That Age Mocking Super Bowl Ad

by Sherman Yellen

Okay, maybe I’ve lost my sense of humor in my seventies but there’s one Super Bowl ad that I hated, and it’s the one that is getting the most attention.  It featured the elderly but ever game Betty White as a football player who gets tackled and trounced on in the field, only to be transformed into a youthful male player when given some magical energy by a Snicker candy bar.  The joke ad has an additional payoff when the young player is tackled again and turns into the seriously old Abe Vigoda.  

What’s the ad saying?  That it’s a young man’s worst nightmare to get old, first - God help him - as an old woman, then as a decrepit old man, both lying in the mud,  looking weak and ridiculous - only to be rescued by the magic of cheap chocolate covered candy – one that is sure to rot his teeth and his mind.    I can see the geniuses at the ad agency thinking that one up.  Gramps and Grandma tackled, roughed up and lying face down in the mud  - the decrepit duo knocked down and messed up by young football players – America’s gonna love that one.  Well, here’s an American who didn’t.   Continued...

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Murder by Mortgage: Foreclosed and Prepared to Die

by Sherman Yellen

It seems I’ve known Molly* forever, at least for the fifty six years that I have been married to my wife. My wife had met Molly in High School where they suffered the terrors of Mme Farley’s French class together. They became close friends: Molly, the fashionable but flighty odd girl, too tall, too talkative, and too needy, and my wife whose staggering beauty and self control commanded every room she entered, and whose kindness enabled her to embrace a girl whom others might have mocked and ignored. Their fellow classmate in those long ago Brooklyn days was Ruth Bader (Ginsberg) with whom my wife served on Boosters – a selective do-gooders club that the High School ran. Molly was then, as ever, not amongst the chosen.

We have lost Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the court but have kept in touch with Molly over the years except for a brief period during Molly’s early marriage to Joe, a man who verbally brutalized her, making it impossible to keep up our relationship since we would not willingly be witnesses to such abuse and knew no way to stop it. When she finally summoned up the courage to divorce Joe, or maybe it was the unfaithful Joe who walked out on Molly and her two young sons, we started seeing Molly again. Lest I diminish her charms, Molly had a gift for telling a great story in all its details, a memory that could be used as a search engine into the shared past, good looks that came with maturity, and a giggle, a generosity, and a warmth that marked her as one of nature’s good and charming people as well as an easy mark.

Yes, she talked too much, often digressing from her subject, with streams of anecdotes branching out of that river of talk, she loved too much and did so with the utmost indiscretion, spent too much on clothes for herself and meals for her friends, gave too much to charity, lent her money to needy sons, but she was Molly, a lifelong friend even as we saw in her the traces of Flaubert’s “Madam Bovary” – the romantic spendthrift who ends a suicide. In a month Molly, now in her middle seventies and in poor health will be foreclosed by the bank that holds her mortgage, leaving her with no money, no home, and nowhere to go.

Continued...

*name changed for privacy

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What Health Care Reform Means to the Middle Class (Hint: Jobs)

by Janet Ritz

President Obama, at his Wednesday press conference, talked about the job-loss impact of rising healthcare costs on the middle class. But why the middle class? This recession has hit construction workers, young people, other demographics. It's because the middle class -- and by extension, the overall economy that relies on the middle class (in this case, the middle aged middle class) -- may not be able to recover in the job market without healthcare reform.

You do the math. You reach thirty, you pay more than when you're in your twenties. You reach forty, still more. You reach fifty and, if you don't get a heart attack from a preexisting condition, you may just get one from the substantive increase in your premiums.

Health care providers argue that as people age they require more health care for which they then have to pay. That may very well be true, but in the world of unintended consequences, it also means those fifty-somethings may just be paying in other ways -- include ways that forgo their ability to pay those higher premiums at all.

What does a potential employer do who has to choose between a fifty-something who comes with higher costs for healthcare, despite being a far better qualified candidate, and a twenty or thirty something less experienced applicant who will cost them far less over time in premiums?

The president talked about the "donut hole" that exists for Medicare patients; the requirement to cover all the costs after a certain limit was reached until a far higher limit came into play. This has been a nightmare for many seniors on fixed incomes.

The middle aged may very well have a "donut hole" between their fifties and age sixty-five Medicare eligibility due to the lessening of employment opportunities that come from inflated premiums for their demographic. Continued...

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My Eyes Are on the Prize

by Sherman Yellen

The other day I sent an email to the President of Bard College, my Alma Mater, protesting an award sponsored by the college that was restricted to novelists under 39 years old. It wasn't about my feeling excluded from that competition. I'm well over 39 but I am not an older novelist shut out of a chance for some prize money and a job, nor am I a professional protester. But it seemed to me that the college had taken a misstep in its prize-giving. If they had asked me I would not have called it the Bard Fiction Prize but the Jack Benny Prize after that beloved comedian who foolishly and forever gave his age as 39.

Clinging to 39 was part of Benny's radio act, which centered on his comic vanity -- his effort to fight aging with a preposterous lie. Along with his shtick of stinginess, playing the violin badly, and wearing a toupee, middle age-denial was Benny's comic persona. Old age wasn't even considered a viable subject for humor then. People died much younger in the 1940s, and those who lived long were more often revered for their wisdom than mocked for their frailties. It was called respect and it came as a part of our human equipment. Now the elderly are often the butt of many a bad TV ad and when not mocked, they are marginalized, trivialized, and Viagravized (sorry about that one). It gets far worse; they are more often ignored. Continued...

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