BOOMERS RAGE AGAINST DYING OF THE LIGHT / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( RECOMMENDED READING )

Boomers rage against dying of the light

By John Lloyd

Published: February 22 2010 20:23

There has been much dark material put into the public debate this month concerning the fate of the baby boomers. That generation, born soon after the second world war, is in the autumn years – and in these years a man or woman’s fancy turns to thoughts of winter: how cold it will be, how soon you will be sans everything, and what the manner of becoming so will be.

These thoughts were framed less disagreeably than they might have been by Sir Terry Pratchett in his Dimbleby Lecture three weeks ago, a lecture whose humorous stoicism was all the more marked coming from a novelist locked in a one-way struggle with a rare form of Alzheimer’s. Sir Terry knows that his illness will progressively disable his faculties – and thus, he said, he would die “before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the Brompton Cocktail some helpful medic could supply ... I would shake hands with Death”. Putting it so, he makes it sound like a consummation to be wished for rather than feared: but a consummation it would be.

Martin Amis had already set a darker mood. A week before Sir Terry’s lecture, he told the Sunday Times magazine that “there should be a way out for rational people who’ve decided they’re in the negative. That should be available, and it should be quite easy.” The writer went on, in Hieronymus Bosch mode, to imagine that “there’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time,” adding that there might be euthanasia booths on street corners “where you could get a martini and a medal”.

One senior British politician has so far ventured on to Mr Amis’s dismal ground: David Willetts, the shadow minister for universities and skills and leading conservative intellectual. His book, The Pinch, is subtitled “How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give it Back”. His argument is a charting of how much wealth and power the boomers have accrued, how they have taken more than their share out of the state and put too little in and how, because of high immigration encouraged by the boomers’ political leaders, the next generation has seen wages in a loose labour market stagnate.

After this, for the boomers among us, to wash oneself away on a tide of brandy or martini would seem the best to be hoped for. But this past weekend, another way suggested itself – curiously, from within the government of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister. In an appearance before a mixed group of British and Italian journalists in Venice, Renato Brunetta, the Italian minister for public administration, spoke of his frustration with the lethargy of Italian society, the unproductive and indifferent bureaucracy (which he is now striving to shake up: a revolution indeed), the lack of independence of youth, the dead grip of age. He said that he had launched a campaign to become mayor of Venice – a post he would, if won, add to his ministerial duties.

He was, he explained, nearly 60 (in May) and wished to give something back to the magnificent, declining city in which he was born, son of a poor man who kept a tourist kiosk. He shares his prime minister’s gift for narrative – but Mr Brunetta’s story was at once more inspirational and precise. It was the impatient, hyperactive vision of one who wishes to shake La Serenissima out of its resignation to continued sinking, whether metaphorical or actual: to again find, as it possessed when it was the great entrepôt of Mediterranean trade until decline began in the 16th century, a base of wealth with which to sustain itself.

There are many questions to be asked (and were, but were ducked) as to how a senior minister could also be mayor of a city that will claim large funds from the national budget. Yet this diminutive man, who levered himself into positions of academic and then political distinction, means to make his sixties the years of a great project: to save the most beautiful city built by human hands for the world, Italy and itself.

Few can have the chances Mr Brunetta has made for himself: but his example, of posing large challenges that would power one through the seventh decade of life, pushes back the dreariest of the reflections on a selfish, ageing generation – and shows how it might repay some of the surplus it has taken out. Watch for this becoming a large political project of our next decade: a planned and enabled use of the sap and vigour left in the autumnal generation, so that the younger ones see, not a population of the demented, dependent old, but men and women alive to and engaged in the possibilities of the world they will leave to their youngers and betters.

But with the brandy and martini in the cupboard, when the time comes.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.