smackdown for the old folks

I'm not familiar with the players in this British melodrama, but it's fairly easy to transpose the arguments to my colonial shores.

Jeremy Paxman has been accused of insulting millions of people after he branded pensioners “virtual corpses” riddled with “incontinence and idiocy”.

The former Newsnight presenter, who is 66 himself, has become embroiled in a dispute with Mature Times, a newspaper aimed at the over-50s, after he launched a scathing attack on the publication....

In a column for the Financial Times, Paxman wrote: “At the reception desk of a hotel to which I checked in this week was a pile of free copies of Mature Times, which calls itself ‘the voice of our generation’. Oh God, I thought, the cheeky bastards are including me. Back off....

“The paper is adorned with advertisements for hearing aids, recliner chairs, copper insoles, stairlifts, devices to help you in and out of the bath, and Your Life After Death, a book written by someone called ‘Joseph’ who, apparently, is dead."

And naturally, there are return salvos from the editor of Mature Times.

But the Brits (or anyway The Guardian) have the nerve to assail what in my country is largely a verboten topic -- the bullshit quotient of old age and the (social/journalistic) cotton-candy approach to it. It's like religion or sports -- somehow the poor dears cannot take it and do not deserve it either.

Tch. Tch. Oh my bad-boy element is chuckling. Is there anything so sublime, so wondrous, and so touching that it cannot have a quite annoying facet or two?