Source: Bigstock

I have never been able to take the political opinions of movie stars terribly seriously. Whilst still a young English teacher, I once taught a future famous Hollywood actress, whom I shall not embarrass by naming here. During a class discussion about politics one day, this girl, then aged 17, solemnly informed me how she would “never vote for the Conservatory Party, because the Conservatory Party are only for rich people, as only rich people have conservatories, don’t they?” (For U.S. readers: A conservatory is British English for what you call a “solarium” or “orangery.”)

The premise wasn’t even correct on its own terms: My current two next-door neighbors on either side each have conservatories, and one is a window cleaner whilst the other works in a warehouse. Presumably, now that she’s a multimillionaire adult, my former student today habitually votes for the Conservatory Party on a regular basis herself? People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Clooney Tunes
I thought of this perfectly pleasant yet politically ill-informed girl recently when I read her fellow Hollywood star George Clooney’s laughable open letter in The New York Times begging yet another well-known star of stage and prostate screening, Joe Biden, to stand down before it was too late on account of his clear senile dementia, as demonstrated in last month’s embarrassing TV debate with Donald Trump during which he is alleged to have literally shat himself. At last, a leader who always follows through! (Although, in today’s less-than-bipartisan spirit, opponents claim it was actually Trump who dumped.)

Following this, another brain-farting Hollywood titan, Whoopi Goldberg, then went on TV and said she didn’t care if the President soiled himself constantly, as she herself “has poopy days all the time.” Indeed so, she appears to make her hair from long, strung-together beads of them. “I’m gonna stand behind you,” she reassured Biden—probably with a bucket.

Clooney is surely correct to advise Walter Shitty that every player has his entrance, and his exit, and indeed Joe has just announced he is stepping down. All well and good. It’s just that I would question why precisely the arbitrary public intervention of the man whose first notable screen credit was in Return of the Killer Tomatoes was somehow supposed to have been the moment where the debate suddenly shifted and Sleepy Joe finally saw sense before crawling shamefaced away into his crypt for good. If Hollywood really wanted to make a condemnation of Biden’s mental unfitness to so much as change his own diaper, surely it would have had much more impact coming from the mouth of Bruce Willis?

Ronald “Kill All Commies” Reagan, Walt “Hitler Was Right” Disney, and John “I Wish I Could Shoot Injuns for Real” Wayne apart, major Hollywood players are not that well-known for their levels of political acuity, as demonstrated by the fact that, the very month before successfully calling on Joe to drop out, Clooney had quite happily helped him raise $30m in donations for his campaign—a fact George actively mentions in his article. Is he seriously expecting us to believe he didn’t notice Biden was a teensy bit doddery before begging all this cash from duped donors?

Bad Memories
According to George: “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” as if back then Joe was still somehow as fresh and full of boyish vitality as Pitt the Younger. No, he wasn’t. Back in 2020, Joe the Elder was already a semi-sentient corpse who walked like Asimo and talked like a bad séance, who was confined to making video appearances from his own basement lest he repeatedly humiliate/soil himself in public.

And during his prior term as Barack Obama’s VP, from 2009 to ’17, I distinctly remember another group of my former female students erecting an ironic fake adoring photo shrine to him on their class noticeboard, mocking his drooling and fundamentally useless nature. If they could see this more than a decade ago (and remember, one of them thought there was such a thing as the “Conservatory Party”), then why couldn’t an allegedly well-informed “political insider” like George Clooney see it as recently as last month?

Maybe Clooney himself also has dementia? After all, he appeared to be suffering from false memories in his article himself, which he concluded thus: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024 [by immediately visiting Dignitas].”

Sorry, George, but I don’t remember Biden “saving democracy” by winning the White House back in 2020. I just remember an obviously incapable Brezhnev-style gerontocrat scarecrow in a suit being installed in office following a gigantic nationwide media and Big Tech cover-up of his patent late-stage coffin-dodgery and his son’s equally dodgy laptop. But then, perhaps Clooney, as a fully paid-up member of the Democratic media-industrial complex, would just prefer to wipe the slate clean of all that.

Say It Ain’t So, Joe
Biden may have just hobbled reluctantly away from his candidacy on Sunday, after prominent Democrat supporters had begun openly calling his campaign an act of “elder abuse,” but a more cunning political tactic might simply have been to lean into his dementia as a potential electoral asset instead. The main overriding project of today’s obsessively identitarian left is to get America to misremember its past wholesale, as with the 1619 Project hoax. What better figurehead for this program of deliberately selective misremembering than Joe “My Son Beau Died Fighting Nazism at the Alamo” Biden?

Notoriously, Biden has a habit of misremembering his own past. Just consider his implausible claim to have had an “epiphany” about gay marriage way back in high school when, as his father dropped him off at the gates, “I remember about to get out of the car and look to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other…. And I’ll never forget it, I turned and looked at my dad and he said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.’”

And, from that moment on, so he now says, Joe Biden supported gay marriage. Apart from all the many times during his fifty-plus-year political career when he spoke out against it prior to 2012, when he suddenly realized support for the practice might be considered an electoral asset amongst the Democrats’ new, younger, more woke voter base. In any case, he clearly didn’t see two men openly kissing each other outside a high school back in the early-1960s rust belt, did he? If he had genuinely witnessed this deviant and ultrarare sight for the day, Joe’s heartwarming anecdote would actually have run as follows:

“I remember about to get out of the car and look to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other…. And I’ll never forget it, I turned and looked at my dad and he said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other. And for this they both must die.’ Then he turned the car straight around and ran them right over, whilst shouting, ‘Keep away from my son’s straight normal asshole, you fucking perverts!’ And I stood there in the playground, laughing and laughing at the two dead groomers, just like all the other kids did. And the teachers too. When the cops turned up, they just shoveled them both into a trash can with spades and said they deserved it. Anyway, please vote Biden-Harris, 2024.”

Total Recall (of the Ballot)
There are plenty more examples of Geriatric Joe recounting “memories” of similarly dubious provenance, the question being whether he was doing this on purpose, to win support with fake politically useful pseudo-anecdotes, or inadvertently, due to a dementia-related condition known as “confabulation,” defined by one medic as being when “You are trying to tell a story, but your brain can’t fill the space, so your brain protects you by making stuff up,” e.g., “My dad used to point out random homos on the street and order me to respect them.”

Then again, there is a third option: Maybe Joe initially just knowingly made these things up, for cynical campaign purposes, before, with an effort of epic self-deception, later coming to believe they were actually true for real, like Baron Munchausen with access to the nuclear button.

Plenty of other politicians these days appear to have done something very similar, as when Hillary Clinton incorrectly claimed to have come under sniper fire in Bosnia, when in fact she was greeted at the airport by an 8-year-old girl who read her a poem and then kissed her.

Biden’s current political opponent Donald Trump, too, is not unknown for being as fond of false memories as he is of false mammaries. Despite this, Trump has inaccurately recollected, “I have the world’s greatest memory. It’s the one thing everyone agrees on.”

No Remembrance of Things Past
Once upon a time, Western politicians (like Trump himself, to be fair, who really did come under actual sniper fire of late) did not waltz straight from university into Parliament or Senate, having genuine interesting experiences from the wider world outside Washington, London, and Brussels to fall back on. Winston Churchill could have regaled voters about the time he was involved in the British Army’s final major cavalry charge during the Battle of Omdurman, or boasted of escaping from a South African prison during the Boer War, and he would actually have been telling the truth.

Today, matters are rather different. Most contemporary politicians’ knowledge of the past appears to be about as extensive as my celebrity ex-student’s knowledge of British conservatories and those who purchase them. They have crafted a world for us all to live in where, by design, there is little true respect for, or knowledge of, the past—a kind of historyless permanent present, in which the only politically “true” past is the politically useful one, as in 1984-cum-1619.

In 2013, doctors were puzzled by patient responses to a visual dementia test in which they were shown photos of incredibly well-known faces like Churchill and asked to put a name to them. Increasingly, participants were drawing a blank: But the true reason turned out not to be a sudden modern-day increase in dementia, but a sudden modern-day increase in sheer historical ignorance. Accordingly, the famous faces were altered: Out went Emperor Hirohito, in came Oprah Winfrey.

Conveniently, therefore, as well as measuring rates of dementia, the test also became highly diagnostic of an entire brain-damaged society with approximately zero accumulated cultural or historical memory to it. “A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments,” T.S. Eliot once wrote, although I forget precisely where.

They say voters end up with the politicians they deserve. Maybe, by landing a U.S. President with a brain so shriveled a sniper’s bullet may actually increase its cognitive capacity, like with trepanning, the Free World has indeed now got the leader it merits, at least for a few months more: a dementia-ridden Democrat for a dementia-ridden democracy. Shame Joe’s stepping down. I can’t remember a candidate ever having been so fitting, myself.