Until Joe Biden started tottering – you know that quickened walk he does at a precarious tilt as if an aide has put batteries in his shoes? – Santiago, the hero of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea, was probably America’s most-critiqued senior citizen. Determined to fulfil his ambition to catch a great marlin – not for the sake of sustenance but for the sake of pride – Santiago takes his boat out to sea and lands the fish of his dreams, only for squads of rapacious sharks to devour it down to the last crumb before he can get ashore to display his trophy.

Pride comes before a fall. In the case of the US president, it comes before his country falls headlong into the slime of a Donald Trump autocracy. As Biden hosts world leaders in Washington this week for Nato’s 75th birthday – an organisation that is a mere nipper, six years younger than Biden – he finds himself under a planet-sized microscope seeking signs of elderly “frailty” for a commentariat of unapologetic ageists.

Yes, indeed, it is stupefying to think that a country of more than 333 million people cannot produce one realistic contender for the presidency who is young enough not to have been alive during the second World War. It is equally pathetic that the US has been unable to bring itself to elect a female president and will not even countenance anyone lacking the sheen of wealth. But his advanced years are not Biden’s real impediment. His unsteadiness, the slurred speech and a sometimes vacant gaze appear to indicate the presence of a medical condition. In itself, a state of declining years is not a sickness. If age truly........

© The Irish Times