Shades of Meaning

None knows his home so well
As I the grove of Mars, and Vulcan’s cell,
Fast by the Æolian rocks!—How the Winds roar,
How ghosts are tortured on the Stygian shore,
How Jason stole the golden fleece, and how
The Centaurs fought on Othrys’ shaggy brow;
The walks of Fronto echo round and round—
The columns trembling with the eternal sound,
While high and low, as the mad fit invades,
Bellow the same trite nonsense through the shades.

— The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, and of Aulus Persius Flaccus (translated by William Gifford, 1821)

W hat, exactly, is up with Joe Biden and his shades?

He surely doesn’t wear them because his future is so bright he’s got to: At Biden’s age, the future can be seen very clearly — not because it is so bright but because it is so near.

Biden is an old man. Age is cruel to a public figure, and sunglasses are a great masker of age. Check out Ringo Starr: The man is 82 years old, but, with a little bit of judiciously applied dye, his trim build, and his sunglasses, he looks like he could still be in a touring rock band. In photos with his son, he sometimes even looks as though he were the younger man. Bono in tinted glasses is your cool English professor; Bono without sunglasses is a prison guard in the Soviet gulag. Ozzy Osbourne in shades is ready to bark at the moon; Ozzy Osbourne without shades is Caitlyn Jenner with a wicked psilocybin hangover.

Presidents want to look youthful and vigorous, whatever their age or actual state of health. Biden is not what you’d call a sprightly 79, and his trademark aviators take a few years off.

In general, you want to run hard, fast, and for as long as you can when a politician starts getting serious about sunglasses. It never ends well.

The O.G. shades-sporting dictator was, I suppose, Francisco Franco. He was pretty fashion-forward as right-wing Catholic caudillos go, rocking not only the shades but also fur coats that would have made Iceberg Slim positively chartreuse with envy. The fashion of the early 1970s was pimps and disco and Eurotrash, and it is appropriate that in that decade Franco passed on the generalissimo’s baton — and the shades — to up-and-coming dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in Chile in 1973, just before Franco’s death in 1975.

You may be surprised to learn this, but upon the death of Francisco Franco, Cuba’s shades-sporting dictator, Fidel Castro, declared three days of mourning. Castro had in him more than a bit of Franco’s extravagant style: The balmy climate of Cuba may have robbed him of the opportunity to wear furs, but he made up for it by frequently sporting two Rolexes — a GMT and a Submariner, if you’re wondering — on the same wrist at the same time. You would think that the right-wing Catholic dictator would represent everything the socialist dictator hated, but, as it turns out, thugs are pretty much thugs, and nothing as trivial as a difference in economic program was going to stop Castro from recognizing and paying tribute to a kindred vicious spirit.

Yasser Arafat played the dictator game like a pro, sporting fatigues and a keffiyeh and a billion-dollar bankroll he acquired . . . somehow. He was a Persol man, though I doubt that the Italian luxury brand would be very much inclined to emphasize the connection. (Persol, like virtually every other brand of luxury sunglasses you’ve ever heard of, is actually a property of the Milanese conglomerate Luxottica, which owns ubiquitous mall-fixture Sunglass Hut.) Mobutu Sese Seko seems to have preferred Celine and in some photos appears to be prefiguring reformed Trump sycophant Anthony Scaramucci by wearing women’s sunglasses. (Celine, yes; Céline, no — Mobutu wasn’t about to wait around for death on the installment plan.) Moammar Qaddafi, who preferred his sunglasses bespoke, was — seriously! — rumored to be planning to launch his own designer-eyewear line before his death in 2011. That is precisely the kind of overpromise/underdeliver tomfoolery you’d expect from a man who ruled as a dictator for decades but never managed to rise above the rank of colonel.

Joseph Kabila, the stylish Congolese politician, started wearing a lot of fancy sunglasses toward the end of his term as president, and, when he put off the vote to replace him, it looked like he planned to stay on. Instead, he resolved to give up the presidency and grew a beard — not an Al Gore–style failure beard but a devious-plan-to-hold-onto-power beard — covering up part of his face while also trying to cover up the fact that he’d rigged the vote in favor of his second choice of successor. (Politics gets pretty complicated in the Democratic Republic of Congo.)

When Kim Jong-un started wearing sunglasses at public events a few years back, it made headlines. But it’s family tradition: His father was a Ray-Ban die-hard. Expatriate artist Sunmu has painted Kim Jong-un’s portrait with starving North Koreans reflected in those opaque shades.

But President Biden is no Kim Jong-un, nor a Colonel Gaddafi, nor even a generalissimo of the most minor kind, and the sunglasses he wears do not call to mind any of those figures. They do, unfortunately, call to mind cult leader Jim Jones. And if the incident at Jonestown seems like ancient history to you, consider that Joe Biden already was well into his Senate career when they started passing around the Kool-Aid in Guyana.

Fifty years is a long time to go on failing to see the light.