Consider CultureWatch's Four Gift Book Suggestions: Murder, Assassination, Racial Hatred and Ageism

Gullette, a leader in the field of ageing studies, contends that society must recognize the pervasiveness of ageism before its citizens are able to fight it. In her earlier work, Aged by Culture, she wrote that men and women are “being insidiously aged” by the culture in which we live. In Agewise, she asks why the degradation of midlife changes and subsequent life phases are not “the biggest stor[ies] of our time?” She labels it “the decline narrative,” and offers a manifesto of resistance — a call to arms.

Ageism, according to Gullette, is “a learned set of beliefs and practices that prevent us from functioning in an optimal way in relation to aging, our own bodies, and people more than ten years older than we are.” She asks for re-education of the “alien” mindset. Many institutions of our culture are examined by Gullette but none is more scathingly damned than the media. Talk, print, and Twitter all conspire to tell stories about our dread of aging, our Botox and spa-fueled battle against wrinkles and flab or, from the other side, society’s anger at “greedy geezers.” Gullette charts the appearance of that moniker in a 1988 New Republic article whose author argued that sympathy for “the aging” was “understandable if increasingly misdirected given “a massive entitlements system for the “unproductive.”

Gullette signals out Jane Gross who, in a New York Times column “The New Old Age,” wrote that baby boomers felt “overwhelmed” about the burden of caring for their dependent, over-eighty parents. She also points angrily to a New York Times article entitled “How to Save Medicare? Die Sooner.” The mantra is increasingly clear and “mean-spirited” — do us a favor and die. Hurricane Katrina ought to have been a “teachable moment,” shocking the people of the United States out of its disregard of age. But the end of indifference to ageism has not occurred. Youth culture continues, relentlessly, thanks to other powerful institutions — commerce, industry, and their handmaiden, advertising. Menopause is troublesome, not liberating: buy estrogen. Aging is pathologized.

Ageism, like other forms of prejudice, can be attacked and defeated. Ideas of resistance and reeducation thread through Gullette’s book. In the last chapters, however, she specifically undertakes a “progress narrative.” It is possible, she argues, to affirm the value of aging. Certainly “decline is real enough,” but progress can and should become “more available as a reality.” Government should be enjoined to create the social and legal bases that defeat vulnerability, whether it means daycare, protection of workplace job seniority, or health care. Advertisers should be reinforced when they present positive age narratives.

Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America examines a broad range of topics related to ageism. This is the book’s strength but also, for me, a source of frustration as Agewise reads like a set of connected essays. This permits exposure to numerous subjects whose treatment, however, is only slightly deeper than superficial. That said, as an introduction to provocative personal and public issues, readers cannot go wrong spending a few hours with Gullette’s book.

Agewise is an excellent candidate for a reading group selection. So, too, is Assisted Dying: An Ethnographic Murder Mystery on Florida’s Gold Coast. An entirely different genre from Gullette’s work of non-fiction, Nanda and Gregg’s novel nevertheless poses parallel questions about cultural values and aging. (Disclosure: Nanda and I wrote a textbook together).

Assisted Dying offers wit, an incisive exploration of age and class, and snappy, tight writing. The book is set in South Florida’s so-called Gold Coast. The mystery exposes readers to the realities of communities for older people, elder care, health care, dying, and death.

Nanda and Gregg tell us that South Florida’s Gold Coast is the utopian vision of nineteenth century venture capitalist Henry Flagler, who recognized the potential of the area “as America’s last frontier.” By developing its economy and infrastructure, he began the transformation of South Florida into a haven to which millions of increasingly long-lived Americans fled in order to enjoy their “well-earned golden years.” During the twentieth century they have been joined by immigrants seeking opportunity and upward mobility. And, of course, as suggested by the very name, “Gold Coast,” the area has attracted the greedy and the predatory bringing more than their share of scams and schemes. Among the schemers are “medical piranhas” swimming in the waters of elder care; you might say that the Gold Coast is their natural habitat. The Coast is, the authors suggest, a place with “a culture of its own.”

As
Assisted Dying opens, unexplained deaths are occurring among the elderly of the Gold Coast. Nanda and Gregg bring in New Yorker Julie Norman, a cultural anthropologist, and Mike, her Big Apple detective boyfriend, to figure out what is going on … and going wrong. They are a well-matched pair of sleuths: Julie, cosmopolitan and academic; Mike, sensible, supportive, and good-humored. Mike has connections in the local Florida police department; Julie has the insights of a professional trained to use ethnography to gain insights into the crime scenes.

Deaths multiply, leading Julie and Mike to find out about the trade in human organs. She and Mike also dig into their personal understandings of illness and death, learning about the considerable differences in religious beliefs and funeral rituals across cultures. They are also exposed to the various forms of elder care and the way core American values are expressed in its options and outcomes.

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Consider CultureWatch's Four Gift Book Suggestions: Murder, Assassination, Racial Hatred and Ageism

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