"God Save The Queen, Man!"

From CTInsider:

President Joe Biden ended his keystone speech Friday at the National Safer Communities Summit at the University of Hartford with a line that has drawn confusion and criticism.

"God save the queen, man," Biden said.

The site gave the White House explanation for the line:

The comment puzzled some people because Queen Elizabeth II died last September, but White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Olivia Alair Dalton said Biden's remark was directed at someone in the audience. Dalton said Biden was unable to do a full rope line, where he usually interacts with audience members in close spaces, because he needed to leave as a storm approached.

The certainly leaves open the interpretation that Joe is completely out of touch, recognizing neither that the queen of the UK isn't sovereign over the US, but beyond that, she's deceased, and there's now a king. But I simply think it's another indication of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, "a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge." I've mentioned this in connection with Joe here frequently.

In this case with the "God save the queen" remark, Joe was cracking a joke, or at least he thought he was. This site talks about the Dunning-Kruger Effect as it relates to comedy, which was one focus of the original study:

Standup comedy is a magnet for the delusional, in part because everyone assumes they have a good sense of humor.

. . . The Dunning-Kruger effect is excruciating to behold: This guy really thinks he’s funny? But it’s also reassuring. In an industry that offers few clear paths for advancement, self-doubt is as crucial a tool for success as bravado. In comedy, anxiety and neurosis are the keys to the kingdom. If you’ve ever asked yourself if you’ve got Dunning-Kruger, you probably don’t.

One artifact of Joe's everyday speech is his frequent remark "No joke, man!" or, conversely, "I'm joking", when he's about the least funny guy there is, no matter what he says or how he means it. This is a man without reflection and without insight, from which it follows that he's without humor. This probably contributes to an impression that he suffers from a medical disorder of cognition, when it's much closer to an issue of being unable to read a room or more generally relate to his circumstances.

Nor does it help that he's the most powerful man in the world, and he inevitably traces this to his own innate ability. But let's see if we can parse out why he said, "God save the queen, man!" and thought it was a joke, when pretty much the whole world took it instead as just a strange and recondite remark. Go to the start of the YouTube excerpt above at the end of his speech:

We're the United States of America, and there's nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together. God bless you all, and may God protect our troops! We can get this done! Thank you, thank you, thank you, I mean it! Thank you!

He then diverges into an explanation of why he isn't going to go down to the audience and shake hands, when he normally would, because there's a storm or something -- and then he wraps it up,

Alright? God save the queen, man!

Putting this in context, a moment earlier, he'd just uttered what he must have understood was the most conventional politicians' bloviation, we're the United States of America, nothing we can't do, God bless, God protect our troops, thank you, I mean it! -- and he's disgusted with it. In fact, it's beneath him. His handlers are making him do this one more time, and he'd rather be back in Delaware. So he sums it all up with "God save the queen, man!" which is his private little joke about how everything he's just said is as empty as if it were said in a foreign country.

In other words, the one thing he's sure about is he's the most powerful man in the world, and he thinks all patriotic platitudes are a waste of time, and he's letting the people who really know what's up know that he understands this perfectly. (This probably extends to his private opinion of the Roman Catholic Church and its mass, for all his weekly attendance there. He's never done it for other than the most cynical reasons, and he's always been on the verge of losing patience with it as well.)

For that matter, God save the pope and God save the holy Roman emperor, if he could only figure out who that guy was. This also goes to why he always has to be led off the stage, as he was at the end of yesterday's vignette. He's the most powerful man in the world, and also the smartest, and he doesn't think he should be wasting his time remembering which way to leave the podium.

Yet again, this is not a medical condition. I think it's important that his opponents understand this. People think he's sick and feeble, when he's just stupid, which requires a different set of strategies.