All the most media exposed candidates for GOP POTUS are over age 50, some like Newt, only a couple years shy of 70 years of age. Only 11 out of 44 Presidents have been under age 50, tilted strongly toward the aging and the elderly.
There’s a saying that old dogs in fading power try to diminish and hold power away from the strongest of the dogs… which are not the elderly, rather the young who are filled with new ideas and insights not clouded by cronyism and comforts.
THis is an old Story. In Greek mythos, Chronos, the old chief god, tried to keep his vibrant and young sons [and daughters] from remaining alive long enough to ever succeed him in office–. He prevented them from replacing himself by killing them… by literally eating them alive. Ripping off their heads, the source of new ideas. Swallowing their bones, bones being symbolic of ideas that endure even in/ under fire.
Does this sound familiar in politics? Whether a dictatorship, or just a bunch of old guys who want the young around only to fan them and peel grapes for them. But otherwise castrate any young person wanting to forge ahead of the old guys.
In the Greek myth, Rhea, next mother of the earth, gave birth to Zeus, and tired of having Chronos eat all her children, wrapped a stone in a blanket and gave that to Chronos, which he promptly swallowed whole without realizing it left one child, one young one, to eventually overwhelm Chronos. Rhea hid Zeus and raised him outside his mad father’s sight.
Eventually Zeus has a huge battle in the sky with his father, and castrates Chronos in a sense, by cutting his belly open and all Zeus’s brothers and sisters are released back to life, Poseiden, Hades, Demeter and others of Olympian, Sea and Underworld realms. Chronos dies and Zeus comes into power.
Whether Herod The Great who ordered the slaughter of innocents during the time of Christ’s birth, save one, for Herod feared the ‘new king’ he’d heard rumors about would depose him, or the ancient Chronos who slaughtered all his children, save one, for he feared his throne being taken from him… or popular politics…
what does it take to wrest power from the old who squat over it and let no one younger near?
According to the old stories it takes telling truth to lies, it takes sequestering the best away from the greedy devouring fathers, it takes a battle in full view, it takes pushing back against ‘one’s own party’ … it takes killing off the greedy king who wont retire gracefully nor let others take the reins now.
I see this pushback in Karl Rove’s words over the last year in his sharp criticism of some of his own party. I see it in some of George Will’s words. If William F still lived, I’ve no doubt he would join in.
Thomas Paine who was a USA Founding father, a pushback kind of guy, pamphleteer and author
said it well:
“There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the `end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. … Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it.
To my mind, this is one of the troubling matters in the current races GOP, DNC, doesnt matter– that the fresh ideas arent coming from the old, they’re carried by those far younger… who the old do not lift up, but live off the energy of the young, but allow them no real power.
The fight in the sky, in full view, is apparently long overdue in order to push the old ‘cemented to their thrones,’ off center stage. Let the young come forward from hiding now. Let the old go rest on their laurels, whatever they are or are not.
# Age at Inauguration
1 George Washington 57 years, 67 days
2 John Adams 61 years, 125 days
3 Thomas Jefferson 57 years, 325 days
4 James Madison 57 years, 353 days
5 James Monroe 58 years, 310 days
6 John Quincy Adams 57 years, 236 days
7 Andrew Jackson 61 years, 354 days
8 Martin Van Buren 54 years, 89 days
9 William Henry Harrison 68 years, 23 days
10 John Tyler 51 years, 6 days
11 James K. Polk 49 years, 122 days
12 Zachary Taylor 64 years, 100 days
13 Millard Fillmore 50 years, 183 days
14 Franklin Pierce 48 years, 101 days
15 James Buchanan 65 years, 315 days
16 Abraham Lincoln 52 years, 20 days
17 Andrew Johnson 56 years, 107 days
18 Ulysses S. Grant 46 years, 311 days
19 Rutherford B. Hayes 54 years, 151 days
20 James A. Garfield 49 years, 105 days
21 Chester A. Arthur 51 years, 349 days
22 Grover Cleveland 47 years, 351 days
23 Benjamin Harrison 55 years, 196 days
24 Grover Cleveland 55 years, 351 days
25 William McKinley 54 years, 34 days
26 Theodore Roosevelt 42 years, 322 days
27 William Howard Taft 51 years, 170 days
28 Woodrow Wilson 56 years, 66 days
29 Warren G. Harding 55 years, 122 days
30 Calvin Coolidge 51 years, 29 days
31 Herbert Hoover 54 years, 206 days
32 Franklin D. Roosevelt 51 years, 33 days
33 Harry S. Truman 60 years, 339 days
34 Dwight D. Eisenhower 62 years, 98 days
35 John F. Kennedy 43 years, 236 days
36 Lyndon B. Johnson 55 years, 87 days
37 Richard Nixon 56 years, 11 days
38 Gerald Ford 61 years, 26 days
39 Jimmy Carter 52 years, 111 days
40 Ronald Reagan 69 years, 349 days
41 George H. W. Bush 64 years, 222 days
42 Bill Clinton 46 years, 154 days
43 George W. Bush 54 years, 198 days
44 Barack Obama 47 years, 169 days