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| Hunter and Joe Biden |
Hunter Biden’s memoir, Beautiful
Things, is an attempt by a prodigal son to drape a sanctifying mantle of
victimology around the shoulders of his dad, now President of the United States,
Joe Biden.
There are problems here. Hunter Biden was a prodigal son,
but his father is not simply the un-hip, kindly, fatherly and forbearing Dad we
meet in scripture. Hunter’s Dad is the President of the United States and, not
to be too difficult, but who writes a memoir at 51 years of age? There is no
memoir of the prodigal son.
Beautiful Things,
which has as its subject ugly things, is not a memoir; it is an apologia that
fails spectacularly.
A review of the book by National
Public Radio (NPR) begins by dragging onstage a familiar Grand Guignol villain:
When former President
Donald Trump was still in office and holding rallies, he often shouted a
question that provoked howls of raucous laughter from the crowd: "Where's
Hunter?"
Trump was referring
derisively to Hunter Biden, the son of the man who is now President
Biden. Beautiful Things: A
Memoir is Hunter's answer to Trump's question. He wants to tell us
where he is, where he has been, and what it has taken to get him from there to
here.
Progressive publications – most especially the bullish New
York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press -- are determined not to allow
Trump to lie easily in the ashbin of recent history. Former President Trump is
to the new century what President Richard Nixon was after August 8, 1974, the
date Nixon delivered his resignation speech.
Beaten to a pulp by news coverage of a seriously compromised
investigation probing collusion with President of Russia Vladimir Putin to deny
the presidency to Hillary Clinton, followed by (two) Democrat impeachment
attempts, Trump does not overflow with resignation to the fate that has been
assigned to him by his critics. Nor has Trump, wearing sprightly his 74 years,
yet attempted a memoir.
Just to keep the numbers straight, Biden is 78 years of age,
not a few of them torn to ribbons by the antics, some of them criminal, of son
Hunter. Democrat Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi is hefting 81 years. It
is somewhat doubtful that in each case age has brought wisdom in the train of
years.
Politics has not always been a theatre of charity, ethics or
forbearance. The post-modern age appears to have elbowed traditional Christian
morality into the ashbin of history, despite all the profane protestations of
wily politicians to the contrary. Niccolò Machiavelli reminds us that the road
to political success is not paved with the beatitudes familiar to Christians
from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount. Few politicians are poor in spirit, and fewer
still will rise to the kingdom of heaven.
Postmodern Catholic politicians in particular who have set
their faces against sound doctrine in the matter of partial birth abortion,
nearly all of them on the Democrat side of the political barricades, are hardly
“poor in secular spirit.” Biden subscribes uncritically to the doxologies of
Planned Parenthood, though perhaps not as ardently as U.S. Senator Dick
Blumenthal, who has been styled by contrarian journalists – yours truly – as
“the senator from Planned Parenthood.”
It comes as no surprise that Christianity and Catholicism
play little part in Hunter Biden’s memoir, and wisdom here enters and leaves
the stage as a rag wearing refugee.
The review of Hunter Biden’s memoir in the Washington Post cannot be said to
be favorable. The reviewer notes that “the addiction memoir is complicated to
pull off,” and he notes, “as the late New York Times writer David Carr noted in
his brilliant version of the genre, ‘The Night of the Gun,’ ‘Beyond the grime
that is bound to accrue from a trip through the gutters of one’s past, what is
the value in one more addiction memoir to me or anyone else?’”
So why make the effort? What political value does the book
have?
There are two convincing answers to that question: 1) the
book is essentially a plea for pity, if not forgiveness. May Hunter Biden in
the future have some political role to play in the broad shadow cast by his
father’s presidency? None of us are fathers to Hunter Biden, and the part
played by the father in the Old Testament is unbefitting to hardboiled
journalists writing in the age of supposed wayward presidents such as Nixon and
Trump; 2) It is an exercise in victimology which, in our morally twisted
postmodern age, operates as a form of political sanctity, a mantel of suffering
that washes away the most laughable stupidities.
It is a pity that Christopher Hitchens, an atheist upon whom
Christian forbearance had no claim, were not alive at this moment to write a
Biden sequel to his book on former President Bill Clinton, provocatively titled
No One Left To Lie To.
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