The Man Who Wasn’t There
Joe Biden doesn’t make gaffes. His is a gaffe.
By Roger Kimball • August 8, 2020
Those things with which we are most familiar are often hardest to see. This is perhaps particularly true of such fraught subjects as politics. There we are every day staring at the same people, reading news stories that are virtually indistinguishable from one another, and what do we know?
Our situation is similar to Alice’s in Through the Looking Glass when she finds herself in a shop that seemed full of curious things. “[T]he oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.â€
I feel that way about Joe Biden. Gertrude Stein once quipped of her native Oakland, California, “there is no there there.†Isn’t that how it is with Joe Biden? He doesn’t make gaffes; he is a gaffe, poor thing. (I’ve expatiated on this elsewhere.)
I suspect that most Americans, whatever side of the political aisle they occupy, do not really see Joe Biden—especially when, like Alice, they are looking directly at him. They need to manage a sidelong glance, a sudden shift of perspective to catch his drift (and I employ the word “drift†advisedly).
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