I’D LIKE A GENERATION WITHOUT SO MUCH RAT IN IT: They Only Eat Rat. “Now here we are, in our seventies, and we’re still strapped together in this ghastly generational pas des millions. Some of us have died off, of course, but the remnants of the legendary pig in a python generation are still wending our way through the snake’s entrails, tussling with each other as we pass through the intestines of the body politic. Our country currently has a 79-year-old president, a 75-year-old principal GOP contender, an 82-year-old speaker of the House, an 80-year-old Senate minority leader, an 88-year-old senior senator from California, an 88-year-old senior senator from Iowa, and an 80-year old junior senator from Vermont who has his eye on the White House. Meanwhile, waiting in wings like a sodden, road-company Lady Macbeth, is 2016’s loser, Hillary Clinton, 74, ready to step over the bodies if and when they ever drop. . . . There is a certain amount of truth in the old saw that with age comes wisdom. And it’s also true that our word ‘senate’—a body of elder statesmen—has the same root as ‘senility.’ But at this point in our nation’s history, we have gone beyond mature age and into the realm of the Grim Reaper, with Washington, D.C., having replaced Florida as God’s Waiting Room. A nation that was founded by young, vigorous men, most of them in their prime (in 1776, Washington was 44; Jefferson, 33; Hamilton, 21; James Monroe, 18) and with their lives on the line, has been co-opted by snarling, barely articulate, grudge-ridden rent-seekers desperately hanging onto their livelihoods, and to hell with everybody else. Hence the cage match now being played out in the runups to the fall congressional elections. ”
