[lbo-talk] aging boomers' anthem

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Wed Apr 18 10:45:11 PDT 2007



>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
><http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY>

While this is clearly a parody, there's other evidence in the media that leads me to believe that "my generation," boomers, will indeed be dragged into their graves without a shred of dignity, trying to the last to show, pathetically, how fit and how cool they are.

One example is a TV ad for Ameriprise financial planning services that features a wizened Dennis Hopper raving about boomers as the generation who "rewrote the rules" and will not be condemned to playing shuffleboard when they have the exciting alternative of, say, starting a new business at the age of 64. This is completely nuts. If I'm lucky enough to be alive at 64, I definitely don't want to be condemned to remaining trapped in the frenzied, demented, trivial pursuits of the business world; I'd far prefer to play shuffleboard, sit in an easy chair reading a good book, or just stare out the window watching nature doing its thing.

Another is a TV commercial featuring some entrepreneurial boomer with badly capped teeth and overly gelled hair boasting about his new website specially for his generation. Gesticulating wildly, this grinning simpleton informs viewers that the website's motto is "Boom! Boom! Bloom!" -- conveying all the excitement and Action! Action! Action! that elderly boomers obviously have in store for them. Standing in front of a blown-up facsimile of his site's homepage, this guy points to the site's many standard topic headings of key concern to hyperactive oldsters. Oddly, I've noticed that this guy never points to one subject heading that appears quite prominently on his homepage mockup and that, I suspect, will be one of the most frequently consulted topics for any boomer who looks at this website, i.e.: "Obits."

Carl

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