By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 23, 2022
None knows his home so well
As I the grove of Mars, and Vulcan’s cell,
Fast by the Æolian rocks!—How the Winds roar,
How ghosts are tortured on the Stygian shore,
How Jason stole the golden fleece, and how
The Centaurs fought on Othrys’ shaggy brow;
The walks of Fronto echo round and round—
The columns trembling with the eternal sound,
While high and low, as the mad fit invades,
Bellow the same trite nonsense through the shades.
— The Satires of Decimus Junius
Juvenalis, and of Aulus Persius Flaccus (translated by William
Gifford, 1821)
What, exactly, is up with Joe Biden and his shades?
He surely doesn’t wear them because his future is so
bright he’s got to: At Biden’s age, the future can be seen very clearly — not
because it is so bright but because it is so near.
Biden is an old man. Age is cruel to a public figure, and
sunglasses are a great masker of age. Check out Ringo Starr: The man is 82
years old, but, with a little bit of judiciously applied dye, his trim build,
and his sunglasses, he looks like he could still be in a touring rock band.
In photos with his son, he sometimes even looks as though he
were the younger man. Bono in tinted glasses is your cool English professor;
Bono without sunglasses is a prison guard in the Soviet gulag. Ozzy Osbourne in shades
is ready to bark at the moon; Ozzy Osbourne without shades is Caitlyn Jenner with a wicked psilocybin hangover.
Presidents want to look youthful and vigorous, whatever
their age or actual state of health. Biden is not what you’d call a sprightly 79,
and his trademark aviators take a few years off.
In general, you want to run hard, fast, and for as long
as you can when a politician starts getting serious about sunglasses. It never
ends well.
The O.G. shades-sporting dictator was, I suppose,
Francisco Franco. He was pretty fashion-forward as right-wing Catholic
caudillos go, rocking not only the shades but also fur coats that would have
made Iceberg Slim positively chartreuse with envy. The fashion of the early
1970s was pimps and disco and Eurotrash, and it is appropriate that in that
decade Franco passed on the generalissimo’s baton — and the shades — to
up-and-coming dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in Chile in 1973,
just before Franco’s death in 1975.
You may be surprised to learn this, but upon the death of
Francisco Franco, Cuba’s shades-sporting dictator, Fidel Castro, declared three
days of mourning. Castro had in him more than a bit of Franco’s extravagant
style: The balmy climate of Cuba may have robbed him of the opportunity to wear
furs, but he made up for it by frequently sporting two Rolexes — a GMT and a
Submariner, if you’re wondering — on the same wrist at the same time. You would
think that the right-wing Catholic dictator would represent everything the
socialist dictator hated, but, as it turns out, thugs are pretty much thugs,
and nothing as trivial as a difference in economic program was going to stop
Castro from recognizing and paying tribute to a kindred vicious spirit.
Yasser Arafat played the dictator game like a pro,
sporting fatigues and a keffiyeh and a billion-dollar bankroll
he acquired . . . somehow. He was a Persol man, though I doubt that the Italian
luxury brand would be very much inclined to emphasize the connection. (Persol,
like virtually every other brand of luxury sunglasses you’ve ever heard of, is
actually a property of the Milanese conglomerate Luxottica, which owns
ubiquitous mall-fixture Sunglass Hut.) Mobutu Sese Seko seems to have preferred Celine and in
some photos appears to be prefiguring reformed Trump sycophant Anthony Scaramucci by
wearing women’s sunglasses. (Celine, yes; Céline, no — Mobutu
wasn’t about to wait around for death on the installment plan.) Moammar
Qaddafi, who preferred his sunglasses bespoke, was — seriously! — rumored to be
planning to launch his own designer-eyewear line before his death in 2011. That
is precisely the kind of overpromise/underdeliver tomfoolery you’d expect from
a man who ruled as a dictator for decades but never managed to rise above the
rank of colonel.
Joseph Kabila, the stylish Congolese politician, started
wearing a lot of fancy sunglasses toward the end of his term as president, and,
when he put off the vote to replace him, it looked like he planned to stay on.
Instead, he resolved to give up the presidency and grew a beard — not an Al
Gore–style failure beard but a devious-plan-to-hold-onto-power beard — covering
up part of his face while also trying to cover up the fact that he’d rigged the vote in favor of his second choice of successor.
(Politics gets pretty complicated in the Democratic Republic of Congo.)
When Kim Jong-un started wearing sunglasses at public
events a few years back, it made headlines. But it’s family tradition: His father
was a Ray-Ban die-hard. Expatriate artist Sunmu has painted Kim Jong-un’s portrait with
starving North Koreans reflected in those opaque shades.
But President Biden is no Kim Jong-un, nor a Colonel
Gaddafi, nor even a generalissimo of the most minor kind, and
the sunglasses he wears do not call to mind any of those figures. They do,
unfortunately, call to mind cult leader Jim Jones. And if the incident at Jonestown
seems like ancient history to you, consider that Joe Biden already was well
into his Senate career when they started passing around the Kool-Aid in Guyana.
Fifty years is a long time to go on failing to see the
light.
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