Crankiness in Decline, Says Old Guy

(2 of 2)
In Scotland, memoirists would be expected to lacerate their enemies and rain garbage on them, and if you raked in $18 million doing it--bingo! more power to you. A wonderful dour tribe, the Scots, and the right to groan and moan is sacred in Scotland. Here we have been duped out of it by the people who gave us aromatherapy and seaweed wraps.

Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality. And a man who turns 60 and tells you he never felt better is delusional. He has forgotten how it was when your whole being leaped and bounded, before you turned into a lumbering galoot. Nature is relentless; it programs degeneration into our DNA. Even if you're positive-thinking, hopped up on Viagra, and your face has been lifted and stapled to make you look like a feral woodchuck, nonetheless one day you'll look like something from the lost lagoon and have the sex drive of a smoked salmon. Nature doesn't care about your golden years; it's aiming for turnover.

You don't get to be old by putting on a happy face. What keeps you going is stubbornness and righteous anger: at ugly buildings, SUVs, background music, the eminence of nonentities, at cravenness and cruelty in general and the shamelessness of this government--leading the lynching of a few corporate scapegoats to distract the mob from your own sins--the naked hypocrisy of it! If you're not brave enough to have morals when you're 72% popular, what hope is there for you? Give the bastards a hard time: that's how you get to be old. But why am I telling you, bubby? Grow up and come back when you know something.