A New Series on Ageism: Why Do We Blame People For the One Thing We All Do?
Introduction: Why Ageism Is Not Acceptable
In the fall of 1960, the ownership of the New York Yankees had decided that they were going to make a change in management. They had made this decision despite the fact that summer he had led the team to the American League pennant, the tenth that they had won in the twelve years he had managed to the team.
Casey Stengel did not want to go but the front office did not want to lose the services of Ralph Houk, their best minor league manager. Unfortunately because Stengel had just turned 70, the front office wanted to make it seem like he had decided retire. The sportswriters who loved Stengel had signed a petition asking him not to go. Privately Stengel hoped that if he could lead the Yankees to one more World Championship, there would be too much public uproar and he could keep his job. That dream ended in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 when Bill Mazerowski hit a home run to give the Pittsburgh Pirates a 10–9 victory and the series four games to three.
Two days later, owner Del Topping conducted a press conference. In it he said that because of Stengel’s advanced age, they were letting him go. Stengel was already upset and was even more angry that he’d been given a prepared speech to read. After he finished reading it, a reporter asked him outright: “Casey, tell us the truth. Were you fired?” “You’re goddamn right I was,” he immediately responded. In the midst of this conference Stengel uttered what for any other man would have been the most historic line he ever said: “I’ll never make the mistake of being 70 again.”
The press was no doubt already prepared to be on Stengel’s side; when Topping gave his reasoning, they were infuriated. A New York writer threw the argument back in Topping’s face: “(Oliver Wendell) Holmes could still outthink the youngsters at age 90, and Robert Frost is more of a pet than most bearded young men in reciting in cafes. This isn’t a job where Casey has to go out and hit a ball or pitch it or outrun it.”
I will reveal how things turned out for Stengel at the end of this article, but one of the things that strikes me about the most in hindsight is that this may have been the greatest expression of outrage in history when an old person was forced out of their job for someone younger.
In the next year we’re going to spend a lot of time hearing about whether age is a disqualifier for the highest office in the land. I will probably end up writing about this particular issue at some point, but this is not what this article, or indeed this series, will be about.
So much discussion and writing in our discourse today is built upon the idea of how so much of our society is broken because of systemic prejudice. Identity politics is built on this foundation; that the problems with society have to do with racism, sexism, hatred of the LGBTQ+ community, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, red states versus blue states, Democrat versus Republican — I honestly could keep going but I haven’t the heart.
But somehow during this period there seems to be one particular form of prejudice that is not merely acceptable in our society but no one blinks at it when we see it. Hell, it’s a subject for mockery, lampooning, part of the vernacular. And what’s particularly ironic is, compared to almost of the other prejudices I’ve listed this one, as far as I know, is relatively new. I’m talking about ageism of course.
Now before this series gets well and truly started some full disclosure on my part because it may have something to do with my bias on the matter. For most of my childhood and well into adulthood, I could not get along with people my own age or even a few years older. I had almost no friends growing up and it was not until I was well into my twenties that I finally began to build a circle of friends that were closer to my own age.
I had a much easier time getting along with people were significantly older than me. I don’t just mean teachers, although I tended to get along better with them than most of my fellow students; I mean my parent’s friends as well as many of their older friends. Even now, I still find it a bit easier to talk to a person fifteen to twenty years older than me than someone my own age.
This experience caused me to follow trends that most people my own ages would not have at the time. I spent a lot of my youth renting films from the 1930s and 1940s, watching comedies and dramas from the 1950s and 1960s (Nick at Nite was one of my favorite channels back then) and even listening to recordings of old radio shows. I listened to more classical music and Broadway than your average eight year old did. I very quickly became a devotee of American history and history in general, including that of film and baseball. And I read a lot of books that would have been considered classics when I was nine or ten.
Perhaps for that reason I’ve always had more of a sympathy for so many of the difficulties that older people have and more empathy for the kind of world they live in. And that may be the reason that when so many articles written online are inclined to blame the past for the problems of today I consider this magical thinking.
I know that is the nature of our history that the current generation will always clash with the one just past. It is the nature of our society and progress. But like so many of the problems that our society faces today, the last twenty years have made it exponentially worse. And unlike all of the other problems involving bias which I can sympathize with, the decision to blame not just the previous generation but basically everybody who is older than a certain age is not only out of touch with today’s society but is actively incapable of solving the problems of the world today not only strikes me as bigoted but ludicrous.
I am inclined, maybe more than most people, to think a lot of the problems today are because of the disconnect of millennials and Gen Z with not only the previous generations but all that came before them. The idea that a twenty-five year old social influencer has a clearer idea what the right decision to make in the Middle East more than a seventy-five year old career diplomat whose spent their entire life studying foreign policy is ludicrous. Yet there is now an entire generation of Americans who not only think the former is more qualified but that the latter has no idea what they were talking about. Why? Because they know how to use Tik Tok and the diplomat doesn’t?
I have often thought that the ever sweeping tide of progress and the way that technology is changing every thirty seconds has amplified the disconnect between generations. It’s certainly made it far easier to get rid of its experience people in any job they might have. We’ve been doing for decades really; getting rid of old and more experienced people in so many fields — journalism, business practices, and yes, politics, because we have decided that new is always better than old. So often the excuse we give is not far removed from the reason that the Yankees gave for pushing Stengel out: you’re too old to do your job.
The entire plot of the recently concluded Succession, in fact, was based on that very concept: that Logan Roy needed to retire for one of his children. That none of them were remotely qualified or even competent to do the job was something that fans of the show realized almost from the start. Then many of them probably saw one of their more elder workers at the office ask them how the hell did you use this new app, automatically think that they needed to retired and never bothered to think of the contradiction.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m just using Logan as a model of pushing the elderly out to sea. Logan Roy was, as we all know, the worst kind of elderly person; he was a sexist, he was a bigot, he was abusive to his children (really everybody) and he was utterly out of touch with the world around him. And I’m not going to pretend that a lot of old people aren’t just that. The problem comes when we decide that just because a person is old, they are out of touch, can not do their jobs and have nothing to teach us because they don’t move as fast as we do and they use references that we do not get. The thing is, we’ve also spent the last decade in Peak TV watching another ‘senior citizen’ repeatedly show how he could run rings around the younger generation. One of the many pleasures of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul was the incredible work of Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut, arguably the most ultra-competent character that Vince Gilligan ever created. It’s not just that he was so handy when it came to killing people, it was that all of the experience he had lived through — even before he got to New Mexico in the first place — gave him a perspective on life that was by far the most rational. How much of the bloodshed that happened in both series could have been avoided had people just listened to this old man? He might not have been able to use iTunes, but did that disqualify his opinion?
The older a person gets, the more they learn. It may take them some more time than a twenty year old to remember certain details but that’s just because they’ve lived longer. I have little doubt there are many young African-Americans and gay people who only found out about Bayard Rustin because of the film on his life and will only know anything about Shirley Chisholm because of the recent Regina King movie that’s coming out. I have little doubt that there still quite a few older African-Americans who might well have known either one of these brilliant pioneers and would be amused at these youngsters thinking that because they sit through the movie that they now know more about the Civil Rights movement and how it failed them then those people who lived and fought for the rights. They may not know how to go Netflix, but that doesn’t mean they know less about ‘the struggle’ than they do. And if they were to hear this generation bitch and moan as to how it’s ‘an Injustice’ why Rustin wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, they would roll their eyes so far back in their heads, you’d think they were dead.
As technology marches forward and advances every few minutes it seems, as there are changes in morals that lasted for decades and are now being done away with, we increasingly tend to dismiss the accomplishments of those who came before us. Worst, the previous generation now goes out of its way to actively blame them for every single problem we face today, from climate change to partisan politics to cable news. It’s worth noting most of the problems are those of the elite and the powerful, and the young agree on this. The problem seems to be because of the fact that conservative voters tend to be older then progressive ones.
That’s not a blanket truth, of course, any more than the fact that every African-American or college-educated person or LGBTQ+ person votes Democrat. But in the binary world that so many of these same groups live in and because of the fact that as people get older they seem to get more conservative (also not a blanket truth, but it doesn’t track with the world is binary) all of these groups will listen to the statements of people who have lived lifetimes longer than them, done more and struggled more, all to provide a better life for themselves and their children with the worst possible two words: “Okay, boomer.” And we’re fine with it. Why? It’s wrong to judge a person by the color of their skin, but how wrinkled it is, that’s somehow OK?
The reason we do this — the underlying one — is the fact that when we look an older person, we are looking at ourselves. We are all going to get old, we’re doing it as we speak. Eventually the difficulties that all of these people are having with technology, we’re all going to have. The movies and TV show we once loved to quote will be greeted with blank stares by people who look like us. We’re going to stumble over names, we’re going to be replaceable at our jobs, we’re going to be ‘out of touch’. The one universal truth across all people is that we are going to all going to get older. And the last thing we want to do is be reminded of that fact.
The old have a lot to teach us if we are willing to listen. Yes some of them are bigoted and do not understand the values that you or I have, but the vast majority have learned more, felt more and done more than we have in our lifetimes — at least so far, and given the march of progress, probably ever will. I learned a lot by talking with them and listening to them. I still do.
So often we mistake age for incompetency. The two are not synonyms nor do they always overlap. This occasional series will demonstrate that in more than a few fields and more often then we might think, the old cliché is true: “age ain’t nothing but a number’. And sometimes that number is more arbitrary than we think.
As for Casey Stengel, as all baseball fans know, less than a year after the Yankees fired Stengel the expansion New York Mets hired him. As any true New Yorker knows, the Mets of Stengel’s tenure — 1962–1965 — were the worst team in the history of baseball. But from the moment they were established they constantly outdrew the pennant winning Yankees. How many of them just came to the park to see ‘The Old Professor’ (as he was known even when he was in his thirties) clown around and delivering his rambling speeches for TV will never be known but as much as it must have hurt him to spend his final years managing a team that finished in tenth place every year, he still did his job and the people still loved him. But he always kept his perspective. When he turned 75 he said: “Most people my age are dead at the present time, and you can look it up.” As always, Casey got the last laugh.