Lately, I've been seeing a lot of commercials, editorials, and other mass media effluvia trumpeting the virtues of growing old. "It's a great time to be 50!" they're shouting. This new "up-with-the-aged" panegyric agenda is the latest ploy by the baby boomers to maintain their stranglehold on American culture and, therefore, the world's economy.

Middle-aged has-been celebrities are tripping over each other to get on Entertainment Tonight to insist that they feel sexier, more vibrant and alive now that they're 50 than they ever did when they were 20…and, incidentally, to sell their new workout tape/frozen vegetarian dinner/airbrushed nude layout in Playboy. I have only one response to this: bullshit! It is impossible for anyone to be sexier or more creative or more physically active at age fifty than at age twenty. It's simply a law of science, like gravity or photosynthesis. Call it oldfartocology.

For thirty years now, we've had the economic and personal agendas of the baby boomer generation stuffed down our collective throat. This age bracket has been a bulge in history's pants. As a tremendous a population burst, it gave them the numbers to shanghai the currency of future political and social debate. Look at the last American election. The issues that were constantly put forth by Al Gore and G.W. Bush were Social Security, Medicare and healthcare4. After all, now that the Height-Ashbury crowd is all grown up we must be sure that they have some extra cash with which to pay their maids5.

Say nothing of the fact that over 70 million American youth live in poverty and that a decent college education has exceeded 30 thousand dollars a year. After all, they've already gone to college (courtesy of now extinct foundations and grants). The baby boomers wouldn't give the youth a trapped fart from their colostomy bags.

Our last President is a fine example of the boomer affliction. A product of the sixties, young people put their faith in Slick Willy because he had a background they had been programmed to trust: he dodged the draft, he smoked pot and he was born after World War II. However, Bill Clinton, like many of his contemporaries, was bought and sold and in the end he used his influence to pardon bandits and drug dealers in exchange for furniture! Now out of public office he's tried to get the taxpayers to put him up in a $700,000 office!

Beyond the political horizon, the boomers have also hijacked the nation's cultural dialectic. Watch them shamelessly resurrect the Eagles for the Night of the Singing Dead concert on MTV Unplugged instead of passing the mic to deserving, younger successors like Jane Jensen and the Dolls. How many more reunion tours must we endure6? Why won't Rod Stewart, Elton John and Eric Clapton go away? Every time I see Mick Jagger shaking his crusty prostate to songs written 35 years ago I want to punch myself in the scrotum! Rod Stewart's 80th birthday album is getting more attention than a boy scout in Michael Jackson's house! What's worse is that there are young people in the audience who don't even realize that they are being sucked into an egocentric festival dedicated to someone else's nostalgia!