Zoomer Magazine – June-July 2023
English | 102 pages | pdf | 48.41 MB
OW OLD IS TOO OLD?
We live in an era where the traditional take on age and ability – that the former automatically lays waste to the latter – no longerholds. It’s a truth this magazine was created to amplify, and we’ve gamely gone about the business of covering late-in-life bloomers, adventuring grandfluencers, mature master athletes and supercentenarians.
And, of course, the health and technological advancements that have led to this flowering.
The idea of radical life extension is trending – see Kendall Roy, on the TV series Succession, pitching the Living+ retirement community with “personal longevity programs” that will give you “25, 30, 50 more years,” as a way to boost Waystar Royco stock. In the real world, where Silicon Valley overlords are spending billions to “solve” aging, futurist Ray Kurzweil’s predicts the singularity – where artificial intelligence will be melded with the human brain to create immortal beings – will be achievable by 2045.
Here in 2023, we will be observing another highstakes age experiment in real time with U.S. President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will be running for a second term. He’s 80, which the headlines were predictably unkind about, as they were when he ran and won in 2020, making him the oldest president in history.
That year, we ran a comprehensive feature by science journalist Carolyn Abraham investigating the aging brain in the context of the Petri dish of presidential politics, and the decision-making required if your job description includes “leader of the free world.” (The cognitive abilities of former president Donald Trump, then 73, were also examined, and, at this point, he is Biden’s likely challenger this time around, too.)
In Biden’s first term, the experience and wisdom argument has worked in his favour, as he’s racked up legislative and geopolitical wins while besting opponents in off-the-cuff verbal jousting, despite his reputation as an addled gaffe machine. But physically, he appears more halting, even a touch frail, and a photo op of him bike riding, meant to underline his vitality, went awry when he fell off. It was hardly the “get off of my plane” energy of Harrison Ford in Air Force One.
Image can be everything and, since John F. Kennedy ushered in his new frontier with the television era, youth and vigour has been the calling card of that office. When his daughter, Caroline Kennedy, put Barack Obama’s 2008 candidacy on its winning trajectory with her endorsement in a New York Times op-ed, “A President Like My Father,” she was echoing the desire for newness.
Obama went on to choose Biden as his vice-president, because he balanced out his “unknown” with the “known.”
But, when considering the alternative among the myriad problems America is mired in, maybe Biden’s old should be new again.
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