"Your Turn To Stand Guard": Biden's Farewell Brings Thoughts of JFK, FDR...and Mom

Watching Joe Biden deliver his farewell address to the nation on January 15 was an uneasy experience. The memory of a failed campaign still rankles. Whether or not you blame his prolonged failure to drop out the race as the key problem Kamala Harris faced, Joe's stubborn plaints that he was wronged can only further damage his legacy. He's in denial even as various elements of his once-robust constituency clearly feel he failed them. Nonetheless, his remarks in the only-too-carefully crafted speech were fair and even bold warning as to the Trumpian dreadnought we now face.

As Biden said, “the truth is being smothered by lies,” and, indeed, the biggest tech oligarchs—we all know their names--have to a man capitulated to a practice of allowing online runnels of disinformation to turn into constant, inescapable streams of right-leaning invective and propaganda.

If Joe's meandering metaphors re the Statue of Liberty seemed tepid and speechwriter-y, he was spot-on in calling out the "misplaced power" (quoting Eisenhower) of the" tech-industrial complex” and clearly citing the now turbo-charging  “oligarchy” that may soon trash Biden’s son-of-the-middle-class prayer that “a fair shot is what makes America America.”

 The familiar refrain that a mere striver from the inevitably-mentioned Scranton, Pennsylvania can become our president only tenuously undergirded the insistence that “now it’s your time to stand guard.” But he's right to declare that. The alternative is plain despair.

Age has its cruel ways, as we see with Biden, who turned 82 in November, now admitting he might not have held up for four more years. (I would be remiss to neglect a shout-out to the truly decent Jimy Carter, who passed December 29 at age 100.) The truth-bludgeoning but canny Trump will turn 79 in June, and his relative success in stuffing loyal incompetents to his presidential team-to-be shows his near-occult skills in consolidating power. In this very week where L.A. is hardly the happiest place on earth—wishes to all for  the urgently needed recovery phase, as I wrote earlier this week—yesterday we got the sad news of David Lynch passing away from chronic emphysema. The news makes one almost wonder if his health buckled as he contemplated Inauguration Day, January 20, which birthday would have made the same 79 Trump will soon reach.

 “Now it's your turn to stand guard,” Biden said, and I could not help but think of my late, lifelong-Democrat mom, and how she stands in for certain aspects of her generation. (She passed at age 90 in 2008; my dad went at 93, not quite a year later.) She was the product of what Cincinnati newspapers identified as Society—her family line included physicians, among them the American colonial forces’ Surgeon General, whose relations founded the first bank in the nation west of the Alleghenies. Later in the 1800s they dwelt in numbers on and near a major road that soon bore the family name of Grandin as it grew swanky. 

My mom came out of Ohio University in the early 1930s and was soon married to her boyfriend, the varsity hoops stalwart, my dad—the best man I ever knew, as I told my wife, who both flustered  and gratified me by repeating to him.  He enlisted in the Navy at the start of World War II, as one did, and she too signed on– but as a surprise move, which few did. She was soon the financial version of a quartermaster, riding motor launches loaded with payday funds out to Navy ships berthed in Bremerton, Washington. (I was always struck that she later abhorred the national fixation with firearms even though she’d worn a service weapon on her hip while on duty.) 

Though she’d joined the fusty Daughters of the American Revolution to please her own mom, she dodged the proffered Colonial Dames membership and entered the Fifties as a kind of proto-libtard, volunteering for Planned Parenthood and when J.F.K. rose to the fore, speaking truth to suburbanites as a loyal Kennedy-style Democrat.

It was during Biden’s marginally bitter address regarding the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people" that I remembered one legendary account of my mom. Hosting a cocktail party in the living room of our (population four thousand) New Jersey bedroom enclave, she didn’t like how the martinis and Manhattans were taking effect on the political chatter. Shucking her heels to stand on the living room couch—framed before the picture window that looked from our hilltop across to the 130 wooded acres of the former Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge estate—she, with some asperity,  told every boozed-up suburbanite in earshot one they could damn well get the hell out if they were going to insult John Kennedy.

Well, it all paid off for her, after a fashion. She would meet the great man, even shake his hand.

 I recall the moment when our nuclear family boarded the TWA flight to Los Angeles International, and how as front-runner for the party's nomination that week he shook hands in the plane'saisle. My mom shook his hand--that dazzling Jack smile, her slight discomfiture, are easy to sumon up in memory– but how I came to have the scrawled autograph from that will be saved for another time.

"Standing his ground" --Torn from the then-current "Newsweek," the pic JFK signed in the aisle before a flight west to his nomination for President in 1960. ( Proper mat and framing to come soon.)

The context was my own realization how spawling and yet how connected the body politif is. I was 11 years old when it was announced that our family was heading west to California to visit the ranch of my mom’s Uncle Clarence Grandin, a figure my sister (then age 13) and I had never met. He was a gentleman rancher in Santa Barbara County—a somewhat romantic figure we’d seen in a photograph on horseback in some capacity at the annual Fiesta that celebrates Santa Barbara’s heritage—and was from the somewhat rough-hewn part of the clan. (He planted my underqualified dad on a cantankerous horse named Nell, who galloped toward a treeline on the ranch until both went down with a salvaging yank on the reins.)

 His brother Harry—my mother’s father—was in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (eventually part of the Teamsters Union) and was described by my dad as big and sometimes ornery, with hands like ham hocks and the build of a man who shoveled coal for the Pennsylvania Railroad for some years. (Hearing me, brother Joe?)

 Two stories had come down the pike re Harry, both exhibiting the combative aspect of the family DNA and both originating from the same day, that of the Washington. D.C. funeral of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (By contrast to the coming administration, does one even need to add that FDR’s kindness was renowned for being directed to the common man, not shared out to billionaires on the grift?) Leaving his hotel to partake of a a hoped-for, heart-stirring view of the funeral cortege, he was momentarily baffled when a gent quicker than he, but not as stout, set a revolving door spinning on its clockwise arc just as Harry laid hand on it, with like intent, from the lobby side. Baffled only a second by the move, then peeved, Harry gave the  brass-and-wood door wing a forceful centripetal shove, which delivered the other worthy’s face properly at fist height for Harry’s chastening blow, which apparently knocked the other man momentarily back before he spilled forward and onto the floor face first.

Well, who can really blame Harry? He proceeded, and having achieved egress onto the grand avenue, Harry was just in time to sift through the dense crowed of mourners to stand at curb’s edge as the American flag decorating the deceased chief executive caisson as caparisoned steeds bore it slowly along. Harry’s blood pressure was perhaps still up a bit, so it’s hard to truly indict him for the simple reaction  that followed. The spectator next to him having failed to to remove his hat at the appropriate moment, Harry gave him a severe look, which was ignored, and as an expedient solution, Harry transferred his own hat—I have all this from my dad, who had it on eyewitness authority—from right hand to left and repurposing the right, back-handed the fellow in such fashion that hat and head parted company. The hat remained in the air a split second as gravity took over, as the other’s head snapped smartly sideways and he shrank away.

For now, the message these brief moments hope to form a small response to Mr. Biden’s pleas for solidarity in the face of what’s coming to our nation, and coming so very soon.

As with my mom’s ejection of her erring friends for talking trash about Jack, and as also seen in Harry’s nimble responses to critical moments,  these moments can only emphasize what Joe advised us: now it's our time to stand guard.