Between a Rock and a Hard Place

On age, the presidency, and mistaking corruption for confusion.

The world is ending, so I went to the place where it began.

One and a half billion years ago, Earth exploded and left the remains in Missouri.

This occurred in the Precambrian Era: before skeletons and sexual reproduction and oxygen, before anything but heat-strewn rock that flowed like rivers of blood. Earth exploded as if in revolt against itself, magma molding into subterranean formations. When erosion wore down the lithosphere, resigning the planet to bearing life, those formations rose to the surface and stayed there.

This is why it is called Mother Earth. You bleed pointlessly for what feels like eons until one day, beautiful creatures emerge from inside, so perfect you wonder how they came from that wreck they call the core.

But they’re here, and you enjoy their company.

Elephant Rocks State Park is a series of gargantuan granite rocks in the Missouri Ozarks. Some are so huge you can walk clear across them and feel like you are navigating Mars. Some are small and silly. They all seem to have personalities, somehow, and the words centuries of visitors carved beneath them add to that effect.

Pink-brown boulders lean on each other like brothers, the gaps between them creating crawl spaces and mazes and passages your kids double-dare you to cross. From a distance, the rocks resemble a row of circus animals that prompted the park’s pachyderm nickname. Black boulders scatter the forest floor like decorative objects, covered in moss and lichens, new art on an ancient canvas.

It feels impossible that this place exists and even more so that it always has, long before humans arrived.

The park is a favorite of young Missouri families, because kids climb on everything anyway. There is nothing like the wide-eyed delight of young child realizing that not only are they not in trouble for scampering and scurrying, but they are encouraged to do so. Kids have been climbing Elephant Rocks for as long as there have been kids.

The first time I took mine to Elephant Rocks, they were three years and six months old. My daughter was a wild child, leaping from one boulder to the next. I ran after her while my husband trudged up with our son strapped into one of those baby chest carriers. I’m glad that I no longer need to know what that contraption is called, but my ignorance leaves me wistful, too.

Childhood takes a long time to go by so fast.

My children are taller than me now, teenagers. They run as wild as they used to, but I’m no longer in my 20s and 30s. I can’t keep up, but I can still track them down. I’ve got a bad back and a merciless memory. They may be fast, but nothing gets by me — because I am their mother.

Sometimes I imagine visiting Elephant Rocks in twenty years, maybe with grandchildren of my own. I’ve envisioned that since the first time I went and saw multigenerational Missourians enjoying themselves. Kids jumping off boulders, mom passing the baby to grandma and basking in the sun, a teenager helping grandpa climb to the top of the tallest rock, where the Ozarks encircle them like a distant wreath. Birdsong and blue skies, picnics from knapsacks, an arm around a shoulder, never too young or too old.

And then came a day, sometime between the pandemic and the hottest summer in recorded history, when that simple wish seemed an incredible fantasy, and my nostalgia for the future grew larger than my longing for the past ever was.

Our time is ending, so I go to the place where it began.

Elephant Rocks State Park, photographed February 19, 2024

*          *          *

The US is embroiled in a debate over the gerontocracy overseeing its collapse. The debate is not whether it is happening — it is — but whether it is appropriate to talk about it. How much to pin on age, and how much to pin on agenda.

I blame agenda. I have seen too many mobsters feign senility once they are caught for their crimes. I have seen too many pundits go gentle on those they believe are going gently into that good night, only to have them live another twenty years, like Henry Kissinger, and not spend them in the Hague.

We shouldn’t be asking how much Biden or Trump forgot, but what they knew and when they knew it.

Particularly Trump: he of the 91 indictments and half century of DOJ investigations and autocratic aspirations and lifetime in organized crime. But also Biden, whose affinity for abetting genocide has been blamed on naivete. As if Biden, an octogenarian career politician, has not known the septuagenarian war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu for more than half their lives.

The problem is not old age, but endemic corruption. The worst Americans are disproportionately old as a result of them clinging to power for decades on end. The result is the oldest and least popular Congress ever and the oldest and least popular presidential candidates ever.

Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Rupert Murdoch, Alan Dershowitz, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Clarence Thomas, Roger Stone, Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, Jamie Gorelick, Merrick Garland, John Bolton, Chuck Schumer, Elliott Abrams…the list of Disliked and Dangerous US Citizens over 70 goes on and on, far beyond who I’m listing here.

These bad Americans hurt not only younger generations, but their own. Senior citizens are not spared their destructive wrath or casual abandonment. The root of the American crisis is elite criminal impunity: the ability for people to commit crimes year after year, decade after decade, without consequence.

The reason we have a gerontocracy is because the US a mafia state. A mafia state requires people who can keep secrets for a long, long time. It requires extreme insularity. The worse the crimes, the more insular the circle gets, and the more aged its core members.

That is why the successors to mafia states are often selected through nepotism, and why Jared Kushner — instead of heading to prison or falling under federal investigation — is being considered for Secretary of State.

Pundits are asking if Biden has the mental wherewithal to be president. To quote Snake Plissken: President of what?

What, exactly, is Joe Biden governing? A country where thousands die of covid every week and we can’t get basic public health statistics? A country that abets genocide through unconditional aid? A country that won’t punish a coup attempted by the other candidate, a notorious career criminal and seditionist who faked dementia on multiple occasions so he would be perceived as less dangerous, but remains in fact a profound national security threat?

A country said to be a democracy, but whose people have less power every year. The younger the people, the less power they have, because power comes from money in America, and they do not have it.

Gen Z, the generation pundits blame for all travails, has been handed little beyond a climate crisis, a plague, and an inability to afford basic resources — much less the college education required for jobs that never required expensive credentials back in the day of the geriatrics who rule us.

This may be the real source of public anger, more than outrage over possible cognitive decline. It’s not that our leaders are forgetful. It’s that they never cared enough to do their jobs in the first place. That was a choice, not an oversight. They treat the citizens they are supposed to serve as people who deserve to be forgotten.

And now they bristle at the suggestion of senility? They should be thrilled. I suspect they secretly are. If you helped kill hundreds of thousands of people, wouldn’t you love it if everyone forgets who you really are and what you’ve done?

Trump and Biden would be delighted if everyone focused on their minds instead of on their money, on their private lives instead of their overlapping networks of corrupt backers who drain our country dry.

*          *          *

What I should feel, when I look at our political leadership, is trepidation similar to that which a Soviet citizen would have felt in the 1980s, as gerontocracy withered their state away.

But above all, I feel envy. These corrupt officials have lived to ages my generation will likely never reach. They enjoyed a social safety net people my age never experienced, because the powerbrokers of their generation destroyed it when we were kids.

I feel rage along with envy, because I know the victims of the system they broke. I know people who died while fundraising online for medical bills. I know how great America’s losses truly are. I know it takes time to forgive — but they stole our time, and they will not be forgiven.

In 2021, I realized I will never be middle-aged: I had skipped it thanks to the pandemic. Life expectancy plummeted right when I was supposed to hit the midpoint, sending me straight to — I don’t know if I’m old, but I am suddenly more than halfway to the grave. Life expectancy fell to 76, what it was when I was a teenager, erasing decades of gains.

Life expectancy is still falling, thanks to a geriatric leadership that has reached heights — octogenarian! nonagenarian! — the rest of us will never see, thanks to the policies those officials pass and the crises they ignore. Climate change and pandemics will accelerate the loss of life. Everyone knows this, but they pretend it isn’t happening.

Those political officials sealed my future — or should I say, they stole it. It is a hard thing to have this knowledge in my heart alongside the two children who reside there.

The focus on age, I suspect, is less about Biden and Trump’s alleged senility than a desire for a way to get rid of both of them that doesn’t highlight broader institutional rot. Age is just the polite, plausible excuse for the DC crowd.

It is reasonable to ask if elderly people are equipped to do a demanding job, particularly one that lasts four years. But age does not indicate aptitude.

The most damning things about Biden and Trump are not their prospective futures, but their pasts: particularly their recent sins and similarities. For more on that, consult this article or this article or this article. I can’t spell out this sordid story again.

The short version: Trump is a career criminal who should be disqualified under the Constitution, and the person who helped him stay viable as a candidate is Biden, who abetted crimes of his own.

Given the low popularity of both candidates, I suspect many Americans know the danger we face, and are more scared than they let on — even powerful Americans. They want a way out of this doomed duality that does not involve confessing to an overlapping network of corruption, because they are scared of that network too.

But they don’t want to tell the truth, so they talk about age instead.

*          *          *

For most of my life, old folks and kids have been my favorite people to talk to, because they are the least likely to lie.

Kids are curious and ask important, uncomfortable questions. Elderly people don’t care enough about what strangers think enough to keep up a façade. They have learned life’s lessons and want to impart them. They do not want to waste their breath on bullshit.

This is why people love Larry David, who has been a cranky straight talker his whole life, even though he strangled Elmo (that made me love him more, but I sense I’m an exception). It is why people love Dolly Parton — can you think of a time outspoken, openhearted Dolly Parton lied?! It is why they like 99-year-old Jimmy Carter much more than they did young President Jimmy Carter, because post-presidency Carter tended to tell the truth, even about tough issues like Palestine.

Again, the problem is not age: America loves its elderly icons. The problem is courage.

Middle-aged people often have the same knowledge as the elderly but will refuse to impart it out of fear. Wisdom is knowledge plus time, minus fear.

But there is a glaring exception to the general honesty of the elderly, and it is politicians. The longer a bad person has been in a bad system, the less likely they are to tell the truth. This is particularly true if you are in the US government or in the mafia.

Or both.

*          *          *

I believe in the wisdom of the ancients, and I also believe the US government is bereft of it. That is why I visit Elephant Rocks. I want to see geology that will outlast us all. I want to see the future in the form of the past: something unbreakable from the core of our battered earth. Something that generation after generation has enjoyed, not in spite of its simplicity, but because of it.

Elephant Rocks renews my faith in American goodwill. The Missouri state parks department made the park accessible to wheelchairs and strollers and created a braille trail. Admission is free. Everyone is welcome and everyone seems happy when they are there. The dream of America still lives in this Ozarks oddity.

Part of preserving that dream is confronting those attempting to destroy it. At the entry to Elephant Rocks is a sign from veterans of World War I announcing they chiseled a message in granite. It says:

“In honor of our nation’s brave/ That sleep over the wave/ They died that we be free/ No more war to be/ 1918”.

The soldiers who carved this message are long dead. But it is notable that they chose an ancient place to carve their desire for peace. They had seen the worst of the world and knew that the US was not immune. They carved a plea into some of the oldest rocks in North America, knowing generation after generation would see it.

And generation after generation did. But new wars were launched anyway, and new generations of soldiers were sent to die. The World War II generation, nearly gone, was the last to fight a winning war for a just cause. The rest — the Boomers, Gen X, the Millennials — fought quagmire wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Three generations of Americans, united by betrayal.

Both candidates for president are men who surround themselves with warmongers, who partner with tyrants abroad, and who seem primed to bring the same horrible fate upon Gen Z that other generations experienced.

Yes, one candidate is better than the other. But we do not deserve to suffer under either.

A long time ago, a president told Americans to ask not what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country. This has been flipped, due to the depth of betrayal since that president’s assassination, to ask not what one can do for one’s country, but to note what one’s country has not done for them.

When your government seems keen on killing you, the question is not only how to survive, but how to live. What to live for, what to run toward, instead of only what to oppose and escape. How to reconcile love for country with rulers set out to destroy it.

My dreams are small. I want to grow old and return with my children to Elephant Rocks, and with grandchildren, if my children choose that. I want ordinary people to support each other in this ongoing ecological and political and public health collapse. I want recognition that these tragedies are happening, and that no one deserves them, and that the officials who hold the power to mitigate them refuse to do so and hide crime behind scandal.

I want those officials removed from power, for the good of my children and yours.

I want people to stop conflating confusion with corruption. Stop making excuses for presidents, past and present. Stop letting them feign ignorance to avoid accountability. There is no excuse for any of this, no excuse at all.

My modest dream should not feel like an impossible fantasy. My dream is only that of an American mother, trying to stay alive.

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More Elephant Rocks! And look at that sky…