Who's That Guy on the Left?

Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool.

Did you watch all of Jimmy Carter’s funeral? Yeah, neither did I. But I did scan all the photos afterwards, and kept coming back to the distinguished-looking gent at the end of the third row, the one with the electric blue tie and gracefully receding hairline. It’s the fella Mike Pence seems to be pointing toward, and asking Al Gore, who’s that guy?

Indeed. Who is that guy?

Is it Jacques Chirac? No, he’s dead. Dan Rather? Some random Windsor, perhaps?

Eventually, I focused on the lugubrious-looking woman seated beside the Mystery Man, and it all clicked. She was unmistakable, nailed by her hairdo, unchanged after 33 years. That was Marilyn Quayle!

So, of course, this raised the obvious question: Who was that wrinkly at her right elbow? A second husband?

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That’s the thing about aging; it’s gradual, except when it isn’t. When it isn’t, it is almost always when you see someone for the first time in a long time. And often, when it happens — whatever your age — you are delivered a mild jolt of existential terror.

Reunions reliably do this. Not long ago I attended a reunion of coworkers I hadn’t seen in 40 years. I looked around the room and thought: What a bunch of careworn, cadaverous half-senescent old farts with one foot in the grave. Most were, of course, roughly my age.

A half century ago, a prominent cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker suggested that the ultimate meaning of life is that it ends — and that we mentally survive the knowledge of this ghastly empiric absurdity by denying it to ourselves.

Everything we are, Becker argued -- our personalities, our attitudes, our very being -- is an elaborate lie, a carefully crafted self-delusion constructed to avoid having to face a fact so terrifying it would drive us mad: Not only are we certain to die, but death could come at any moment, followed by an eternity of nothingness.

We deal with this, Becker said, by making ourselves busy, often stupidly busy. We tranquilize ourselves with the intense and the trivial; we make friends, raise families, drink beer, have hobbies, follow the Celtics, find comfort in religions promising eternal life, all of which take our minds off the potentially paralyzing truth. We deceive ourselves into believing -- not literally, of course, but emotionally -- that we are immortal. It is a form of insanity. Paranoiacs and depressives are in some ways the sanest among us, Becker suggested.

Cheerful guy, Becker. Yet the book struck a deep, dark chord. It won The Pulitzer Prize. Also, the year the book was published, Becker died at a mere 49. But that’s a hideous story for another time.

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Back to the Dan Quayle phenomenon. Intimations of mortality.

I still think of Quayle as the fresh-faced 41-year-old doofus who boinged up to the podium in a semi-sprint when George H.W. Bush announced his surprising choice for running mate. It was a dramatic moment, but the room stayed a bit quieter than you’d think. It was full of Republican senators and congresspersons who knew the adolescent triviality that was Dan Quayle. I suspect they would not have been surprised when, some time later, Quayle had to be schooled by a 12-year-old in how to spell “potato,” or was led like a lamb into a trap that created one of the most humiliating moments in American debate history.

The point is everyone understood that all Dan Quayle had going for him — the only reason that the the 64-year-old Bush tapped him for the ticket — was his youthful appearance and semi-Kennedyesque vigor. Here’s what he looked like:

And then, he disappeared for quite a while. He remained in our minds as a callow, shallow child. And now here he is. The geezer beside Marilyn.

There is nothing undignified about aging, of course. But we are all children of Ernest Becker, and we kid ourselves. I, for example, deep down, believe I still look like this guy:

(Don’t ask. It was for a 2001 story about a dude ranch.)

… Whereas in fact, I currently look like this, in a photo taken Friday night.

I am 73, four years younger than Quayle. I just now realized that to understand the joke on the t-shirt I happened to be wearing, you would have to have been born no later than 1957.

Here’s a solemn promise to you: If you upgrade your subscription to “paid,” I will never publish another photograph of my current self.

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Today’s Weekend challenge for you: Have you had a reunion-type experience that was funny or interesting or profound, vis a vis the aging process? Tell us here. You can also write on any other subject inspired by this post.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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And finally, from the pages of …

As you know, in solidarity with Ann Telnaes, various artists have been producing their own cartoons on the same theme as the one of Ann’s that The Post killed, causing her to resign. Some of these new ones have been extraordinary. This may be the exraordinariest. It is certainly the most brutal. It just arrived in my inbox. It is by my friend Jack Ohman, a Pulitzer prizewinning cartoonist.

Whoa.

Bye.