Because John McCain is unbelievably McOld (you can probably tell I used to write for the Onion, folks) it has become common on the left to consider attacks on this element of his character ageist.

To some extent, I accept this. (I refuse to accept the right-wing talking point version of it - in general the right only cares about any kind of ism when it’s personally inconvenient to them, and ageism is no exception.) The major excuse I have to justify my trucking in it is this - while he may well be at least partially senile, McCain chooses to be ‘old’ in the way pop culture generally demands it. There’s nothing about being an advanced age that makes computers inherently unapproachable, that keeps you from stringing together a coherent sentence about foreign policy or fills you with murderous contempt for people you’ve never met.

One of my grandparents was born in ‘33 and we spent hours the last time I was up to visit discussing the role the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire had in the current state of the Middle East - and he was a special-needs education professor, not a historian. Even my grandfather on the other side - about McCain’s age and a kind of shameless racist the modern world no longer produces - is willing to engage the foreign suffering our domestic politics cause. One of my grandparents was born in the Arizona Territory and she rarely gets as irascible or verbally confused as the senior senator from Arizona.

In short, yes - dumping on McCain for no better reason than being old is unpleasant and wrong. But just as he does Whitey, he gives the elderly a bad name; he’s been rotten inside his whole life, it’s just that - like a bottle of shit left in a wine cellar - he’s grown only more purulently despicable with age. Letting him use that age - an age shared or exceeded by millions of Americans with minds and souls in far better shape than his - as an excuse to be a horrible human being is as ageist as anything. He’s been treating computers as a fad and brown people as disposable since my parents were in high school; just because he’s gotten nastier and more unusual for both with age doesn’t excuse him.