed one of Trump’s first executive orders will be to maximize oil production and end credits for electric vehicles – the short-sighted, idiotic “drill, baby, drill” mantra.

Let’s get past both those forms of transportation – there have been few innovations in creating new ways to go places compared with communication technology. Let’s encourage imagination.

— Kindness. Mean will be in power starting Monday. Mean will be the default approach of the White House, Congress and Supreme Court. Mean will drive the stories you see on the news and the attitude of the plurality. If you don’t believe that, explain why a house near me still flew its “Fuck Biden” and “Fuck Kamala Harris” flags as late as New Year’s Eve. 

We have to create new, innovative ways to be kind – to look out for people who are pariahs to the MAGAs. Kindness is our not-so-secret weapon for making America greater – a task that will be easier once we get past Trump and his ilk.

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GOOD THINGS THAT END

Jimmy Carter’s passing reminds us that human lives aren’t eternal – even ones as worthy of going on forever as the 39th President’s.

Carter died Sunday at the age of 100, the longest-living American president. That’s a nice fact, but here’s a nicer one – he appears to have been a genuinely good person. He was honest – perhaps too much for American politics – and saw the future when others found it safer to stay in the past or present.

Because his opponents – on both the left and right – found it convenient, the narrative they painted was of a failed presidency. 

His firm stand on human rights and only tepid support of the corrupt Shah of Iran was seen as leading to the Iranian Revolution, 

In turn, that was seen as leading to the taking of American hostages at the embassy in Tehran and a largely unwarranted surge in oil prices. 

And that in turn led to some of the worst inflation in my lifetime. Which resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan.

That all sounds really bad. But Carter got what we would now call “trolled” a lot. 

He was not popular with the Washington establishment – to be fair, he was a bit haughty about it, but there was certainly some justification. His focus on human rights ticked off the Arab nations, right-wing dictators in Latin America and the Soviets. And once the U.S. right – Reagan et al. – and the left – Ted Kennedy et al. – ganged up on him, he was finished.

But Carter saw climate change and the energy crisis coming. He established diplomatic relations with China and negotiated the Camp David accords that still keep the peace between Israel and Egypt.

More important, he didn’t talk to the American people as though they were idiots. His August 1979 address to the nation – often called the “malaise speech” – is perhaps the bravest any American president ever delivered. 

But by telling the American people that there might be something wrong with them, he opened the door to opportunistic types who knew they could curry favor by pandering. (see Trump, Donald J.)

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The timing of Carter’s death seems like quite a coincidence. It’s three weeks before Trump’s inauguration – just in time for Carter’s family to avoid having Trump play a major role in the commemoration of a man he belittled for decades.

Instead, a eulogy will be delivered by President Biden, who was among the first major political figures to support Carter’s long-shot 1976 presidential run. (It also says a lot about Carter that the man he defeated for the presidency, Gerald Ford, will eulogize him through a letter written before he died.)

That’s a reminder that another good thing that’s ending, unfortunately, is Biden’s presidency.

The Biden and Carter presidencies share a lot. They both inherited a mess from a disreputable Republican predecessor. Biden got the mishegas Trump left because of his botching of COVID. Carter came on in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace following Watergate, something the more honorable Ford couldn’t overcome.

Both men confronted a fanatical and fantastically well financed assault from the far right. Carter contended with the so-called “Moral Majority,” the slime such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. For Biden, it’s the megabillions of Elon Musk and other would-be oligarchs seeking favor from their bought-and-paid-for candidate.

The final thing the two men share is that their presidencies being appreciated more than 40 years after the fact. Carter’s vision and humanity is coming to the fore now that he’s no longer around to accept the accolades. 

That, I’m afraid, is what will happen to Joe Biden. Americans blamed him for higher gas prices and whatever it was they were paying for a dozen eggs. It didn’t matter that the supply chain problems that produced the inflation came as a result of Trump’s COVID failure.

In the process, Biden not only rebuilt the economy, but managed – along with the Federal Reserve – to cool its overheating without inflicting a recession on this country. He actually get the funding for thousands of project to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.

Biden stood steadfast behind Volodymyr Zelensky and the people of Ukraine when threatened by Vladimir Putin – who seems to be Trump’s hero. And while he couldn’t get out of the trap Putin, Iran, Netanyahu and Trump set for him in Gaza, he never stopped trying to get a fair solution and an end to the horror – his critics notwithstanding.

Joe Biden – in fact, probably you and I – won’t be around when historians realize how lucky we were to have a man of such compassion and intelligence as our president. That’s little comfort as 2024 ends.

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If my GOOD THINGS THAT END headline seems a little off to you, I understand.

The proverb is “all good things must come to an end.” I’m guessing its intended meaning is that you should appreciate what you have when you have it.

But while that might apply to vacations in Hawaii, a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream, and the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden, it doesn’t – it can’t – apply to everything.

Caring about the other people in our world. Compassion for the sick and needy. Encouraging dreams and hard work. Civility. Diversity. Generosity. Creativity. 

Democracy.

In the eight weeks since the election, I’ve taken the first breather from news in my 70 years. I’ve avoided social media except for wishing good tidings to friends and family – and sharing my thoughts about holiday music. I refused to let the latest outrage, the chaos meant to consume and disable us, spoil my holiday season with friends and family.

Now, it’s time to reengage. We have less than three weeks until we are mandated to give the White House back to its desecrator. It’s time for the fight of our lives.

Because there are many good things about America that can never be allowed to end.

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HOLDING THE COURSE IN CHOPPY SEAS

If you have a casual familiarity with world history, you know that empire building is a key part of it. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottomans, the British.

And now us. Like it or not – and, trust me, a lot of people don’t – the United States is the world’s most powerful nation. It has a fearsome military force, has its thumb on just about everybody’s economy and is the cultural touchstone of the planet.

It’s a privilege and a burden. The world’s lesser powers will either accept American leadership or see it as something to throw rocks at. 

Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. All of them can’t stand the idea that the United States stands in the way of their designs for dominance. At the same time, responsible leaders around the world seek our help in securing their way of life amid peace and prosperity.

No one seems to have understood this better than the 46th President of the United States: Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

Biden has always had a feel for global matters. He’s sought alliances and been a good partner throughout the world. He has led without dominating and reaffirmed American friendship.

He’s also stood up for what’s right.

Ukraine is the best example. Putin wanted this democracy nowhere near his turf. He did everything he could to undermine it. When it didn’t work – and the Ukrainians elected a comedian who turned out to be a real world leader – Putin launched a hideous war against people who just wanted to be left alone.

That Ukraine stands independent today – in what seemed like a considerable overmatch – is largely because of Volodymyr Zelinskyy’s leadership and the grit of its people. It also has a lot to do with Biden, the United States and the coalition of democratic powers that banded to give Ukraine the resources it needed to fight.

The situation in Gaza is a bit more complicated.

The United States has a long-standing and honorable commitment to the security of Israel. We recognized its independence in 1948 within minutes of its declaration. There are ancestral, social, economic and religious ties with the nation.

When Hamas launched the horrific terrorist attack on October 7 of last year, the Biden administration was obligated and inclined to support the Israelis. It has, for the most part, kept that commitment.

It’s kept that despite the fact that Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is probably more spiritually aligned with Putin than Biden. Keeping a nation at war – and putting the burden on non-combatants – is an evil in itself. What Netanyahu has done in Gaza is unforgivable.

Biden has needed to balance all his responsibilities in this crisis. And very few in the United States were going to be happy with whatever he did. That he owned up to the responsibility is a credit to his administration – amazingly, this crisis would be worse if he weren’t president.

It is hoped that Kamala Harris, who didn’t have particular international experience when she became vice president, has learned from Biden. And, because she’s learned for the professionals in this administration, she can be counted on to guide American foreign policy in a moral and protective direction.

She’ll have some freedom to change up a few things – dealing with Netanyahu, who is trying to stay one step ahead of the law in Israel. But she’s clear about her unbridled support for Zelinskyy and Ukraine, and will deal with bad actors directly and firmly.

What she won’t do is back down from American responsibility. She will not threaten NATO, or our partners in East Asia. She won’t talk tough about China before caving like a sandcastle in a tsunami. She’ll deal firmly and fairly with crises throughout the world.

She will not isolate us. She won’t bend under the weight of the power we wield on this planet and beyond.

You can’t say that about her opposition.

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