Welcome To The Assisted Living Facility That Comes With Nuclear Weapons.

(This article was inspired by John Stewart’s recent ‘rant’ on the age of government officials)

This past week brought strange tidings from the U.S. Senate.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died suddenly, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been hospitalised for an undisclosed illness. Undisclosed enough that Trump's favourite oracle, Laura Loomer, has already declared him clinically dead online, which may be the first accurate thing she's ever said.

But here’s a detail that slid past most of us: half a dozen sitting members of Congress have died in office this term alone. Six sitting members have shuffled to meet the choir invisible!

 Now, if this happened at a mid-sized insurance company, squads of health and safety personnel would descend en masse to seal off the building and test the carpets for asbestos. Instead, on Capitol Hill nobody blinks, because the real hazard isn't in the walls or the carpets. It's the same thing coming for every last one of us: time.

So what, exactly, is picking these men and women of high office off? The work they do cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered dangerous. It's not as if they're down in a mineshaft, or wiring a chemical plant, or handling anything more flammable than a hot mic and a bad toupee. No, the culprit is something every last member of the human race eventually has to deal with, no exceptions: old age.

As it turns out, the most dangerous workplace hazard on Capitol Hill right now isn't asbestos or gridlock.

It's a pulse.

So, armed with these facts, I went digging.

Lindsey Graham, a child aged just 71, was replaced in no time flat in a small piece of political theatre. South Carolina's governor, 79 himself and moving at a pace best described as "unhurried," floated a suitable 78-year-old replacement.

However, his plans were quickly thwarted when the chap in the White House stepped in and installed Graham's sister instead: aged 66, with not a shred of political experience, presumably chosen because 66 now reads as youthful and her ignorance of all things political means she will be extremely pliable when voting on matters of state.

I couldn’t resist a look at C-SPAN, the government’s internal broadcast system, which televises most debates and hearings. A Senate committee is deciding whether Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal lawyer, should lead the Justice Department. (scary!) This incredibly weighty decision rests on the shoulders of 92-year-old Chuck Grassley and 81-year-old Dick Durbin, a duo whose combined age could plausibly qualify them for a group rate on a Danube river cruise.

We all have to agree that Capitol Hill is overrun by a horde of geriatrics going about their business when, in theory, one would have thought by now they would be out playing croquet or engaging in a spirited game of Mah Jongg. I guess you have to admire their collective work ethic.

It isn't a shortage of political will they lack so much as the feeling that many of them are confused about why they are there at all. For instance, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who is reportedly in the early stages of dementia. Her office, naturally, disputes the diagnosis, even though an intrepid TV crew filmed her being transported to the facility in question. These days, news outlets seem to be getting our medical news from district police offices.

 Another sufferer, Kay Granger, spent several months in a care facility while, on paper, she still represents her constituency in Texas. This puts a whole new slant on the concept of working remotely.

Another spry member, Dwight Evans, 78, had a severe stroke, confining him to the sidelines for God only knows how long. Bernie Sanders, a snip of a lad at 83, recently had a heart attack but, by all accounts, was soon back on his feet, out and about yelling about billionaires within the week, which says something about his constitution or about the restorative power of geriatric youth.’

Anyone who's sat through a Sunday visit with an ageing relative knows the plot: tea gets poured, and grandpa stands and wanders off to relieve himself in the hall closet, mistaking it, with total conviction, for the bathroom.

Now multiply that scene by 535, add subpoena power, and viola, you have the U.S. Congress, a body that just recorded its least productive session since 1954, which is either a coincidence or the most honest legislative achievement in over seventy years.

The upshot of all this is that America is governed by supposedly well-meaning folk, well past the retirement age they've declined to extend to anyone else, on the theory that everyone else should keep working because there's not much pension funds left.

To be fair, these ageing souls have to navigate a world moving at the speed of light while they shuffle through the halls of power like somnambulating snails

Let’s be honest, the country is ruled by barnacles: venerable, load-bearing, and immovable, clinging to the hull of a whale aptly named Big Government, which somehow manages to swim through troubled waters even though barnacles do not have the ability to steer.

 For instance, 92-year-old John Carter, co-chair of the House Army Caucus, was delivering a speech on the urgent need to modernise America's defence systems. Pretty serious stuff, one would have thought. Listening to him for over five minutes, I understood not a single word he mumbled. At one point I genuinely thought he'd switched to Vietnamese or Dutch, possibly by accident, or possibly out of some deep institutional memory the rest of us don't have clearance for.

I could keep going: the hip replacements, the incontinence appointments, the recliners on order that come with the little motor that lifts you upright to vote, but I think by now you get the picture.

Overseeing this entire assisted-living facility with access to a nuclear football is the geriatric-in-chief himself, the octogenarian Donald J. Trump.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Paul v Walters is an author of several novels who lives on the island of Bali. His latest offering, RITUAL, was recently launched at the International Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.