'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Aging gracefully...

I'm on a cross-US plane, traveling home to Virginia after a poignant visit with my 96-year-old mother-in-law, who lives in a small town in northern California. Being with Granny and seeing her struggling to deal with her daily routine put me in mind of two other older people elsewhere in the world who are going through their own versions of these tough struggles of age-related infirmity-- but under situations where:

1. they are both the nominal heads of significant polities that have no formal provision for head-of-state retirement,
2. each is surrounded by a tightknit conservative coterie of men who have an interest in keeping him at some visible level of human functioning, and
3. each of these coteries can be presumed to have access to all the very latest in life-elongation technology.

I am referring to the Pope, and to Saudi Arabia's King Fahd.

Almost as soon as I started composing the above description of the situation these two men find themselves in I found myself feeling sorry for them. I'm assuming, in both cases, that there's a strong likelihood that the ruler in question may well have passed the stage of brain/physical decay at which he loses the ability to make his own wishes known even if they're in defiance of the wishes of his advisors.

In both cases, the man's advisors seem to evince an all-too-evident desire to keep some some minimally credible biological simulacrum of the old ruler alive. And in both cases, the old man's age-related decline seems to have progressed beyond the point where we could expect him to be able to summon the guile, the planning ability, and the implementing ability that would be needed to effect an end run around the advisors.

So I see both these old guys as, effectively, the captives of their advisors' designs for the polity. Which may well not be--indeed, probably isn't--at all the same thing as the best interest of the aging lion himself.

Maybe I do the pope a disservice with this analysis. Maybe he still does have sharp cognitive skills and is quite prayerfully sincere about his desire to continue enacting in public the role of Exemplary Elder that he is said to have chosen. But seeing him nodding off there in public aboard his La-Z-Pope chair somehow makes me think there must be a happier way for him to be.

King Fahd, however, seems an easier case to analyze. I think it's been quite a while now since anyone has even seen him in public and provided independent verification that he is indeed still alive. In the mean-time, with all the Kingdom's levers of power having fallen into the hands of the experienced and intelligent Crown Prince Abdallah, the CP is quite happy to be able ever further to postpone the once-key issue of who it is that gets to be the next in line, after him.

I call this a "once-key" issue, because until recently, it was always assumed that being CP and then finally winning the brass ring of the monarchy was just about the most desirable role imaginable for any one of the Kingdom's thousands of princes. Now, though, this seems like far from being a sure thing.

The Kingdom is in internal turmoil as two generations'-worth of easy oil income and the resulting combination of over-fertility and slothfulness suddenly catches up with its people. The conflicting demands of the Wahhabis and the (considerably less numerous) liberalizers are clashing head-on throughout the Kingdom's state organizations-- and this, at a time when the eponymous royal family's coffers are suddenly dry--leaving them suddenly unable to use the time-honored tactic of buying off any authors of oppositionist or critical views.

Plus, at a time when Washington--which for the past 70 years has been main guarantor, one might even say the raison d'être, of the Saudi monarchy-- has also, suddenly, turned extremely balky and unhelpful.

Plus, at a time when the regional order in the Gulf has also been upturned, rendering the strategic environment for the Saudis suddenly terrifying unpredictable. (See next post.)

So these are times of dizzyingly rapid and unpredictable change for the rulers of Saudi Arabia. Maybe the incentive system among the senior royal princes has actually changed? Maybe instead of jockeying to be the one who gets to be the next Crown Prince, instead they are suddenly jockeying not to be forced to take the role? How much happier and predictable a life they could lead if they were merely doing some mundane task like managing the investments in London; or something enjoyable but essentially powerless like writing poetry?

On the other hand, if you're a senior royal, your own personal happiness or personal wellbeing may well be of little account. Exhibit Number One: King Fahd.

Oh dear, the burdens of monarchy! (Or, papacy?)

[Written Saturday, 12/27.]