A person looks at a New York Times news article on US President Joe Biden's announcement that he is dropping his reelection bid on 21 July, 2024 (Reuters)
Sentimental tributes pour in for Biden. But from enabling genocide in Gaza to supporting the US's rich at the expense of the poor, he leaves a trail of human and economic carnage.
Originally published in Middle East Eye.
In the long shadow of the First World War, one of the greatest titles for an epochal work - Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford - definitively marked the final acts of the British empire, that hung on for decades until coming to total demise in, of all places, Yemen.
In the same period, TS Eliot, the transplanted American, put it a little differently: “This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper.”
Perhaps the current American equivalent would be “no gas left in the tank”, or “end of the line”.
Unfortunately, no well-known enough North American cultural figures come to mind who might be able to describe this particular moment.
An enfeebled president, suffering from dementia and possibly Parkinson’s, and amid an ongoing genocide, fully documented in real time, that his administration has paid for, approved and enabled - and closer to a third world war than at any moment since 1945 - has seemingly made a “personal decision” to not pursue a second term in office.
And this “decision” was delivered in the strangest way, on a Sunday, with a post on social media and a digital signature, no photograph of the president, no press conference, just a vague reference to an update in the coming week.
Within hours of this surreptitious announcement, we were told that Vice President Kamala Harris is the “choice”, and is already in the process of picking up delegates.
That all this follows so closely the 13 July assassination attempt on the clear front-runner in the 2024 election, former President Donald Trump, an event with more questions than answers and a minimum of public information, raises even more questions.
Was there more than one shooter? Why have numerous former secret service agents and seasoned veterans of such details declared the incident a major security failure that needs further investigation? Are we being subjected, yet again, to “the lone gunman?”
And just as importantly, if President Joe Biden is unfit to run for office again, despite his insistence and the insistence of his medical staff and the cordon sanitaire of the mainstream media that has claimed non-stop that he is “sharp as a tack” - at least until his disastrous debate performance on 27 June - how can he possibly finish his term?
More to the point, as a few non-mainstream journalists have emphasised, how can he possibly retain sole control, at least according to US executive office policy, over decisions regarding nuclear strikes?
Propagandistic tributes
How are we to even begin assessing this news, especially against the backdrop of the lachrymose, embarrassing and mind-bendingly propagandistic tributes littering the major mainstream media outlets?
CNN’s senior political correspondent, Van Jones, for example, came close to tears while gushing this: “It’s kind of like your grandpa, you gotta take the keys… Then you finally get the keys back, and you just cry. Because this is somebody that you love, this is somebody that you care about. This is somebody who was there for you. This is somebody - you wouldn’t be here without him… this is a human moment, for one of the great humans in America… if you’re a young person watching this, this is leadership, this is patriotism, this is what it means to put the country first, put the party first, and put the cause first…
"I don’t know anything about politics, I just know that I love this man, I care about this man… Wait till we get to the convention. You’re gonna see people crying, standing, screaming, cheering… I love Joe Biden, I appreciate what he’s done, and a lot of people are heartbroken today, even if it's the right thing, it’s still just horrible.”
How did we even get here?
The narrative presenting Biden from his basement bunker headquarters in the 2020 presidential campaign as “Joe from Scranton” - the kindly avuncular figure, ready to bring unity and political experience to the country, to fight for better things for all Americans - was hermetically sealed from any scrutiny of his actual positions and legislative record.
A seeming champion of the downtrodden and the racially oppressed, marching lockstep with the orthodoxy of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, and ready to “defund the police”, Biden’s actual political career tells a completely different story.
Except for the last few years of the American war in Vietnam and into the early stages of the Reagan policies in Central America, Biden fervently fostered a bipartisanship that, in the words of Jessie Jackson, pulled Democrats to comb “their hair to the left like Kennedy” and move “their policies to the right like Reagan”.
As we have come to know only too well, this kind of US political bipartisanship generally means either some kind of assault on the citizenry, or war, whether officially declared or not.
Sordid record
The actual record is sordid, and highlights include: working firmly against integration, to the point of delivering a eulogy for staunch segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond as late as 2003; voting for President Ronald Reagan’s drastic cuts in health, education and social services; support for the Reagan tax cuts, a turning point in the rapid acceleration of the transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes upwards; fervent crusades on drugs and crime led to bills Biden wrote, sponsored or championed, causing mass incarceration, draconian sentencing, and astonishing overreach in civil forfeiture, mainly affecting the populations he supposedly came to advocate for in 2020.
Black lives certainly didn’t seem to matter for most of Biden’s political career.
The list goes on: welfare reform; Nafta; the transformation of Delaware into a banking haven that made declaring bankruptcy almost impossible for working- or middle-class citizens; the war on terror (even before 11 September 2001); supporting the USA Patriot Act as “measured and prudent”; serving as the key figure for bipartisan support to fight the war on Iraq; repealing the depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in order to remove the wall between commercial and investment banking, enabling mega-mergers that have transferred even more wealth upwards; serving as point man for the expansion of Nato and the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014; undermining any possibility of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
One could go on, at length, and certainly in detail regarding his current term as president. But none or very little of this is even brought up by the mainstream media, for Biden had come to “save democracy”, so his prior record was of no importance.
It is shocking, in retrospect, to find that actual reporters asking actual questions in Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988 managed to torpedo any possibility of his success, as Biden found himself caught up in a tangled web of lies and half-truths, placing himself in situations that had never actually occurred and were simply fabrications, from being at the top of his class in law school, to being an anti-war and civil rights activist.
These only expanded throughout his career, to the point of claiming he’d been arrested when trying to visit Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.
While these incidents have always been sloughed off as “Joe being Joe”, Biden has left a trail of human and economic wreckage in his legislative wake, not to mention the wanton corruption in his own family that he has, and continues, to hide, deny, and fiercely protect from scrutiny of any kind.
The political culture that Biden has embodied through a lifetime mostly spent between Washington, DC and a beach house in Delaware (where he spent a good part of his presidency, perhaps even a majority of it), truly represents the success, at almost every level, of American society’s ability to never even see or be aware of the effects of its position in the world and the effects its core policies have had, and continue to have, on billions of people around the world.
Poetic justice
But, try as it will, the image-making machine that once was Hollywood, with all its attendant organs of propaganda projecting itself around the globe has, in the common parlance, shot its wad.
Like Biden himself, it has come to rely on its own fabrications, as if they were real.
What is real, though, is the US military budget, the bases the US has positioned all over the world, and the unrelenting and desperate efforts to maintain itself as the global hegemon.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the public display of such cruelty and wilful destruction in Gaza that even the term genocide can’t fully encapsulate.
No matter what US propaganda tries to project, the peoples of the world will remember Biden as “Genocide Joe”.
They will remember his insistence on “Israel’s right to defend itself” and his embrace of internationally recognised war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.
They will remember the hand of the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, being raised again and again as the lone veto for a ceasefire in Gaza.
And they will remember the images of Gaza's mass graves, children torn to pieces, exploding buildings, assassinated journalists, kidnapped doctors, targeted medics, tortured prisoners, starving people, pulverised hospitals, agricultural land bathed in white phosphorus and destruction of the likes not seen since Dresden in the Second World War.
Given his record, there is even some perverse, poetic justice in regular “Joe” being at the helm of this sinking ship during these harrowing and momentous times.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic and scholar. He is the author of more than 20 books including After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future and the forthcoming Controlled Demolition: a work in four books. He is Distinguished Professor at Queens College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.
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