Death and the whiniest generation, part 2

Maureen Dowd had an entertaining little piece in today's New York Times bemoaning the mortality of the boomer generation:

The deaths of iconic figures and the noisy debate over assisted suicide have brought boomers face to face with their nemesis. "Suddenly," The New Republic observed, "we are all speculating about the feeding tubes in our future." Boomers want to control mortality so they're looking at living wills, and legal and medical options.

Though readable as always, not only is her take sooo four days ago, she misses a key point:

it's always helpful to keep in mind the aggregate age of the baby-boom generation when considering the "next big thing". The huge popular and consumer power of this actuarial horror (disclaimer: I'm a tail-end boomer myself having been born in 1959) is difficult to overestimate as a factor in American popular culture.

Is it any wonder that in the mid 60s and early 70s , just as the post WWII generation was hitting its late teens that the "youth movement" flourished? And later in the 70s as this same generation moved into its 20s that the non-stop partying of the disco era took shape? This was followed by the coke fueled go-getters of the 80s, which also hosted the start of the housing bubble as boomers started to get jobs and couple off.

In the 90s the typical boomer self-absorption began to become focused on their off-spring and long term investments. It was the era of soccer moms, insane dot.com investing and a continuing housing bubble.

So now, when those born in 1945 and after are now looking at their 60th birthdays, is it any wonder what the next "real big news" will be? I believe all this talk of Social Security "insolvency" coupled with the ongoing unavoidable mortality of "the greatest generation" (i.e. the boomers' parents) has suddenly focused the boomer generation on what may be their last "next big thing", that is, death.

But icons have been dying for years, and Terri Schiavo wasn't the first, or, legally, the most important case in memory (boomer memory anyway, gen-Yers can be forgiven their ignorance I suppose. But the Karen Quinlan case made its way all the way to the New Jersey Supreme court in 1976, which case provided the basis for Oregon's Death with Dignity Act.

The difference is that then the boomers were in their thirties, and death, while always interesting, was a distant thought. Now on the other hand death, their own, is an increasingly unavoidable inevitablility.

I personally consider the proposition dreadful as the always self-obsessed boomer generation begins its ultimate navel-gazing exercize. But perhaps the very inevitability of the Big Sleep will ultimately shock the boomers into action. Perhaps the nation will be forced to clarilfy its flirtatious dance with death and make some rational end-of-life decisions. Perhaps the nation will "discover" that the only way it can afford medical care for the aging boomers is by insuring medical coverage for everyone.

But then I ponder the demagogues on the religious right whose entire raison d'etre is to prey on mortal fear.

I can't predict which way the balance of death will tilt, towards rational acceptance or superstitious denial, but I believe that finally, in their last years, the baby-boom generation will have the opportunity to step from their parents' shadows. Whether they, whether we, blow this opportunity as we have so many others only time will tell.

Boomers and healthcare

Your CaliBlogger prompted a lively discussion over at Daily Kos with the x-post of Death and the whiniest generation (astute readers will note I changed the title a bit for kos, gotta keep it punchy to catch people's eyes over there). It's a great discussion and I highly recommend the article, but more importantly the many astute comments it sparked.

One of the ideas I posted later in the discussion was my hope that as the boomer generation ages it will begin to truly begin to recognize the need for fairly radical health care reform. Just to show that I'm a good day and a half of the news cycle, tomorrows New York Times will be featuring a piece by the redoubtable Paul Krugman announcing the need for health care reform and announcing it as his major focus for an impending series of articles:

Those of us who accuse the administration of inventing a Social Security crisis are often accused, in return, of do-nothingism, of refusing to face up to the nation's problems. I plead not guilty: America does face a real crisis - but it's in health care, not Social Security.

Well-informed business executives agree. A recent survey of chief financial officers at major corporations found that 65 percent regard immediate action on health care costs as "very important." Only 31 percent said the same about Social Security reform.

That Mr. Krugman is turning his very keen eye is very good news indeed. Not only is he a distinguished economist (bio here), he has also proven to be able to cut through the typical political blather and frame his points in clear and understandable terms, an ability he has amply demonstrated by taking apart brick by brick, the Republican noise machine's misrepresentation and manipilation of the Social Security debate.

And it is readily apparent the Mr. Krugman's vision is quite clear as he focuses on healthcare, a true crisis:

So what's the problem? Why not welcome medical progress, and consider its costs money well spent? There are three answers.

First, America's traditional private health insurance system, in which workers get coverage through their employers, is unraveling. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that in 2004 there were at least five million fewer jobs with health insurance than in 2001. And health care costs have become a major burden on those businesses that continue to provide insurance coverage: General Motors now spends about $1,500 on health care for every car it produces.

Second, rising Medicare spending may be a sign of progress, but it still must be paid for - and right now few politicians are willing to talk about the tax increases that will be needed if the program is to make medical advances available to all older Americans.

Finally, the U.S. health care system is wildly inefficient. Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world. (I've encountered members of the journalistic elite who flatly refuse to believe that France ranks much better on most measures of health care quality than the United States.) But it isn't true. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country - 75 percent more than Canada or France - yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.

So those are the issues that need to be addressed, others might be listed, but Mr. Krugman's next point, and why its so important for progressives to get vocally on board. The money quote:

To get effective reform, however, we'll need to shed some preconceptions - in particular, the ideologically driven belief that government is always the problem and market competition is always the solution.

The fact is that in health care, the private sector is often bloated and bureaucratic, while some government agencies - notably the Veterans Administration system - are lean and efficient. In health care, competition and personal choice can and do lead to higher costs and lower quality. The United States has the most privatized, competitive health system in the advanced world; it also has by far the highest costs, and close to the worst results. [Emphasis mine]

So that's the battle, and if progressives and the Democratic Party have the balls to take it on, it can be the defining moment of this generation of the enlightened. But it's a battle that will make the Social Security piratization skirmishes look like mere dust devils compared to the tornado the regressive will whip up against what needs be done: remove our country's healthcare from those who's over-riding goal is profit.

In that battle I believe progressives have unaccustomed allies, most notably the (non-insurance) business community which increasingly faces the choice of paying exhorbitant health insurance costs, or face increasing losses from un-insured workers absent due to health problems that go unaddressed until they reach emergency room status.

But my main hope, God help me, is that the enormous mass of the boomer generation will, as they typically do, act in their own self interest, and support rational health care solutions.

Mortality and the whiniest generation

I've found it's always helpful to keep in mind the aggregate age of the baby-boom generation when considering the "next big thing". The huge popular and consumer power of this actuarial horror (disclaimer: I'm a tail-end boomer myself having been born in 1959) is difficult to overestimate as a factor in American popular culture.

Is it any wonder that in the mid 60s and early 70s , just as the post WWII generation was hitting its late teens that the "youth movement" flourished? And later in the 70s as this same generation moved into its 20s that the non-stop partying of the disco era took shape? This was followed by the coke fueled go-getters of the 80s, which also hosted the start of the housing bubble as boomers started to get jobs and couple off.

In the 90s the typical boomer self-absorption began to become focused on their off-spring and long term investments. It was the era of soccer moms, insane dot.com investing and a continuing housing bubble.

So now, when those born in 1945 and after are now looking at their 60th birthdays, is it any wonder what the next "real big news" will be? I believe all this talk of Social Security "insolvency" coupled with the ongoing unavoidable mortality of "the greatest generation" (i.e. the boomers' parents) has suddenly focused the boomer generation on what may be their last "next big thing", that is, death.

In today's New York Times, the ever ascerbic Frank Rich makes the observation, though without making the connection (one of the interesting things about boomer self-absorption is its failure to see how many of its interests are merely a function of its anomalous size):

Fox's howler was in its way the most honest barometer of this entire cultural moment. The network was pulling out all the stops to give the audience what it craved: a fresh, heaping serving of death. Mr. Smith had a point when he later noted that "the exact time of death, I think, is not something that matters so much at this moment." Certainly not to a public clamoring for him to bring it on.

Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.

Mr. Rich goes on though to make an entirely correct point on how the culture of death is being used by the wingnut right to support its ludicrous and dangerous agenda:

Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

This agenda is synergistic with the entertainment culture of Mr. Bush's base: No one does the culture of death with more of a vengeance - literally so - than the doomsday right. The "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as Eric J. Greenberg has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a 40-title series, "Left Behind: The Kids," that warns Jewish children of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too late. Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original series' 60 million.

Unfortunately, as the boomers become increasingly obsessed with their own mortality I see little hope to combat the culture of death and its corollary of desperate psuedo-religiosity and psuedo-morality. Unless gen Xers and younger are willing to take up the fight, fully cognizant of the demographic battle they are fighting.