May 20, 2016
His back hurts. His memory is slipping. He
can’t cook, but then he never could. Igloo-making is no longer one of his
diversions. The wit is sharp, quick as ever, but now he’s prone to … what’s the
word? Oh, and he has Parkinson’s disease.
Michael Kinsley is aging so you don’t have to.
The editor in him, the one who held the reins at The New Republic, Harper’s and
Slate, and grasped for a few hours the chance to helm The New Yorker, would
refine that. Here’s how he puts it, in his guidance to the 74 million baby
boomers entering the years of living less dangerously:
“But when it comes to
the ultimate boomer game, competitive longevity, I’m on the sidelines doing
color commentary.” His chronic disease, which gives him many of the symptoms of
old age but which he believes is no more likely to bring him to an early death
than slipping on a bar of soap, has presented him with “an interesting
foretaste of our shared future.”
Kinsley, who coined a
new definition of a gaffe — when a politician tells the truth — and once
described 38-year-old Al Gore as “an old person’s idea of a young person,”
(today, Paul Ryan), is in public service mode, out with a slim book on aging.
“Sometimes I feel like a scout from my generation, sent out ahead to experience
in my 50s what even the healthiest boomers are going to experience in their
60s, 70s and 80s.”
Full disclosure: I
like Kinsley. I would call him a friend, even if his trademark misanthropy
prevents him from returning the sentiment. But here’s the thing: I loathe books
about baby boomers. I hated the yuppie thing. I despised the era when my
generation acted as if we were the first people ever to have kids. And I can’t
stand the Viagra-taking, booty-shaking, aging rocker
phase. I don’t doubt that boomers will “reinvent” old age, because that’s what
boomers do to every age.
But along the road to
Bernie Sanders grumpiness, can somebody slap some sense into these people?
Enter Kinsley. At age 65, his Parkinson’s has given him a premature taste of
the stumbling, the cognitive slips, the limits that will inevitably define
life’s actuarial last trimester. He can no longer drive. A woman at a dinner
party offered to cut up his meat.
When I met Kinsley in
1996, he had just moved to Seattle to start Slate, the online magazine. There
were many reasons to hate him: Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar, wunderkind
editor, talking head on CNN’s “Crossfire,” his visage on the cover of Newsweek,
under the headline: “Swimming to Seattle: Everyone Else is Moving There. Should
You?”
I gave him six months
before he left. Surely he would die outside the biosphere of Beltway
bloviation. A decade later, he was still here in Seattle. He found true love,
his wife Patty Stonesifer — who has done much good in nonprofits and
philanthropy after doing well at Microsoft. I always thought of him as a highly
evolved brain inhabiting an uncertain body, an E.T. with wit. But then he
learned to backpack in the Cascade Mountains, to snowshoe, to swim in Lake
Washington in winter, and yes, to build an igloo — all with Parkinson’s, which
was diagnosed when he was 43.
In his book, “Old Age
— A Beginner’s Guide,” he tries on altruism, suggesting that boomers’ ultimate
gift to the future would be to pay off the national debt, and do it before the
last of that g-g-generation turns 65, in 2029.
Nice try. Never going
to happen. Kinsley’s contribution to the wave of new books, shows and miracle
antidotes to aging is his approach. Where others would groan, wince, cry or
whine, Kinsley is looking for the joke. So, after undergoing nine hours of deep
brain surgery, he thought of what he could say
to assure his friends he had not lost any of his analytical skills.
“Well, of course,” he
said, post-op. “When you cut taxes, government revenues go up. Why couldn’t I
see that before?”
Easy for him to say. No, actually, it’s
not. His Parkinson’s meds allow him to seem relatively symptom-free for hours,
but then he starts to stiffen, like the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz,” in need
of oil. And Kinsley admits to some loss of his mental acuity in recent years.
He notes that 28 million boomers are
expected to develop Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia — nothing to laugh at. “Dementia
seems like an especially humiliating last stop on the road of life,” Kinsley
writes. “There’s no way to do it in style or in dignity.”
But perhaps there’s a way to find some
grace notes through humor. I saw Kinsley this week, before a packed house at
Seattle’s Town Hall. He was in typical form. Asked at the end of the evening
what his audience should “take away” from the distilled wisdom of his book, he
paused, giving that owlish, quizzical look of his and said, “Several copies.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/opinion/aging-in-the-key-of-humor.html?_r=0
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