OPINION:
“And where would those have been?” federal prosecutor Robert Hur asked President Biden, referring to some papers that had been boxed up at the vice president’s residence in Washington at the conclusion of the Obama administration. “Within the Naval Observatory?” he wondered.
It was a simple, straightforward question. Easily answered in a single word.
In fact, despite the gravity of the deposition last October, neither a yes nor a no to that particular question would have made any difference in the outcome of the case of misused classified government documents being investigated by Mr. Hur.
He just wanted the answer to a simple question.
But the question wakened a memory in Mr. Biden’s mind. A spark flashed across his eyes, like a falling star.
There. Glint. Gone.
Perhaps he saw someone — long dead — in that room with all the lawyers gathered around the table. He must have rubbed his hands — those gnarled hands with wax-paper skin — together to keep the flame of that memory from going out.
“Well,” the president began distantly. And he reared back a half-century in time and took the lawyers on a strange, circuitous journey through the Chesapeake Bay, past Cape Charles, along the craggy shores of the Pocomoke Sound and up the Delaware River to his old political stomping grounds — to back even when he was certain he never wanted to be a politician.
“I said no, no, no, I can’t do that. I just — I’m thinking of starting my own law firm and its going to — no, I can’t do that,” he said. “And because they meet in Dover and dah, dah, dah.” He trailed off.
It was a Homeric tale of slavery, women, famous dead men, segregated clubs, a dead child and hardships. Good and evil were alive like a pair of snarling, tangled pit bulls.
But no good man in Mr. Biden’s story was without evil. And no evil man was without some good.
A crucial moment in his turn towards a lifetime in politics involved a 23-year-old man — “this poor kid” — down a 100-foot industrial chimney scraping hydrogen bubbles off the inside.
“He was wearing the wrong pants — wrong jeans,” Mr. Biden recalled. “A spark caught fire and got caught in the containment vessel and he lost part of his penis and one of his testicles and he was 23 years old.”
Mr. Biden spoke in long, disjointed sentences that creeped like kudzu until they just …
Then flashed another memory, and Mr. Biden picked up 40 years off in a different place, telling a different story that was also the same. A moment later, he was in Idaho, looking for work.
Reading the transcript of Mr. Hur’s interview with Mr. Biden brings to mind William Faulkner’s opening line in “Absalom, Absalom,” which at one time held the record for the longest sentence in the English language. Mr. Biden beat that by hundreds of words and was no less disorienting.
For Mr. Biden, the past is never dead. It’s not even past.
His story was filled with fantastical characters like Cock Robin, Senator Schmedlap, and the king of Mongolia with his bow and arrow and children riding horses bareback. “I’m not a bad archer,” Mr. Biden boasted to the lawyers gathered around investigating the misuse of classified government documents.
His story was also filled with grave injustices.
“No Blacks, Catholics are allowed!” he said of the Wilmington Club.
“We were a slave state by law,” he menaced. “Drawn bayonets.”
“We were one of the border states so we couldn’t figure …” Then his eyes went dark again. “Anyway,” he concluded.
And, of course, the story was filled with human weakness. Always human weakness with Biden men.
Recalling that the lawyers had rifled through the filing cabinets at his lake house looking for misplaced classified government documents, Mr. Biden scolded: “You left everything in place?”
And then a happy thought.
“I just hope you didn’t find any risque pictures of my wife in a bathing suit, which you probably did. She’s beautiful.”
A smile likely twitched across Mr. Biden’s face, but the transcript does not record that any of the lawyers laughed.
It was all deep in the past, which for Mr. Biden is not past.
The very edge of modernity for Mr. Biden is the newfangled and magical fax machine. But the fax machine is so super modern he still cannot remember the name of the damned grinding, beeping paper roll thing that answers your phone with squawking noises if you don’t pick up quick enough because you are too cheap to have a separate line for the — “what do you call it? When they send these …”
No, not “Absalom, Absalom.”
“The Sound and the Fury.” That’s it. It is the nearly incomprehensible opening scenes of “The Sound and the Fury” when Benjy Compson searches for a lost quarter in the scrub brush beside a golf course, moaning and crying for his sister, Caddy, who smells like trees and tenderly takes care of him even though, by age, Benjy is a grown man.
“And also, I was …” Mr. Biden tells the lawyers, confused again.
“My sister was helping me,” he says. “She’s smarter than I am.”
It’s all an old tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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