EXCLUSIVE | Jill Biden and the vanishing age of decency

In his commencement address at the U.C.L.A Medical School in 2018, author and surgeon Atul Gawande spoke about his encounter with a prisoner who had swallowed half a razor blade and slashed his left wrist with the corner of a toothpaste tube. He was a racist and sexist who heaped abuse on one of Gawande’s female colleagues. As Gawande reluctantly went about suturing the skin on his forearm, the prisoner hurled invective about the hospital, the policemen and the clumsy job that the doctor was doing. Gawande did not know what to do. Until he remembered something that a professor had told him: that when people speak, they aren’t just expressing their ideas; they are, even more, expressing their emotions. And it’s the emotions they really want heard.

So Gawande stopped listening to his words and instead focused on the emotions behind them. Eventually, the prisoner confessed that he had been in solitary confinement for two years. His eyes began to water and for the next hour, he unburdened himself to Gawande. It taught the doctor the value of every life. He did not understand or like the man, but all it took to see his humanity—to be able to treat him—was to supply that tiny bit of openness and curiosity, recalled Gawande.

“Regarding people as having lives of equal worth means recognising each as having a common core of humanity,” added Gawande. “Without being open to their humanity, it is impossible to provide good care to people—to ensure, for instance, that you’ve given them enough anesthetic before doing a procedure. To see their humanity, you must put yourself in their shoes. That requires a willingness to ask people what it’s like in those shoes. It requires curiosity about others….”

This sentiment—of treating everyone with dignity—is one that former American first lady Dr Jill Biden would identify with, because it is the foundation on which she has built her life. Everything about her spells decency. Morality is more than an ideology; it is identity. Kindness is her compass. “I think that people come together because they need one another, and that’s our humanity—that we can give comfort to each other,” she tells THE WEEK over Zoom. “Acts of kindness are what matter most in life, and I truly try to live by that ideal.” 

She does not come across as entitled, but as someone who believes the universe owes her nothing, and she owes it everything. She speaks with a gentle lilt and laughs easily. What endears is how often she refers to you by name. It could be a tactic to build connect. Or it could be because she cares. Either way, it works. And, it seems, not just for you, but for scores of others.

In her new book View from the East Wing, she writes about teaching a class on writing about conflict. (She was the first first lady to hold a salaried job while in the White House, as a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College.) Once, she purchased Google Cardboard headsets so that the class could experience global conflicts in 3D. Most of her students loved it, as they felt as though they were there. One student, however, ran out of the room sobbing. Jill ran after her into the ladies’ room, where she told her story. She’d left her family back in Syria and married an American. She was basically alone in the US. “It was heart-wrenching,” writes Jill. “We became friends. We still text, and she sends me pictures of her boys in Halloween costumes and Christmas outfits. I’m so proud of her.”

The book is full of such encounters. Whether it is regularly calling the student whose mother is in Ukraine, who speaks to her while bombs explode in the background, or visiting a ‘red area’ after the death of members of a dance troupe there, against the advice of her husband’s aides, the former first lady unabashedly wears her compassion on her sleeve. 

In many ways, she is old school. She seems to be valiantly holding on to an age of decorum, discretion and chivalry that is fast disappearing. Take her relationship with her husband. The year before they left the White House, Joe began waking up repeatedly at night. Instead of confronting him about any urological issues, she instead alerted one of his doctors. The reason would turn out to be his prostate cancer. “While it sounds old-fashioned that I spoke about the issue to the doctors rather than to Joe directly, it’s always been the nature of our relationship that we’ve maintained a veil of discretion around personal health,” writes Jill. “When I went through menopause, I never spoke about it with him, even though I experienced two years of horrible insomnia, and when I did manage to fall asleep, I was jolted awake by night sweats.”

Despite the discretion, the couple has always leaned on each other. The one tradition they never broke was having dinner together, even when Joe started out in politics as a senator and had to commute two hours to Washington by train every day. Even on the occasions when Jill ate earlier with the kids, when Joe returned, they would all sit together as a family at the dinner table and share about their day. The tradition continued in the White House, where she’d ensure they had flowers and lit candles on the table. Even when Joe had to go back to work afterwards for briefings or to make phone calls, he always made time for dinner together.

Something else Jill always used to do for Joe while in the White House was write him notes in lipstick on the mirror in his bathroom, where she knew he would see them as he shaved. Sometimes just a heart. Other times, “You’re my hero.” On her way to work one morning, seeing how much negativity Joe was facing, she left him a note that said, “Get up, champ. Get up”—something his father always said to him in hard times.

***

In 2010, dalit intellectual Chandra Bhan Prasad introduced one more goddess to the existing pantheon of deities in India—'Angrezi Devi’ or the goddess of English. She stood on a desktop computer wearing the robes of the Statue of Liberty, armed with a pen and the Indian Constitution. Angrezi Devi, believed Prasad, would empower dalits and help them break the shackles of untouchability. English, he believed, was the key to upward social mobility, power and equality. “If they start worshiping English as a goddess, nobody can prevent them from giving their kids A,B,C,D,” said Prasad. English-speaking dalits, he believed, would not be content to clean gutters or do menial tasks.

He has a point. In today’s world, English has immense power. It is not just a language; it encodes a mindset and patterns of behaviour, and offers unique opportunities. As a professor of English, Jill would know this well. A month after Joe won the presidency, Joseph Epstein wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, ‘Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.’ The article began: “Madame First Lady—Mrs Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” Jill felt the article was ‘bizarre’ since she was being attacked for an honorific that had taken her years to earn. When her first marriage ended in her mid-20s, she was left without a career, a college degree or much savings. She swore she would never again be in that vulnerable position. It took her 15 years to get her doctorate from the University of Delaware at the age of 55, along with two master’s degrees. While raising three kids and teaching full-time, she had to take it slow. 

But it was a sacrifice worth making, she writes. Teaching English became her refuge. “I was happy to be Dr. B for a few hours a week, to be able to do what I did best, to see a clear difference in the students’ work from one paper to the next as things that were hard for them got a little easier,” she writes. She shared with the students “literature that had helped me through difficult times in my own life, and encouraged them to see poetry as a refuge”.

Unfortunately, English today is under massive attack, from the political right, from hate-spewing trolls, from the slang-obsessed Gen Z and from the American president himself. “Don Trump has come to be the epitome of all that’s boorish with the western world,” THE WEEK’s R. Prasannan wrote in his PowerDrive column. “He swears like a sailor, tells lies, breaks laws, sleeps with hookers, mouths obscenities at fellow-rulers, and does all things that genteel people abhor. In a single speech in Florida this month (April), he tossed out 10 ‘hells’, three ‘damns’ and a ‘crap’.”

Prasannan compares him with his predecessors, many of whom used foul language in private, but rarely in public discourse. In chats with his aides, Richard Nixon, for example, called Indira Gandhi a “bitch” or a “witch”, Mexicans “dishonest” and the blacks “a bunch of dogs”. In 2004, vice-president Dick Cheney told Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor to “f***” himself. But compared with Trump’s foul words, “these sound as pure and pious as pulpit speeches,” writes Prasannan.

But it is not just the president. When he was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, writes author Mark Edmundson in The New York Times, swearing was the domain of guys. Guys who worked with their hands—construction men, plumbers and carpenters—cursed copiously on the job. Sometimes a neighbourhood dad would let loose a stream of bad words from the backyard when he was three beers in, but not often. Among cursing guys, there were rules. Swearing was an outdoor activity. Keep it out of the house. Never swear in front of women. Never curse out a teacher or a cop.

Today, the situation has changed. Profanity has become ubiquitous. Everyone, including kids, indulges in it. “Omnipresent cursing, the programmatic reduction of nearly everything, pollutes our worldview,” writes Edmundson. “It makes it harder to see what is true and good and beautiful. We become blind to instances of courage and compassion. Our world shrinks. And we shrink along with it.”

In that sense, Jill seems like one of the last women standing upright in a world that has gone topsy-turvy. Her language is an accurate reflection of her innate decency. In her book, she only refers to Trump by name once or twice. She never openly denigrates anyone. She sees Hillary Clinton, for example, as “one of the greatest politicians of our time, as well as a singularly kind person”. Everything she had gone through, writes Jill, made Hillary a person of deep knowledge and grace. She describes her relationship with France’s first lady Brigitte Macron as “two friends together, just like sisters”. Brigitte, too, had three sisters and they bonded over that during the Bidens’ G20 trip to Rome, over champagne and French fries. Former first lady of Canada Sophie Gregoire Trudeau was “fun and energetic” and Sheikha Moza of Qatar was a “powerhouse” and “one of the most glamorous women in the world”. Jill recounts the time she and Joe went on a hunt for a Monet painting in the White House with Germany’s Angela Merkel and her husband. “That night we discovered it, the four of us—two world leaders and their partners, and yet also just two couples having drinks during an impromptu house tour….,” she writes.

At times, Jill’s writing seems too sanitised, too rose-tinted. By not writing anything bad about anyone, I ask her whether she was being honest or just cautious. “I don’t think I was being cautious,” she says. “These were just my reflections, the way I saw and felt about things, during our four years in the White House.” Perhaps, at places, she was hiding or moderating her true feelings, but in a climate of exaggerated hatred and vulgarity, moderation—even if it masks the full truth—cannot but be refreshing.

***

There is one rule that pervades Christopher Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey, about the Greek king Odysseus’s return home following the decade-long Trojan War—Zeus’s law. The law states that you should treat the beggar and the stranger as you would want to be treated. Except that this was not the original Zeus’s law in Homer’s Greek poem, from which the film is adapted. The original law was narrower, a demand for hospitality towards a guest or a stranger. By expanding its scope from a law of hospitality to one of compassion and reciprocity, Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into the centre of The Odyssey, says Ezra Klein, author and host of NYT’s ‘The Ezra Klein Show’. This law of ‘doing unto others what you would have them do unto you’ is demanding and few of us live up to it. But the problem with the modern right, says Klein, is not that they don’t live up to it, but that they detest it. Trump sees treating the stranger among you with kindness as ‘suicidal empathy’. The iron law that rules the world today is one of strength, force and power.

Nolan’s biggest trick in the film was to make one of the oldest laws new again. “What the opposition has to do is recognise what Nolan recognised—that it is actually an affirmation of our core values to say cruelty is weakness,” says Klein. “It is only compassion and reciprocity that can build a durable society. Order is necessary, but order without ethics and decency is perversion or authoritarianism.”

What we need is a return to politics of another order, the kind that internalises Zeus’s law of compassion (the way Nolan saw it), the kind espoused by the likes of Joe and Jill. In fact, the former first lady never distinguished between friends and enemies while visiting sites of tragedies. Humanity, for her, trumped politics. “I understood why I was often advised not to go to MAGA strongholds,” she writes. “But to me, finding ways to grieve together outweighed every other consideration. It’s what makes us human. So I went to places where they hadn’t voted for Joe because we’d promised to serve everyone, not just blue states. I offered my hand to whomever was in front of me, whether they shook it or not.”

Perhaps this is ‘suicidal empathy’, but it is the only kind of death that leads to life. A life that upturns the values of this world, with its deepest joy coming from sorrow, its greatest strength from weakness.

VIEW FROM THE EAST WING

By Jill Biden

Published by Gallery Books

Price Rs1,499; pages 276