Opinion: Twilight of the Boomers

How old should our leaders be?

Here in the United States, we’ve had minimum ages for federal leadership since the Constitution became the law of the land in 1789. Nowhere in the Constitution are maximum ages mentioned.

In the relatively recent past, those minimum ages have raised some questions.

For just one obvious example, why should teenage girls allow lawmakers and law enforcement to determine what they are and aren’t allowed to do with their own bodies when they aren’t allowed to be part of the making or enforcing of the laws?

In the extremely recent past, the absence of maximum ages for leadership has come roaring into this nation’s public life.

Watching the disintegration of Joe Biden’s reelection campaign in real time, it became painfully obvious that the time for a national discussion of maximum ages is long overdue.

As with so many other issues in our national discourse, I wonder what a theological perspective from an Ásatrú perspective could look like. What small insight can those of us who practice the Old Way in the modern world add to the discussion?

As in so many other instances, I think it’s good to turn to the old texts – not to find holy writ from our supposedly glorious ancestors, but as a starting place and an inspiration for our own understandings of our current moment and our places in it.

Sometimes sagas

Over the past decade, I’ve grown increasingly less committed to the practice of mining the Icelandic sagas for concepts from the old polytheistic religions.

When it comes down to it, the sagas of Icelanders are works of historical fiction written by Christian Icelanders. As Robert Kellogg states in his introduction to The Sagas of Icelanders (Penguin Books, 2001), these prose works were composed well after Iceland’s conversion to Christianity in the year 1000.

They were written mainly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they concern characters and event in Iceland, and to some extent the larger Norse world, from three hundred years earlier.

As was hammered into me by professors while I was studying at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the farther a written source is from a historical event, the less trustworthy it is as a historical document. This seems obvious, but there has long been a practice among practitioners of Ásatrú and Heathenry (myself included) of citing saga passages as evidence of actual pagan practice.

They are not. At best, they are suggestive of what may have been, with some details surviving in the form of oral tradition or written documentation that made it into the mix when the saga writers were creating their sometimes polemical, sometimes political works of literary fiction.

Like any works of fiction, they can (and do) have literary merit that is able to strike a chord within modern readers, including Heathen ones. Sometimes, they include quotations from older poetry of the pagan period that would otherwise be lost to us.

One saga that does have these particular merits is Egils saga Skallagrímssonar (“Saga of Egil, Son of Grim the Bald”). It takes place between 850 and 1000, and it was written between 1220 and 1240, likely by Edda author Snorri Sturluson.

What matters for this particular discussion is its powerful portrayal of the vastly changed life experiences of its main character as young man and as old man.

Ale and magic

By the time the Icelander Egil Skallagrímsson is 12 years old, he is already recognized for his ability to compose poetic verses. He is “so big that few grown men were big and strong enough that he could not beat them at games,” and his mother declares that he has “the makings of a true Viking when he was old enough to be put in command of warships.” The declaration is sourced to one of Egil’s verses cited by the saga author.

Four short chapters later, young Egil is the powerful and problematic Viking adventurer that has fascinated readers across eight centuries.

When King Eirik Blood-axe of Norway invites Egil and his companions to a feast after a blót (“sacrifice”) to the dísir (divine female figures), the young protagonist shows a Thor-like capacity for ale-drinking.

Spouting poetry as he downs drink, Egil offends the queen, who sends him a horn of poisoned ale. In a much-discussed act, Egil uses a knife to cut his palm and carve runes into the horn. After using his own blood to color the runes, he recites a verse, the horn shatters, and the ale spills on the ground.

Following this bit of runic magic, Egil recites a verse to the hapless fellow who delivered the poisoned drink and drives a sword all the way through him.

A running feud between Egil and the royal couple leads to many iconic scenes, most of them featuring Egil reciting new verses as he does his Viking deeds. One of these deeds is perhaps the most famous instance of runic magic in the sagas.

He took a hazel pole in his hand and went to the edge of a rock facing inland. Then he took a horse’s head and put it on the end of the pole.

Afterwards he made an invocation, saying, “Here I set up this scorn-pole and turn its scorn upon King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild” – then turned the horse’s head to face land – “and I turn its scorn upon the nature spirits that inhabit this land, sending them all astray so that none of them will find its resting-place by chance or design until they have driven King Eirik and Gunnhild from this land.”

Then he thrust the pole into a cleft in the rock and left it to stand there. He turned the head towards the land and carved the whole invocation in runes on the pole.

Egil’s deployment of the níðstöng (“scorn-pole”) against his enemies – with its use of spoken magic made physical via the carved runes and its appeal to the landvættir (“nature spirits” or “land spirits”) – underscores his role as the prototypical and far-traveled saga protagonist who is fluent in runic magic, able to compose poetry on the spot, and fearless in his confrontations with rivals and enemies.

It’s the extreme turnabout in characterization later in Egil’s life that is relevant to the discussion of aging.

Falling down

After his Viking days are done, Egil settles down at his farm in Iceland and watches his children grow up. Tragedy strikes when two of his sons die young, and he locks himself in his bed-closet to be alone with his great grief.

Eventually, his daughter Thorgerd convinces him to write a poem about losing his sons, and the act of composition itself appears to be therapeutic for him. Instead of spouting verses as a belligerent goad to his enemies, Egil now partakes of the god Odin’s mead of poetry as a means of meditative comfort in the face of personal loss.

Immediately after the composition scene, the saga tells us that

Egil lived at Borg for a long time and grew to an old age. He is not said to have been involved in disputes with anyone in Iceland. Nor is anything told about him duelling or killing anyone after he settled down in Iceland.

This is a far cry from his days of violent Viking derring-do.

He then turns his farm over to his surviving son Thorstein and moves in with his son-in-law Grim. No longer a chieftain, he still presides over a case at the assembly and delivers a decision in favor of his son. Unsurprisingly, the opposing party declares his decision to be unjust. Egil replies,

“I expect you and your son’s lot to worsen, the longer that our quarrel lasts. I would have thought you realized… that I have always held my own against people like you and your son.”

The man who had been the young wielder of sword and runic magic is now the old man manipulating the legal system to get back at his family’s rivals.

By the second-to-last chapter, Egil status has fallen in status (literally).

Egil Skallagrimsson lived a long life, but in his old age he grew very frail, and both his hearing and sight failed. He also suffered from very stiff legs…

One day Egil was walking outdoors alongside the wall when he stumbled and fell.

Some women saw this, laughed at him and said, “You’re completely finished, Egil, now that you fall over of your own accord.”

Egil responds with an off-color verse:

My head bobs like a bridled horse
it plunges baldly into woe.
My middle leg both droops and drips
while both my ears are dry.

Now in his eighties and completely blind, Egil is even bossed around by the cook, who remarks that “it was astonishing for a man who had been as great as Egil to lie around under people’s feet and stop them going about their work.”

Ridiculed and refused, Egil rides out with the two chests of English silver given to him long ago by King Athelstan and hides them in an undisclosed location, preventing the younger folks around him from partaking of his wealth.

He then catches his final illness, dies, and is buried in a mound with his weapons.

Say it ain’t so, Joe*

Young Egil is pretty awesome in the same way that the Misifts were pretty awesome back in the late 1970s and early 1980s; super fun to read about and watch from a safe distance, but definitely not a scene you’d want in your own living room.

Turning back to this column’s opening about minimum ages for leadership, would we really want an extremely violent and more than a little unhinged (albeit charismatic) punk kid like young Egil anywhere near the mechanisms of power? Is age just a number, or is there something that inherently makes a person of 30 more trustworthy than a person of 25?

The truth is that men of any age can present themselves in a very reasonable and respectable way while promoting horrific policies and passing actively harmful legislation.

These days, we don’t talk so much about the time Joe Biden spent in the U.S. Senate across four decades, from 1973 to 2009. Maybe we should.

Way back in his first term, Biden was only 30 years old, beginning his service right at the minimum age required by the Constitution. A man in his 30s and 40s isn’t necessarily burning with the reformational zeal of youth. Many of Biden’s deeds during his 20th-century senatorial career weren’t all that great.

In the 1970s, Biden strongly opposed efforts to desegregate schools. When he sponsored a bill limiting the ability of courts to order desegregation via busing, civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg publicly told him that the bill “heaves a brick through the window of school integration.”

Biden’s bill forwarded the old “separate but equal” ideology, as did the appropriations bill amendment he sponsored that forced the federal government to fund segregated schools. His co-sponsors were southern Republicans Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, and he still bragged in 2019 that he had successfully found common ground with notorious segregationists.

Biden’s further anti-integration efforts led the Civil Rights Commission to repeatedly criticize his work in their 1977 publication “Desegration of the Nation’s Public Schools: A Status Report.”

In the 1990s, Biden strongly opposed the advancement of gay rights. In 1993, he voted for the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that banned all homosexual people from serving in the U.S. military. In 1996, he voted for the “Defense of Marriage Act,” notorious for defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman while allowing states to deny recognition to same-sex marriages performed in other states.

There’s more. In 1991, while chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden gave precedence to Clarence Thomas over his sexual harassment accuser Anita Hill and refused to let other victims of Thomas provide testimony. In subsequent years, Biden variously blamed his own shameful actions on Republican Senators, President George Bush, and Clarence Thomas. In 2019, he called Hill to say she had been treated badly – a statement she described as a non-apology.

It can be (and often is) pointed out that Biden’s views on issues relevant to African-American and LGBTQ+ communities “evolved over time” and that he has done helpful things in his later years.

That’s nice. I don’t really care.

Deathbed conversions, confessions, forgiveness, and salvation are part of other religious traditions. They’re really not part of Ásatrú, at least in any version that I would subscribe to.

The fact that Biden may have changed his mind (or at least his public statements) decades after doing the damage doesn’t change that the damage was done or erase the fundamental consequences his actions had upon people in the 1970s through the 1990s. Childhoods were shaped, doors were closed, and careers were derailed.

Not least of all, we’re absolutely still dealing with the consequences of Biden’s handling of the allegations against Thomas, now the most obviously corrupt justice on a thoroughly compromised Supreme Court.

Biden was in his early 30s when he fought integration and in his early 50s when he opposed gay rights. These weren’t the rash indiscretions of early youth.

Would Black women and gay men in their 20s have acted differently had they held his power? Given the minimum age requirements in place then and now, we can’t know.

But we do know that there were plenty of young, Black, and gay people in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s who were just as qualified as Joe Biden to be in his position of power but were denied the opportunity.

It’s that legally enshrined and ongoing denial of youth that makes me wonder why we’re so deferential to old age.

After the twilight

I don’t need to go over the events of the month since Biden’s disastrous performance in his televised debate with Donald Trump. There’s plenty of easily findable material online that endlessly obsesses over that calamity and Biden’s subsequent inability to dispel doubts about his decline or quell the flood of calls from within his own party to withdraw his candidacy.

Over the past week, Democrats have giddily celebrated the ascension of Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket.

That’s great. It doesn’t deal with the issue of elderly leaders in this nation of ours.

Maybe Egil’s tale has something to teach us here.

The Viking poet’s loss of his two sons, extreme grief, and subsequent therapy through composing poetry has resonances across the many centuries with Biden’s loss of his son Beau in 2015, his public displays of grief, and his extensive public speaking about loss and healing.

In both the Viking and the politician, this is something with which those of us who have experienced similar loss can sympathize. But for both Egil and Biden, it also shows a serious turning point that marks the solidification of their elderly status.

At this point, both men are looking backward instead of forward. Nostalgia, which can appear quite early in our personal timelines, becomes the regular state of mind and can take a turn into an overwhelming obsession as we reach the end of our roads.

Young people are, of necessity, future-focused. The majority of their experiences are ahead of them, and change is embraced as a positive in and of itself – as opposed to change feeling destabilizing and threatening for many among the elderly population who have only the shortest distance left on their journey.

This isn’t just about Joe. The elderly Egil’s self-serving decision at the assembly immediately brings to mind the corruption of the aforementioned Justice Thomas, who is (at 76) the oldest on the Supreme Court. It also resonates with Trump’s bottomless hunger for taking revenge upon rivals via endless lawsuits and spurious appeals, a hunger still unsatiated as he now takes his place as the oldest presidential nominee in United States history.

We don’t seem to have either the will or the ready means to remove Thomas from the court, and he can gladly sit there until (like Biden) he feels like stepping aside or (like Ruth Bader Ginsburg) he dies on the job. There also seems to be no way to make Trump actually pay any real price via the court system we have.

There must be a better way.

This isn’t about a lack of respect, like the women who laugh at the elderly Egil stumbling and falling while walking outdoors or the online trolls who laugh at the elderly Biden stumbling and falling while walking up the stairs of Air Force One.

We can respect the deeds done by an aged leader (at least the positive ones). We can honor their accomplishments and salute their service.

We shouldn’t have to stand silent while an 80-year-old declares what an 18-year-old is allowed to do with her own body. We shouldn’t have to pretend that someone who can’t seem to stay awake during his own trials and can’t stay even vaguely on-topic in his own speeches is competent to lead a nation where the largest age group is far less than half his age.

We can vote at age 18 but can’t be a U.S. Representative until 25, a Senator until 30, and a president until 35. These minimum requirements haven’t changed since the Constitution went into effect way back in 1789.

Although, as I stated at the beginning of this column, these minimum ages are problematic, let’s be charitable and take them as settled (for now). If we do so, and accept these arbitrary ages as necessary for the performance of duties by our elected leaders, why not set necessary ages at the other end?

Sure, everyone ages differently, and everyone has a different diminishing of capacities in old age.

But the same claim of different strokes for different folks can also be made at the front end; some 25-year-olds are just as able to accept the responsibility of leadership as 35-year-olds are.

Yet here we are with these hard and fast minimum requirements. Maybe it’s time to finally set some hard and fast maximum requirements.

Let’s be generous and say that a 40-year stay in Washington is a solid career for any elected official. That would mean representatives max out at 65, Senators at 70, and presidents at 75.

That seems like an easy and reasonable place to start, and it would help prevent the public humiliations faced by the Egils and Bidens of the world.

Just as we celebrate the positive deeds of the Vikings long past, let’s celebrate all the many positive accomplishments of the Baby Boomers and, as President Biden said in his public address to the nation on July 25, “pass the torch to a new generation.”

As Norse mythology teaches us, a new world arises after the twilight of the elders, “earth from the ocean, eternally green.” Let’s go there, together, under new leaders.

*Say it ain’t so, Joe
Please, say it ain’t so
That’s not what I want to hear, Joe
And I’ve got a right to know

Say it ain’t so, Joe
Please, say it ain’t so
I’m sure they’re telling us lies, Joe
Please, tell us it ain’t so

They told us that our hero has played his trump card
He doesn’t know how to go on
We’re clinging to his charm and determined smile
But the good ol’ days are gone

The army and the empire may be falling apart
And the money has gotten scarce
One man’s word held the country together
But the truth is getting fierce

Say it ain’t so, Joe
Please, say it ain’t so
We pinned our hopes on you, Joe
And they’re ruining our show

“Say It Ain’t So, Joe”
Lyrics by Murray Head
Performed by Roger Daltrey (1977)

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