Out of Time (7 page)

Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World

Age and ageing may appear elusive and complicated when looked at from any personal perspective, yet across society they are monotonously orchestrated in terms of a war of the generations, placing us within uniform and competing age cohorts. In the USA, the public staging of generational conflict made it into the popular genre of reality TV with
Battle of the Ages
, aired on NBC in 2010. In the UK that same year, we saw repeated scapegoating of the older generation, now mockingly labelled the ‘Baby Boomers’, as responsible for all the woes of young people. The indictment was promulgated at government levels, with the high-profile Tory MP David Willetts publishing his emotive polemic entitled
The Pinch: How the Baby-Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and Why They Should Give It Back
.
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Historical Underpinnings

There is nothing new about the war between the generations, or the baiting of older people, though it has taken different forms through history. It is sometimes thought that in earlier times the old were treated with far more respect, affection and kindness than they are today. The self-styled cultural critic and ageist resister Margaret Morganroth Gullette, for instance, so attentive to the way in which ‘we are battered by the crosswinds of prejudice as we age’ in much of today’s world, believes that we have seen a steady erosion of the ‘cautious veneration that was once directed so unconsciously toward vulnerable old people’.
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Societies are indeed diverse in their attitudes towards and treatment of the elderly, but there are multiple reasons for this.

One key factor in the difference in attitudes to ageing can be found in the number of people who now manage to reach old age. Where there is a mass of elderly people there is less respect than in societies where there are few, especially when in the past it was more likely to be only the relatively powerful and affluent who survived into old age.
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Nevertheless, ambivalence, at best, has been the pervasive cultural sentiment surrounding old age even in traditional societies such as those that existed in Ancient Greece. The Hellenic world, with its cultural riches, philosophical scholarship and official respect for old age and the rights of seniority, provides a perfect case study of many of the enduring contradictions in attitudes towards old age, especially in the epicentre of its cultural power and influence, the Athenian city state around 500 to 300 BCE.

On the one hand, Athenian law required children to provide for their ageing parents and imposed harsh penalties on any instances of mistreatment. Owning property, alongside access
to other material goods, ensured considerable power for the small number of city elders who had managed to reach the age of sixty or seventy in Ancient Greece. Furthermore, in the philosophies of Socrates and Plato, old age was associated with wisdom. Plato himself, for instance, suggested that fifty was a good age to begin philosophy.
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That is a pleasing thought.

On the other hand, Athenian culture displayed a consistent distaste and mockery, if not outright disgust, towards what were routinely presented as the miseries and hideousness of ‘vile’ and ‘ugly’ old age. All heroism, beauty and sweetness resided in youth, and in youth alone. This is especially prominent in the work of its best-known poets and playwrights, as the surviving plays of Euripides or Aristophanes exemplify. With harsh, caustic wit, both writers showed older men and women, in different ways, as stock figures of ridicule. They depicted old men as locked in conflict with their sons, ending up beaten and derided; old women as helpless and pitiable, if not ridiculous, above all for any erotic desires they might still hold, such desire arousing immediate disgust. In Aristophanes’ play,
Ekklesiazousai
, or
Women in Power
, for instance, old women are described as ‘dirty old bags’, able to offer a man only ‘vinegar dregs and a beard and bad breath’: ‘sex with her is like sleeping with death’.
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Such cruel ribaldry meshed with the usually pitiless antics of the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology. Immortality aside, these deities were distinguished from human beings above all in the idea that they would never grow old, never experience the misery and doom of human ageing.
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If we travel through time, leaping across the centuries from the fifth century BCE to 1600 CE, the conflict between young and old continues, with England’s greatest bard famously proclaiming that ‘crabbed age and youth cannot live together’. Yet
even Shakespeare’s haunting description of old age as ‘second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything’, seems mild compared to other cruel caricatures of the old.
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Furthermore, however much old men have been lampooned for their ugliness, witless infirmities, or ageing lechery, especially when marrying much younger women, it was elderly women who aroused the most terrifying degrees of horror. Throughout world literature and across historical time down to the present, ageing women have been depicted as dangerous and destructive creatures when seen as having any power, or else as feeble and repellent objects of pity or contempt, when seen as needy and dependent.
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Even the highly esteemed sixteenth-century Dutch scholar of enlightenment and tolerance, Erasmus, in his famous essay
In Praise of Folly
, fiercely mocked older women who ‘still play the coquette’ and ‘do not hesitate to exhibit their repulsive withered breasts’. It is thought that his words might lie behind the hideously memorable Flemish portrait known as ‘The Ugly Duchess’.
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The disdainful and denigrating caricature of the elderly can in certain times and places result not just in routine cruelty, but also in overwhelming acts of brutality. It is important to notice that this has been more likely to occur in periods of economic, social and religious change and upheaval. As many will know, this was most harshly evident in the witch-hunts that lasted for three centuries in early modern Europe, especially in central Europe.

From around 1450 to 1750, it was particularly older women, usually widows living alone, who were most easily targeted as witches. Numerous studies of these witch-hunts have argued that the main targets of the accusations were women most detached from patriarchal institutions. The historian Brian
Levack sums this up: ‘The limited data we have regarding the age of witches shows a solid majority of witches were older than fifty, which in the early modern period was considered to be a much more advanced age than today.’
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His work is corroborated by Deborah Willis, again suggesting that it was usually an older woman, living alone, who was most likely to be ‘resented as an economic burden’ and seen as ‘the locus of a dangerous envy and verbal violence’.
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This meant that around three-quarters of the tens of thousands of victims who were tried, tortured and executed as witches in central Europe were older women.
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If witches have had, historically and metaphorically, an ageing female face, it is a visage that continues to haunt us today. In my youth, with Hollywood’s dream factories servicing collective fantasies in the West, the most memorable roles available for the ageing actress were women who were either threatening or pitiable, or often both at once. Perhaps most haunting of all was the chilling performance of Bette Davis in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
(1962). Here, she plays the part of a briefly successful child star, her fame long gone, now engaged in the increasingly sadistic abuse of her subsequently more successful, but now crippled sister, played by Joan Crawford. Davis’ high-pitched cackling and increasingly demented behaviour embodied the precise doubling of old woman and horror. More often, Hollywood’s baiting and punishment of the older woman focused especially on the once successful career woman, portrayed in mid-life as someone now as distressing to herself as she was alarming to others and threatening, in particular, to younger women. This was also the theme of the earlier film
Sunset Boulevard
(1950), as well as the sensationalizing 1968 movie about an older lesbian,
The Killing of Sister George
. In all these films, women who have had some professional success are seen stripped completely of any autonomy or dignity as they age.

To what extent, if at all, we have moved beyond these malicious caricatures is another of the questions to which I will return. However, given the well-documented dearth of any leading roles, let alone good ones, for women over forty in cinema, we can be fairly certain that any progress will be slow, at least in that place best known for marketing our fantasies on the cinema screen. Not for nothing do female stars decry the lack of roles for older women. Simone Signoret and Rita Hayworth were just two of the many beautiful screen goddesses excoriated relatively early in their careers for signs of ageing, when male stars retained their romantic leads despite their boozing and increasingly battered looks.
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Channelling Discontent

The Battle of the Ages, we can see, has a history, looping us back through time and bouncing us forward into the present. Two decades ago, in his now classic text,
The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America
(1992), the historian Thomas Cole warned that the extent of the federal budget deficit in the USA was creating an increasing ‘possibility of intergenerational warfare between young and old’.
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What he did not mention was the extent of the media’s complicity in inciting such warfare. His compatriot, Gullette, took up the story. She was soon compiling an extensive register of the ways in which many of the most popular media outlets were busy throughout the 1990s manufacturing a form of homogenized
generational combat. While the decade began in the midst of economic recession with the censure of the supposedly passive younger ‘generation X’ as ‘work-shy slackers and whiners’, the search for scapegoats soon switched to defending this younger generation, now lumped together as collectively anxious and discontented, against the culpabilities of ‘greedy Baby Boomers’. Media headlines targeted all those now in mid-life, whose eager aspirations when themselves young were said to have been responsible for impoverishing those who came in their wake. ‘ “Crybaby” Boomers “hate their kids” ’, opined a particularly abusive opinion piece by Walter Kim in the
New York Times
(July 1997); other media outlets quickly followed this lead, soon summarized in the
Utne Reader
.
¹⁵

Meanwhile, any deterioration in the conditions of life, whether at work or at home, were also blamed on the Boomers, who according to the academic and award-winning investigative journalist, Mark Hunter, had ‘done more than any other generation to erase the line between work and private life’.
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Hunter’s comment appeared in the mass circulation lifestyle magazine,
Modern Maturity
, with its proclaimed mission to help people over fifty to live ‘fulfilling lives’, later provoking a heated exchange between Hunter and Gullette.
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‘Boomer-bashing’ was declared the new ‘national pastime’ among twenty year olds by Suneel Ratan in
Fortune Magazine
in the mid-1990s, and also used as a source of humour and provocation by fellow journalists, such as Michael Grunwald of
Time
magazine and another popular US journalist, Bruce Farris, in the
Fresco Bee
.
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It hardly needs saying that such facile generational scapegoating lacked any accompanying economic analysis. In reality, apart from the new millionaires mainly created by what was soon to prove the disastrous fiscal speculation following the removal of
all significant banking regulation in the 1980s, the majority of Americans in the USA, of whatever age, were becoming relatively poorer and less secure. There has been rising inequality among all age groups and a relative decline in both the quality of jobs and the value of wages since the 1970s, as evident in countless economic analyses, from academic texts to routine household surveys.
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We have long been familiar with a chorus of men blaming women, and in particular feminism, for men’s deteriorating working and home lives, accompanied by routine resort to antiimmigrant sentiment, not to mention the abiding visceral racism of white Americans, all serving as conduits for discharging rage. Nowadays, however, cultural incitement of resentment of the young towards the old has become yet another repetitive feature of much of the media’s channelling of discontent away from any more useful attempt to grapple with the far more complicated analysis of the socially destructive effects of the deregulation of corporate finance and its impact on the policies of nation states.

In the UK, the surge of media attacks on the sixty-plus generation is more recent. In 2006 the contrarian journalist Brendan O’Neill was given space by the BBC to broadcast his views: ‘Baby boomers like to trumpet their generation’s achievements. But their fondness for conspicuous consumption and foreign travel has led to many a modern-day ill, from rising debt to environmental woes.’
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(O’Neill was associated with the maverick
LM Magazine –
short for
Living Marxism –
that in the 1990s leaped, with extraordinary success, clear across the centre ground from being a small intensely sectarian far-left Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, into the lap of the corporate right.) More generally, it was not until 2010,
following the global financial crisis, that the upmarket British media joined the chorus of denunciations of the Baby Boomers in any systematic way. ‘Crisis? Blame the baby-boomers, not the bankers’, was the headline in the 22 February edition of
The Times
, introducing an article by the paper’s principal economics columnist Anatole Kaletsky. Kaletsky ended his analysis of the crisis with a warning of the dangers of ‘the rapidly escalating cost of government-financed pensions and healthcare as the baby-boom generation, born from 1945 onwards, starts to retire’. The potentially costly needs of an expanding ageing population now combined with a recurring hostility to those who participated in the freedom-loving 1960s to generate a new vituperation towards the older generation: ‘The greedy demographic governing body of timid baby-boomers, far more than the fervour of bankers, is the loyal mercantile calamity right away confronting Britain.’
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