The saddest, loneliest Althouse blog tag: "Biden the healer."

I created this tag on November 8, 2020, and I don't create a new tag unless I think there will be a good number of other posts that will support that tag. I imagined Biden stepping up to the role of healer. I went back today, looking for "Biden the healer" in my archive, because I've been thinking how much better Biden might be doing — and, more importantly, how much better this country might be doing — if Biden had followed the path of healing — of bringing us together. But Biden was and is a divider. Maybe January 6th was too much of a temptation, such great raw material for tearing us apart. He could have said — like Lincoln — "with malice toward none, with charity for all" and forgiven everyone involved and called upon all of us — on his side and the other side — to "bind up the nation's wounds." But he didn't do it. And now it's too late.

Here's my November 8, 2020 post. Read it and weep. It's title is an eloquent quote from someone who has gone on to distinguish herself for her comical lack of eloquence:

"Joe is a healer, a uniter, a tested and steady hand, a person whose own experience of loss gives him a sense of purpose that will help us as a nation reclaim our own sense of purpose, and a man with a big heart who loves with abandon."

In that one crowded sentence, Kamala Harris — in her victory speech last night — stated the theme for Biden's presidency. 

I see the laying-on-of-hands concept that we were talking about yesterday. Remember? The writer in The Atlantic — Franklin Foer — talked about Joe's "effort to heal... to wrap himself around others in mourning." He saw "something religious in this laying-on of hands... an act of communion." Because we are "desperate" and Joe is the "parental figure," what is required of us is "an almost irrational faith in healing."

Kamala presents Joe the "healer" — using his "tested and steady hand." But she doesn't, like Foer, make it sound like any sort of miracle or anything religious. She grounds the power in Joe's real-life experience — "experience of loss " — and his "big heart." 

Now,  the word "healer" is problematic in speech. It has a homophone...

 

A fine dog, but you don't want to call your President a dog. Especially not a "heeler." To heel is not to lead. To whom is he heeling? 

Ah, but the dog that is called a "heeler" is not called that because he heels. The Australian cattle dog is nicknamed a "heeler" because he moves cattle along by biting at their heels! That's leadership of a sort.

It is good with older, considerate children, but will herd people by nipping at their heels, particularly younger children who run and squeal.... The ACD was originally bred to move reluctant cattle by biting, and it will bite if treated harshly. The Australian Cattle Dog's protective nature and tendency to nip at heels can be dangerous as the dog grows into an adult if unwanted behaviours are left unchecked.

You'd better train this dog! It's not time for "irrational faith."  

(Photos © Meade. ) 

Thoughts:

1. Well, we didn't train that dog, and now, he's gnawed at us far too long, and we're about to re-home him.

2. Joe had trouble with his own dogs, and we're forced to infer that he failed to take care of the most basic responsibility within his personal household: Train whatever dogs you may have.

4. These days, the notion that Joe could be engaging in the "laying on of hands" just sounds like the set-up for a sex-predator joke.  

5. This is the second post today where  communion has come up. Earlier this morning there was a woman who grabbed at the communion wafers and was, for her sin, bitten by the priest. And here, we have Franklin Foer writing "something religious in [Joe's] laying-on of hands... an act of communion." Franklin Foer isn't Christian. His family is Jewish (his mother the daughter of Holocaust survivors and his brother the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer). I don't know how precisely he meant to connect the laying on of hands — which is a Jewish and a Christian tradition — with communion — which is only a Christian tradition. I'm not sure what Foer thought Biden could have done that would be analogous with communion, but I do feel safe saying that whatever it was, Biden did not do it.