If Joe Biden did what I did last week, he'd be swiftly ridiculed

Carbon dating of my long life says that I am 78. Whenever I do something that is absent-mindedly doddery I thank God (I am going through an Easter phase of believing in Him) I am not running for office and being monitored by media and opponents ravenously hungry for proofs of my senility.

In a new online essay, The Age Of Gerontocracy Is Nothing New, Erica Benner notes: "The obvious concern [about electing the old] is that people of advanced years tend to experience some forms of physical and mental decline ... In the US, many worry that letting a pair of old men represent two halves of a politically fractured country is a dangerous gamble."

With increasing frequency I do things that if dear olde Joe Biden was seen to do them would bury him under an avalanche of scoffing ageism.

One day last week, having driven myself to the shops, I did my shopping and went back to my car to drive home and absent-mindedly got into one of its back seats. I quickly realised my mistake, for the absence of a steering wheel in front of me was a powerful clue.

I had a little self-deprecating chortle to myself, but of course if Joe was ever seen doing something comparably muddleheaded it will be no chortling matter for him.

And yet, reluctant to believe that to be old is necessarily to be senile, I fancy that the absent mind is often absent because it is busy being present somewhere else, doing something else. And, at that somewhere else, it may be doing something intellectually worthwhile, something more indicative of mental agility than of mental clumsiness.

So for example one may drive to the shops listening to ever-stimulating ABC Radio National (its mantra "Think bigger!") and be so engaged with a broadcast Big Idea of philosophy, of religion and ethics or of the arts, that one arrives at the shops no longer sure what one has come to the shops for.

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One morning this week I was in the supermarket unsure why I was there. I had temporarily forgetten my mission to buy mushrooms and broccoli because that trivial quest had been eclipsed in importance, on the way there, by a ripper Radio National discussion about Beethoven.

A smart maestro soon to conduct Beethoven's mighty Missa Solemnis was suggesting that we may hear, in that sacred music, Beethoven's passionately expressed doubts about the existence of God. This was such a Big Idea about perhaps the Biggest (greatest) composer of them all and surely the Biggest Question of all (whether or not God exists). No wonder, then, that these mighty matters temporarily drove matters of broccoli from my mind. This seems a proof of mental acuteness rather than mental enfeeblement, don't you think, readers?

But moving on, Erica Benner notes, worrying, "In 2024 more people than ever before will vote in national elections across the globe ... [and in many countries leaders and candidates] are septuagenarians, or older.

"Joe Biden will be 82, and Donald Trump 78, when Americans go to the voting booths in November. Men in their eighth decade head most of the world's most powerful countries, democratic or not.

"At a time when democracy itself is locked in life-or-death struggles against local and global threats, is it safe to place executive power in the hands of such old men?" Benner agonises.

She argues that ancient beliefs that the old are bound to be wise surely no longer apply.

"Some question the fitness of leaders raised in an era when economies were more national than global, when most laypeople saw the looming climate emergency as remote or unlikely, and when AI-engineered misinformation was the stuff of science fiction.

"In the fifth century BC, Confucius taught that 'When you meet someone older, you must respect and submit to that person's wisdom and power because he must have come across problems you encounter.' But what if he (or she) hasn't? We now live in an age where technological innovation is powered by younger entrepreneurs and creators, while older generations are still struggling with the novelty of AI and the internet. This means that younger generations will now inherit a world fraught with challenges that their elders may barely understand."

Erica Benner points to this year being a year of elections everywhere and to how so many of those seeking election are ye olde.

But of course that is not an issue here in the almost pubescently youthful ACT. The ACT government will be led into the election by Andrew Barr - at 50, the eternally boyish Peter Pan of ACT politics - and the Canberra Liberals by the elfin Elizabeth Lee.

Ms Lee, at only 44, seems far too young to be squandering her best years on the Liberals. It is a fogey party synonymous with crotchety, backward-looking beliefs and depending on an older, gerontonostalgic voting base of voters still pining for the lost paradise of pre self-government Canberra, still struggling with the new-fangled novelties of light rail and of the internet.