You Are Old, Father William
firstthings.com
firstthings.com
In any case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William
"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."
"You are old," said the youth, "As I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
Pray, what is the reason of that?"
"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling a box—
Allow me to sell you a couple?"
"You are old," said the youth, "And your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."
"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
What made you so awfully clever?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"
Because most people who want to write will have done so before 70, and a large chunk of them just want to watch TV (or rather, have nothing better to do in their minds, which is sad).
> Why do so few of the expensive, risible fashion ads in the New York Times Magazine and its equivalent at the Wall Street Journal feature oldsters?
I don’t think this is true for many luxury items? Watches, alcohol, cars, and boner pills all associate with ads of refined older men in my mind. Especially in print media.
Still doesn't answer the question. Just means those that do want to write over 70 are fewer (and they could be writing for decades before too, it's not about writing only after 70, but about becoming a new published writer after 70, or just a new celebrated book writer after 70 -even if you've published other books before too). Besides it's not the "after 70" category missing, where's the "after 40/50/60" lists?
Or at least, that would be my takeaway if number one on the list were Steven King. It’s not interesting that he is still a good author. It is noteworthy that he is older than I expect. He is ~72 btw.
As for fashion ads, we may be creatures of habit, not to say biased against the "risible" ads.
> Everyone who writes about aging “Boomers”—how “they” have ruined “our” society, and so on, ad nauseum—should be required to memorize Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William” (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and recite it aloud before an audience of men and women age seventy or older.
There are proper arguments to show how the Boomers were a significant part of dismantling many of the governmental programs and social structures that they themselves benefited from, and then blamed the subsequent generations (GenX, Millennial) for struggling. The key pieces are the comparative cost of housing and education compared to the aforementioned generations, the removal of pensions, and the devolution of health care. While these were set into motion by the generation before them (Reagan, Bush), they were unwilling to put political pressure to change its course.
None of this has to do with dismissing the life experience of the Boomer generation, but rather the simple acknowledgement that their political and social policies didn't work, and it's time to fix that.
We were born before the invention (1959-1960) of pharma birth control, and were teenagers when it took hold in society. It was the biggest change in human history (I'm not exaggerating). We, generalizing, did an awful job of starting to sort out the moral / ethical / social changes birth control brought.
We lived through the Summer of Love (see the previous paragraph) and some of us didn't get it. To misquote Spiderman, "with great freedom comes great responsibility." Some of us missed that. Hence DJT 45, hence the abuses of celibate clergy, among other notorious members of my generation.
And, fossil carbon release.
We did make the US stop the Vietnam war. That was good.
We made the US get rid of the military draft. That, in hindsight, was bad. Politicians think twice if they have to raise taxes and conscript young women and men before they go to war.
What's going for us? What do we have to offer?
We think in decades, not years.
We made it to the moon.
We invented the internet.
We helped cure the world of sanctimonious horsest like the poem Lewis Carroll parodied: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_...
Maybe it's self-delusion, but I hope we're not finished doing some good.
I'm sorry but considering the US hasn't existed for very long, and income taxes in the US haven't existed for very long, I don't see what your point is other than to knock down something you dislike.
The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism.
I'm not going to blame Boomers for the current situation because there are so many assumptions I have to make about the current situation for such blame to be effective. I think one has already been thrown around in this thread, something about education costs, where such complaints make big assumptions about the value of education in the status quo or what the entire point of an education is (e.g. being a productive part of the workforce vs. having critical thinking skills vs. knowing the value of learning about being able to discipline yourself into doing it when you want).
The worst thing is, blaming Boomers for our problems makes the assumption that there is something uniquely special about that generation that allowed them to set society on the wrong path, as if every generation before and after has also been uniquely special in not having that ability.
So I find your comment particularly underhanded in taking this hatred for Boomers and lobbing some pet-dislike you have for a certain ideology. "Oh yeah, us Boomers suck, we ruined everything especially because we don't like taxes," as if Boomers have a monolithic opinion about taxation or anything for that matter.
PS: You may have stopped the Vietnam war, but what do you think paid for it? (Answer: Taxes.)
While true, there seems to me to be some merit to the argument that there was a subtle change in the nature of such discourse during this period and (mainly) among a large section of the members of this generation (that many members of subsequent generations have accepted as de facto and default) and that is integration of taxation/government with market-based thinking, that is, that paying taxes is something the individual does to get an individual return, in the same way a person walks in McDonalds and expects to put money on the counter and get their happy meal and not, instead, that the homeless guy in the corner gets a happy meal.
As far as I know, the Federal income tax (in the US) started out as a way to finance war. So it would be more like going into McDonald's and paying to have someone stand there with a gun and threaten/kill anyone who tried to take your (or anyone else's) Big Mac. There was no homeless, hungry guy in the corner suffering if not for the forced generosity of a third party. My only point here is to say that, in an abstract way, the current income tax was formed on an idea of protection as a transaction, not on being generous towards down-on-their-luck people. I believe that context is important when we talk about generations later rejecting taxation because they don't see what's in it for them.
(But I'll also admit / point out that, in the context of when the current Federal income tax started, young men were being drafted to fight in WWI, which I think is way worse than any tax in terms of the individual vs. collective. As in, there's no clearer way to say that the state owns you than it being able to send you to war potentially against your will.)
"Late Leading-Edge Boomer" here, with a nit: We weren't the ones who got humankind to the moon in 1969-72. The Baby Boom is considered to have started in 1946. All three astronauts who flew the first lunar-landing mission (Apollo 11, in July 1969) were born in 1930. Flight director Gene Kranz: 1924. Guidance officer Steve Bales, who could have aborted the landing after a computer alarm: 1942. Junior computer specialist Jack Garman, who urged disregarding the alarm and continuing the landing: 1944.
(Source: Wikipedia articles.)
The politicians and business leaders of that generation may have caused lots of problems, but I don't think it's fair to blame the average "oldster" for those things. There's value to having a range of perspectives and it's very alien, and probably detrimental, the way our culture has seemingly just swept them out of sight like spectral reflections of our own mortality.
I don't see how the preference of older people for the suburbs has anything to do with our culture overvaluing youth.
As for the politicians and business leaders, they are older. The average age of CEOs is 50. In Congress, it's almost 60 - that's 20 years older than the people they represent. Young people may have the attention, but Boomers (and some X'ers) have the Power.
So people are still excited about, say, the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead (not that the living members themselves are boomers, maybe a touch old for that description), but the promotional images might be from 1978, not even 1995, or today. So the echoes of this energetic youth culture remain youthful as the people themselves age.
> In the last several years, two writer friends of mine have told me the same story: Their (very savvy) editors advised them to change the age of the protagonists in their novels-in-progress, making them considerably younger; otherwise, their books wouldn’t be publishable.
The "golden years" is the first time in our lives where we are free to be ourselves. We no longer have to bend to the ideas of others to get funding. If you are a writer then self publish. You no longer has to take ideas from marketing departments who dream up book ideas. You can say what you want to say.
Original: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_...
Parody: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William (current version of article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=You_Are_Old,_Fath...)
A quote I scoured for the article then (the line about the “idiot questioner”) is also in this article. The author of this article may have come across this quote independently rather than via Wikipedia, but this sort of thing has happened often enough that I've come to realize writing for Wikipedia has surprisingly large impact.
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As an aside, the article is about changing perceptions of old age: from the “sententious piety about old age” current at the time of Southey/Carroll, to their “invisibility” today. (A general paucity of works featuring old people at their centre, with a few examples collected in this article: I'd add films too, like Pixar's Up, or these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_old_age.) It ends with “I would like to see more of this salutary belligerence among my fellow oldsters.” In short, it's about old age in general, and today's “cult of youth”.
But many comments here so far are about taxes, the economy, “Boomers”, social security,… none of which is touched on by the article at all, beyond the first clause of the first sentence. I wonder whether there may be a cultural component here; is it the case that people who don't grow up with experiences of highly valuable conversations with them in childhood and youth, are inclined to think of them primarily in economic terms? Or is it that any discussion of “old people” in general is impossible without reference to the entire generation of “old people” one happens to know?
Anyway, here's another “old writer” the article didn't mention: a wonderful interview with P. G. Wodehouse at 91 (and a half): https://web.archive.org/web/20150814120619/http://www.thepar...
And it’s quite all right for me to respect the elderly in general while acknowledging the baby boomers didn’t heed environmental collapse, stole all they money from future generations, raised their cost of living/education while keeping their wages stagnant, and concentrated wealth while dismantling unions.
You don’t get to cry “respect the elderly!” as a response to say, getting a parking ticket. It’s not a valid response to criticism of your generation either.
Interestingly, Wikipedia has an in-depth article on the usage of this phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule. It's stated that this phrase is derived from a legal principle of republican Rome: exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis ("the exception confirms the rule in cases not excepted").
So, in this sense, the fact that books with old protagonists are rarely bestsellers proves the "rule" that the author stated.
Yes. And the fact this meaning is meaningless, or at least a very dishonest tactic, doesn't really change the fact it's now the most common meaning.
Pragmatically, the lesson here is that "the exception that proves the rule" is a bad phrase to use unless you're deliberately trying to confuse or derail the discussion.
Two other idiomatic expressions that have similar confused usage are "proof is in the pudding" and "begs the question" (https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246664/why-can-i...)
I mean the current common meaning is meaningless; to wit: "Exceptions to the rule I just propounded make the rule stronger, as opposed to disproving it."
> Two other idiomatic expressions that have similar confused usage are "proof is in the pudding" and "begs the question"
The first is misquoted ("The proof of the pudding is in the eating" is immediately obvious) and the second is a horrible translation which would have gotten a failing grade in any school which taught Latin and which should be forgotten.
I think, perhaps, we could call a truce on the generational warfare.
You don’t know that the author painted your generation with an overly broad and negative brush. And even if he had done so, it wouldn’t render the article “pointless”.
As is the article. In my opinion, of course. That was sort of my point.
I've no doubt that some "young" people disrespect "old" people simply because they are "old." By the same token, some "old" people disrespect "young" people simply because they are "young." This is nuts. Respect people who are worthy of respect regardless of age (conversely, sadly, many people don't do much worthy of respect, again regardless of age). Back to my original comment: can we just stop with this kind of generational pot shots?
Nowhere does the author say that. Your whole comment is a strawman.
How about improving it instead of dismantling it?
Social Security has always been eminently fixable by extremely modest changes in taxation. It is folks with attitudes like the one expressed above who have consistently put off making those changes.