Things are always worse than they seem. That adage may seem amusingly cynical, but that is only because it is of what Kant called “the crooked timber of humanity.” Often, as we all know, things are better than they seem. But then there are mournful spectacles like the Group of 7+, which just met in Italy.
The plus sign is for Ursula von der Leyen who, as president of the European Commission, gets to tag along like a poodle, a superfluous though preening and self-important mascot for the increasingly superfluous and self-important OnlyFans forum representing Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. If you look it up, you will find that the G7 is supposedly “organized around shared values of pluralism, liberal democracy and representative government.”
It took me a minute to stop laughing, too.
In fact, the G7 is a superannuated forum whose real purpose, apart from self-congratulation, is to spend the tax dollars, real and imaginary, of their subject populations, and to pontificate about imaginary problems like climate change.
The big news out of the G7 this year — apart from its efforts to goad Vladimir Putin into doing something stupid by voting to give Ukraine another $50 billion to continue its war with Russia — concerned shuffle. I am not talking about the game that’s popular on cruise ships catering to retirees. I mean the Leader of the Free World™, Joseph R. Biden, he of the aviator shades and barking glossolalia.
For the last two days, clips of the ancient one shuffling slowly away from the group of world leaders as they gathered to watch some parachutists perform populated the headlines. It was, the Sun reported, Biden’s “worst ever performance” on the world stage. Really? Worse than his embarrassing performance at Normandy? I am not sure we have instruments precise enough to make that calculation.
In any event, what made the G7 shuffle especially memorable was the intervention of Giorgia Meloni, the dishy prime minister of Italy, who espied POTUS wandering off like a bemused toddler and, with gentle, nurse-like firmness, guided the lost one back to the group.
Biden spokesmen objected that the clip was taken “out of context.” The president, you see, was merely registering the presence of another parachutist who landed just out of the picture’s frame. My own view is that more context makes Biden’s performance seem even worse. As one naughty commentator put, if you look at the longer clip, Biden’s behavior is “even more horrifying,” more geriatric, more porous, “A dull head among windy spaces,” as T.S. Eliot put it in “Gerontion.“
Speaking of Eliot, Joe Biden is the perfect “objective correlative” for the G7 and kindred pustules of globalist exhibitionism. The pop singer Michael Jackson popularized a dance move known as the Moonwalk. Joe Biden gave the group its signature move: an alarming rictus, hoisted upon a vacant stare by a wizened, trembling hand, propelled uncertainly forward with halting steps and slow. Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s the Joe Biden Shuffle. It will not, I am confident, be widely imitated — outside the parlors of late-night comedy, anyway — but it is certain to be long remembered.
