It was a choreographed scene starring the US president and First Woman that was meant to convey the restorative spirit of the festive season.
Final week, Joe and Jill Biden emerged from behind a black curtain like giddy celebrities and took their purple seats earlier than a big Christmas tree brimming with decorations and items on the Kids’s Nationwide Hospital in Washington, DC.
Their excited viewers included a gaggle of younger sufferers and their dad and mom anxious to see the commander-in-chief and his spouse who would learn aloud the favored poem, The Evening Earlier than Christmas.
“Thanks for letting us come to see you,” President Biden mentioned.
Certainly, each First Woman starting with Bess Truman – 75 years in the past – has made the annual pilgrimage to the youngsters’s hospital “to unfold vacation cheer”. In 2022, Biden turned the primary sitting president to tag alongside.
A frail-looking however animated Biden winked, waved and smiled because the First Woman learn from the image guide, holding it aloft.
When the First Woman completed, Biden thanked the hospital employees. “It’s particular, particular what you do.”
He had this parting recommendation: “The place there’s life, there’s hope.”
With that, Biden urged the youngsters to return after they’d recovered to supply assist to different children spending the vacations in hospital reasonably than at house.
A hospital official applauded the Bidens for “persevering with this annual custom…[that] brings a lot pleasure to all the youngsters, the households and our employees”.
“God bless you all,” Biden mentioned.
Their efficiency lasted lower than 10 minutes.
Nevertheless transient, it was designed partly, I suppose, to burnish “Uncle Joe’s” credentials as a caring president who’s all too accustomed to the fear, heartache and searing ache of caring for sick youngsters or shedding them to a sudden, violent act with terrible penalties.
However watching the Bidens stage this perfunctory ritual – with tv cameras in tow after all – solely deepened my contempt for a decrepit president who considers the welfare and lives of some youngsters extra useful than others.
As an alternative of utilizing his powers and affect to attempt to cease the maiming and killing of 1000’s of Palestinian youngsters, Biden has, in odious impact, inspired the maiming and killing of 1000’s of Palestinian youngsters.
In occupied Palestine, Biden just isn’t a harbinger of “pleasure”, however the co-architect of the dystopian carnage engulfing a shattered folks and their shattered land.
This complicit president, who’s fulsome social gathering to a scientific marketing campaign to snuff out life and hope in Gaza and the West Financial institution, had the near-sickening audacity to share what quantities to an affordable little bit of greeting-card-like philosophy that “the place there’s life, there’s hope”.
Astonishing.
Biden compounded this obscenity by visiting a hospital to reward medical doctors and nurses tending to the sick whereas America’s proxy, Israel, has ruthlessly gone about occupying, ransacking and destroying hospitals all through Gaza and forcibly disappearing and killing Palestinian medical doctors and nurses.
What they did and the way they did it – to borrow a phrase – was particular, too.
That Biden and his handlers have been blind to this blatant and ugly juxtaposition is a measure of how disposable and forgettable the promising lives and horrific deaths of Palestinians are of their misanthropic geopolitical calculus.
The litany of halting pictures of the dirt-caked faces of Palestinian youngsters calling out for his or her misplaced mamas and babas or small, limp our bodies wrapped in white shrouds apparently didn’t dissuade Biden from enjoying his half in an agreeable picture op that, given the deadly occasions and bleak context, stings of indecency.
The Bidens’ token look and all that it revealed in regards to the president’s signature nature has served because the exclamation level to a brewing realisation that, like a hurricane, has gathered energy and momentum in me since early October.
I’ve been such a idiot.
I’ve written columns – that I want I may erase – praising Biden as a literate, if not honourable, different to the mayhem and insanity embodied by an illiterate, dishonourable charlatan named Donald Trump.
I’ve written different columns – that I additionally want I may erase – extolling the knowledge of enlightened People who, I used to be assured, would select Biden over Trump once more this coming November and spare a fretting world 4 extra years of Trumpian insanity and mayhem.
Enlightened People exist. There simply aren’t sufficient of them.
I chided different, a lot wiser columnists, who wrote that past the rhetorical edges, each Biden and Trump have been elected to guard the pursuits – at house and overseas – of the oligarchs they serve below the risible guise of a phantom “democracy” hooked on struggle and plunder for revenue.
On this defining rating, Biden has confirmed to be each bit as helpful and dependable a marionette as his predecessor. Trump’s offish manners and profanity offend the fragile sensibilities of the liberal and progressive cognoscenti, not his loyalty to the disfiguring establishment.
I couldn’t care much less who prevails within the upcoming presidential marketing campaign. I cannot fear a whit about America’s “future” as a result of if even the latest previous is any litmus, historical past’s best killing machine is sure to trigger extra dying, ache and struggling throughout the globe – whoever is president.
This coming yr I’ll benefit from the entertaining spectacle of a rustic slipping deeper into fanaticism and dissonance whereas a lot of it, predictably, turns to muppets with megaphones, equivalent to Joe Rogan and Invoice Maher, for a approach out of (or into) the upcoming abyss.
Talking of muppets, a be aware to the swarm of nitwits who will, little question, warning me to be “cautious what I want for”.
How a lot worse can it get? A genocide is being perpetrated towards thousands and thousands of harmless Palestinians whereas pricey, outdated Uncle Joe twiddles his knotty thumbs. Reasonably than get incensed about that, you’ll get miffed at me for scripting this “outrageous” column.
Priorities.
Lastly, I feel it will be becoming if Trump returned to the White Home.
Then, the entire daffy guff about America being a nation based on a sacrosanct structure, the rule of legislation and a shining metropolis on a hill that the remainder of us ought to emulate will probably be extinguished emphatically.
What a second will probably be when People – effectively, 66 % of eligible voters – make it official on November 5, 2024: electing a profession prison to guide a prison regime.
So, completely happy jaundiced new yr, everybody!
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
