He is hardly an archetypal baby boomer. He wasn’t at Woodstock — he was too busy helping his father campaign for the Senate in Texas — and he certainly didn’t march against the Vietnam war, although exactly what he was doing at the time remains a matter of some intrigue.
While others dreamed of world peace he dreamed of running a successful oil business. (Both dreams failed miserably.) Judging from his own admissions, he was too drunk too often to have paid much attention to the cultural earthquake his generation was triggering.
On Thursday, however, United States President George Bush will undergo what will come to be the defining experience of boomers in the next few years: he turns 60. In the US the high-profile milestone — which Bill Clinton reaches in August — has prompted an outbreak of reflection on the ageing of the baby-boom generation.
It also seems to have provoked much introspection on the part of Bush himself, who rarely lets a week pass these days without mentioning his advancing years. ”I’m a bike guy, and I like to plug in music on my iPod when I’m riding along, to hopefully help me forget how old I am,” he told an audience in Minnesota in February.
”I’m getting kind of old these days,” he told Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, the next month.
In Nebraska in June he thanked the state governor for taking ”time out of your schedule to say hello to the old president. Getting older by the minute, by the way.” And on returning from a surprise trip to Baghdad three weeks ago, in response to a reporter who asked how he was doing, the president said: ”A little jet-lagged, as I’m sure you can imagine. Nearly 60.”
Bush has referred to the upcoming birthday as ”a personal crisis”. He meant the remark as a joke, and used it to lend weight to his controversial attempts to push through changes to welfare and medical care for America’s future generations of over-60s, which he says will be needed precisely because boomers are working and living longer.
But it is impossible to avoid the sense that turning 60 is a genuine personal shock for the world’s most powerful baby boomer — as it surely will be for other members of the generation who, according to the cliche, believed they would live forever.
Nor is that just a cliche. A survey by the polling company Yankelovich Partners, reported recently in Newsweek, revealed that baby boomers ”literally think they’re going to die before they get old”, said Walker Smith, the company’s president. Asked to define ”old age”, the average boomer settled upon an age that was three years after the average American had died. People aged 60 years old today have an average life expectancy of 82,3.
Many of the 78-million Americans born from 1946-64 — the technical demographic definition of the baby boom — ”fully expect that advances in healthcare and genomics are going to enable them to live past 100”, Smith said.
To capitalise on that mindset corporate America needs to stop referring to the over-60s as ”elder” or ”senior” in its advertising, according to Jim Gilmartin, who runs Coming of Age, a consultancy specialising in marketing to baby-boomers. ”Don’t be surprised to see members of these segments hop on their motorcycles for a road trip,” he tells his clients. ”Going out to dinner often, spending an evening in front of their 50-inch TV home theatre, booking a trip to the Bahamas, and driving cross-country to see friends are other activities and pleasures they’ve earned and enjoy.”
New books aimed at boomers seem to arrive on the shelves in America every day, with titles such as The Power Years: A User’s Guide to the Rest of Your Life, and My Time: Making the Most of the Bonus Decades after 50.
The president certainly prides himself on his physical fitness: after his most recent physical assessment his doctors reported that he has the resting heart-rate of a well-trained athlete. Regular exercise ”makes it easier, especially when you’re whipping people half your age — some of them trained to kill people, like Secret Service agents”, his close aide Dan Bartlett told the Associated Press.
Bush will hold birthday celebrations on Tuesday, inviting ”150 close friends and family” to dinner, before watching Washington’s Independence Day firework display. The president, it is predicted, will spend much of the evening joking about his age. – Guardian Unlimited Â