#gerontocracy

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In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was 33, James Madison was 25, Alexander Hamilton was 21, John Adams was 40, and Thomas Paine was 39.

Rosa Luxemburg was 35 when she wrote The Mass Strike, Che Guevara was 28 at the Granma Landing, and Fidel was 30, Bill Gates was 19 when he created Microsoft and 31 when it went public. MLK Jr. was 26 when he led the Bus Boycott and 39 when assassinated, Malcolm X was 39 when assassinated, Martin Luther was 33 when he wrote the 95 theses in 1517.

When Robert Oppenheimer began his professorship at Berkeley, he was 25; when he spearheaded the Manhattan Project, he was 38. Napoleon became Emperor at 34. Chögyam Trungpa was 19 when he was bestowed the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism to take to the West, and led a group of over 300 refugees on a dangerous journey across the Himalayas to India from Chinese-occupied Tibet. Jiddu Krishnamurti was 29 when he rejected his role and disbanded the Order of the Star. Ramakrishna was 25 when he met Bhairavi Brahmani. Mikhail Kalashnikov was 30 when he designed the AK-47.

Toussaint Louverture was age 33 when he commanded rebel forces in Haiti; Bhagat Singh was executed at 23 as an anti-colonial martyr against British Raj; Simón Bolívar, 36, liberated South America from Spain; Huey Newton co-founded Black Panther Party at 24.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Joseph Stalin kicked the bucket at 74. Napoleon was 46 in 1815 when he was defeated at Waterloo and subsequently banished to Saint Helena for the second and final time. Hitler was 56 when he committed suicide in his bunker in April 1945 as Allied forces closed in on Berlin. FDR was 60 when he signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942 authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans. Rodrigo Duterte was 71 when he assumed the presidency of the Philippines in 2016 and initiated his controversial "War on Drugs." Bill Clinton was 52 when he was impeached in December 1998.

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).

Every now and again, I reach the end of the week with more stray links that I've been able to squeeze into the newsletter, and when that happens it's time for a linkdump. This is linkdump number 31; here's 1-30:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

It's been five years (to the day!) since Wired killed off "Beyond the Beyond," Bruce Sterling's excellent blog, a wanton act of online vandalism that, among other things, made it much harder to figure out what was on Bruce's mind, a subject I find endlessly fascinating:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/17/cheap-truthers/#cheap-truth

Sterling's got a Medium that he almost never updates. I follow it through RSS, the best way to keep up with both things that update frequently and also hardly ever:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

This week, he posted a long, thoughtful, and seriously intriguing review of Cafe Europa Revisited, Slavenka Drakulic's followup to her 1996 international blockbuster Cafe Europa:

https://bruces.medium.com/cafe-europa-revisited-2025-be8875c06c4c

I confess that I had never heard of Drakulic, though, as I read Sterling's review, it became clear why he dotes on the acerbic Croatian essayist, a keen observer of the material world and theorizer of political upheaval:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602764/cafe-europa-revisited-by-slavenka-drakulic/

Drakulic is well-known for an essay collection called "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed," and the subtitle of this volume is "How to Survive Post-Communism," which just about says it all. Sterling characterizes it as the start of a new hot genre, "Old books directly written for old people by old people."

"The West" (whatever that is) is getting old. For more than a decade, Bruce Sterling's been predicting a future of "old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky." Original Sin, a new heavily reported book on the 2024 election makes a good case that Biden was indeed in a state of advanced senescence through much of his presidency and the entire election campaign, and had no business occupying the White House, much less running for another four years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/books/review/originial-sin-jake-tapper-alex-thompson.html

Biden's unwillingness to confront his age and frailty, along with Trump's obvious mental and physical decline, has many terrified American political thinkers talking about the gerontocracy that's running the country:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/01/designated-survivors/

Corey Robin got in some good licks on this one, in a piece called "We really are the oldest democracy in the world":

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/05/15/we-really-are-the-oldest-democracy-in-the-world/

"Oldest democracy" as in, "the democracy with the oldest leaders." The Democrats are gearing up for the midterms with such repeat offenders as Maxine Waters (86), Rosa DeLauro (82), John Garamendi (80), Doris Matsui (80) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (80). Also running: David Scott (79) who had to step down as ranking House Ag Committee member over health concerns. And: Dwight Evans (70), who missed most of last year's votes after suffering a stroke.

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