The Last Word

...getting on though still kicking...

...not so long as one can achieve the same result verbally...

...They share responsibility for the verbal indignities visited upon them because they passively and unprotestingly permit them to be inflicted...

...The most favored among them may be oldish, which is cuter than its poor relation, elderly...

...For just as no one is ever old, so no one ever dies...

...By such mindless diversions they are systematically deprived of whatever dignity and pride nature may have left them, and the only abuse that is meticulously spared them is any reference to their agedness...

...When they become burdensome to their families or to society, they are likely to be carted off to nursing homes, rest homes, retirement homes—never to old people's homes, needless to say...

...As if the temporary smile could keep the final grin at bay...

...Yet in this land of unlimited possibility, one need not rely on the techno-symbolic process of recycling to triumph over death...

...DAVID SUTER in these minimum-security jails to various indignities and abuses by undertrained and underpaid attendants...

...No way...

...And wouldn't such disavowals mean that this country itself had ceased to be young and new and had become mature...

...People do depart, but they do it by passing away or passing on, leaving us behind, going to sleep, meeting their maker, going to their last (or eternal) reward, joining the majority (not necessarily moral but certainly silent...

...They are octogenarians at ninety-six because we don't know how to handle the nineties in Latin...

...While Europe never went to the oriental extreme of venerating old age per se, it has traditionally displayed pride in old things—old houses, old churches, old towns, old universities, old books, old paintings, old wines, old violins...

...Wouldn't we have to betray the American heritage, the American dream, the American rags-to-riches myth, the American bigger-'n'-better idea...

...In the land of the spree and the home of the crave, obsolescence is built into everything we manufacture, so that goods will be cheaper to discard and replace than to repair and retain...

...All too often, indeed, they are active co-conspirators in the general societal scheme of self-delusion...

...Even in a time of cruel economic exploitation, they, too, seem to adhere to the national creed, Keep Smiling, which is the American way of baring one's teeth (or dentures) against dying...

...But how could we, in such close encounters of the first kind, maintain our patriotic duty of being optimists, of being positive thinkers (or non-thinkers...

...The evasions we employ in our references to old age expose us, revealing our fears, our hypocrisy, our utilitarian and mechanistic outlook on life...

...But the clients of such establishments are obviously not just run-of-the-mill elderly or senior citizens...

...I don't know whether recycling is an American invention, but it ought to be...

...Closer to the surface, it is bound up with our economic order, and therefore with our philosophical perspective...

...Since politeness and euphoric optimism are among our national virtues, it stands to reason that we would want to avoid offending our aged by calling them old and thus implying they are useless, worthless, fit only to be put out to pasture...

...Not in God's country, they're not...

...Obsolescence is what keeps business in business, and in the process it encourages us to associate oldness with outwornness and malfunction—even where people are concerned...

...are past their prime though not over the hill...

...The German writer Walter Benjamin referred to "the eternal return of the new," a phrase that seems to be a particularly apt characterization of life in the United States...

...Seldom is any notice taken of what they once may have been or may have done...

...There is no sadder sight," Samuel Clemens wrote in his diary, "than a young pessimist, except an old optimist...

...There are, accordingly, no old people in America...

...In a society that treats youthful and useful as more than mere phonetic kins but almost as synonyms, we should not be surprised that old has been stricken from the common vocabulary...

...Young soldiers, on the other hand, are more likely to give their lives...

...Other civilizations have a different slant on the matter...

...They can choose among sunset villas and leisure lodges and sundry havens for the haves which resemble well-run and even luxurious hotels or apartments, sometimes even offering such costly commodities as quiet and privacy and a modicum of freedom, not to mention medical attention and respectful treatment...

...if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little...

...But whatever they are, what they are not is old...

...The new world, unable to match these, has understandably taken the opposite tack, extolling youth and newness...

...To nobody's surprise, well-heeled oldsters have it considerably better...

...This festival of euphemisms has its deepest roots in our fear of death...

...By that standard, most of our aging oldsters and elderly elders know too little...

...they are routinely called by their first names and reprimanded as if they were children...

...no spring chickens though not looking it...

...It is all so very simple...

...Having committed the crime of attaining longevity without achieving affluence, they may be subjected Felix Pollak, who admits to being old, is a poet and the retired curator of rare books at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library...

...We're taught to stress the positive and shun the negative, even if we have to falsify reality in the process...

...And our most serious humorist also wrote, "The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much...

...They have "parties" arranged for them, at which occasions silly hats are put on their white or bald heads and they are made to sit in a circle and clap their hands to ancient kindergarten songs...

...not as young as they used to be but then who is...

...Instead, they are elderly ox senior citizens or retired folks or members of a Golden Age Club, which a senior noncitizen aunt of mine used to call, in an inspired malapropism, the Golden Club Age...

...Those, at any rate, are the conditions that prevail in most shelters for the impecunious...

...If we were to call things by their real names and do away with all our euphemisms, circumventions, and circumlocutions, however transparent, we would inevitably face things head-on as they are...

...they are mature or advanced in years or, at worst, older, which is still younger than old...

...If they are old soldiers, they fade away...