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Our culture is preoccupied with youth. Twenty years ago the
advertising slogan �Wash the gray away� might have referred to a
Monday morning laundry chore; today it refers to a prematurely gray
wife who can recapture her husband�s affection by tinting her hair.
Thirty years ago a good tooth paste cleaned the teeth; now there is
a dentifrice on the market that �gives you sex appeal.� �After
using it,� the announcer insists, �everything else is just tooth
paste.� On bill-boards, on magazine and paper-back covers, in motion
pictures, in every conceivable type of advertisement, from the radio,
from the television, from loud, insensitive recordings -- all we
see and hear stresses one issue: To be glamorous, to be attractive,
to be accepted and wanted, one must be young. Our mass-media
advertising techniques may be excessive and in bad taste, but they
cannot be blamed for our unhealthy absorption. They have not diverted
our attention, they have simply intensified it. They are promising
us what we have always wanted to hear: We can stay young! We can
become eligible for social security without acquiring facial lines
or any gray hairs. The methods may be new; the fear of aging is as
old as man himself. We have been victimized, not by the agency
men with slogans, not by the manipulators and satisfiers of public
appetites, but by our own gullibility.
Despite such flagrant assurances of rejuvenation, or perhaps
because of them, no one seems to know how to be young anymore, least
of all the young. Our teen-agers have little spontaneity and even
less imagination to entertain themselves. I feel more sorrow for
Dr. Leary�s audience, trying pathetically to reflect a modern image,
than I do for Dr. Leary, who -- after a lengthy opportunity to
examine the implications and seek the benefits of contemporary
society -- chooses to offer the remnants of our civilization on the
altar of L.S.D. and juvenility. Aging men who chase the elusive
fountain of youth are to be pitied; but the young who fail to
appreciate the sweet nectar as it seeps through their lips are to
be mourned. Like spring, youth is a natural state, heedless of
conditions set down by the receivers. The magic heyday of adult
privilege combined with youthful competence and care freeness has
no strings, either to pull it to us sooner than the normal time, or
to delay its appointed departure.
And, contrary to the blaring commercial messages, youth has its
disadvantages. Youth can be a tired, middle-aged foot trying to
squeeze into a shoe with a severely pointed toe. Youth can be an
expensive dress that Is too short for comfortable sitting. Youth
can be heavy stretch ski-pants worn on a hot July afternoon by someone
who has yet to visit a ski-slope. Youth can be a hideous abuse of
melody and a violent disregard for rhyme. In short, youth can be
ridiculous. I must agree with the person who wrote, �We are like
flies that crawl on the pure and transparent mucous-paper in which
the world like a bon-bon is wrapped.� The bon-bon world with which
we are obsessed is an artificial, unobtainable youth that would
fall away to dust, like glorified preserved mummies, if we ever
broke through the transparent protection. And flies who discover
the unreality of the sealed package spend their time looking at
other flies, rather than staring into an illusory magnifying glass
which magnifies nothing.
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