GBO NEWS: 10th Legacy Film Fest (Virtually) National; NYT Shows Ageism Deeper Than SNL’s Crude Slurs; PLUS Span’s Audio Bubbe Diaries Published; USC’s National Reporting Fellowship Deadline; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Our 28th Year.
May 10, 2021 — Volume 28, Number 4
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. To subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge, simply sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, you’ll receive the table of contents in an e-mail, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: No Nonfungibles, Only Invaluables.
1. 10th LEGACY FILM FESTIVAL ON AGING: Virtual—and National—for the First Time, May 24-31.
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE: *** Apply By May 17 for USC’s Center for Health Journalism 2021 National Fellowship.
3. INVISIBLE AGEISM IN PLAIN SIGHT: *** Beyond SNL’s Ageist Rap Video, NYT Stories Promotes Burden Falsehoods of Too Many Old People.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Beyond SNL – PUL-EASE! Saturday’s Colin Jost Unfairly Trumps on old dogs; *** Paula Span’s New Audible Original, The Bubbe Diaries; *** UCLA Minority-Aging leader Steve Wallace Dies, 63; *** Cancer Claims Health Journalism Editor Pia Christensen, 50.
1. 10th LEGACY FILM FESTIVAL ON AGING
The 10th Legacy Film Festival on Aging is set for May 24-31, and for the first time, of course, will be virtually available nationwide and beyond. Delayed for a year pandemically, the festival is the only international screen event exploring the life of our aging world in its full spectrum. More than 30 feature-length and short films will take viewers – mask free – on a global tour from Australia to Sweden, from Hungary to Cuba, and across the US. Media interested in accreditation or screener links for advance festival coverage can email publicity@larsenassc.com.
Full disclosure: GBONews readers, this one is deeply and satisfyingly personal. Your editor has proudly served on the Festival’s board, reviewing and sometimes fervently arguing with fellow screeners over submissions. Our selections expose the variegated and nuanced realities of late life, love, anxieties, sorrows, triumphs and joys in ways that go well beyond the facile “bucket list” framing of old age in mainstream American entertainment and, yes, news. (Adventure and quests may be important, even illuminating, but without depth, isn’t the sky-diving grandma story or a Hollywood elder-action flick as much of a “cut to the chase” scenario as ever romped across a stage or screen?)
There’s nothing else like the Legacy Film Fest. For years, I looked forward to sitting in the festival’s San Francisco theater location, regretting only that more people couldn’t enjoy so many selections on aging, many that US audiences didn’t even know existed. Our newly virtual world changes that now – anyone can see this wide range of films. The full program with some listing linking to a film’s trailer, is available at www.legacyfilmfestivalonaging.org.
The films are organized into 11 programs, each costing audience members only $8. (An All Festival Pass is $50.) Some programs include a longer feature and shorts, others bundle several shorts. Among the themes is “Caring: Its Many Dimensions” with documentaries on Latinx and Black families in Milwaukee and bestselling palliative care physician Jessica Zitter’s Caregiver: A Love Story). In the “Adaptation” program, New Zealand’s Bellbird is a richly layered drama of three-generations of male stress and bonding through the lens of grief and resilience in rural life.
The program on “Civil Rights” includes the exhilarating story of centenarian Betty Reid Soskin, lifelong Black activist and late-life National Park Ranger, who told her tales at Northern California’s Rosie the Riveter Historical Memorial Park. It will screen along with The Giants Wore Gloves, about how in 1958 Arkansas, a group of middle-class white women helped defeat the governor’s attempt to stop the desegregation of Little Rock high schools.
One of three productions under the banner “Courage Against Hate” is Elder Voices, with stories of Japanese Americans, European Jews, Muslims and other conscientious objectors, who came of age during the Depression and World War II. They reside together in a Quaker retirement community in New Jersey.
Four shorts included in “Savory Traditions” are a foodie’s buffet of Japanese mochi-making, African American sweet potato pie, the search for authentic Mexican cuisine, and the life of a cooking school (with a cameo by Julia Child).
Two of my favorites are feature-length documentaries with more heart than most dramas. Under the program heading “Memory,” the film The Rest I Make Up follows Cuban American experimental dramatist Maria Irene Fornes over 25 years. She was acknowledged by colleagues at New York’s renowned La Mama Theater, such as Edward Albee as “America’s Great Unknown Playwright.” Fornes stopped writing, but never ceased storytelling, as dementia tattered her memory—not such a problem for a dedicated Surrealist. Her friendship with a young writer/filmmaker reignites her visionary creative spirit – and gives viewers a new and surprisingly joyous depiction of living with dementia.
Also, proudly touching is The Euphoria of Being. From Hungary, under the festival’s program heading “Darkness and Light,” the film follows dancer Éva Fahidi as she collaborates with a brilliant young dancer, Emese Cuhorka, as they create a performance to premier on Fahidi’s 90th birthday. A Holocaust survivor celebrated for her memoir of surviving Auschwitz, she weaves her painful story into a powerful and cathartic dance, while bonding lovingly with the film’s director, Réka Szabó, and her younger dance counterpart.
One advantage for Festival goers is that, as with other virtual festivals, they can chose to watch a film program on any day within a 24-hour period after first clicking on “Play.”
I also strongly recommend that film buffs click on the Archives section under “About” at the top of the Legacy Film Festival website. You’ll see films shown over the past nine years that open a new vista on the experiences of old age, many available on streaming services. (Another tip: Substantial numbers of American or non-US features and documentaries are available for free on the Kanopy streaming service, which operates through local libraries. Great films, free on entering your library card and pin numbers.)
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** Apply By May 17 for USC’s Center for Health Journalism 2021 National Fellowship. In July, 20 selected reporters will Zoom gather over five days “to learn more about the intersection of race and health, as well as how chronic stressors — poverty, housing and food insecurity, lack of opportunity and toxic stress — affect the health, welfare and well-being of vulnerable children, youth, families and communities,” according to their website. Each Fellow will receive a reporting grant of $2,000-$10,000 and five months of expert mentoring to report an ambitious investigative or explanatory project on health or social welfare issues by December 31, 2021.
There are different grant categories offering various stipend amounts, and their site explains these and elaborates on topics for which we’re they’re seeking project proposals.
According to the Center, “The National Fellowship is open to print, broadcast and multimedia journalists from around the country. The Fellowship is appropriate not only for health reporters, but for all reporters with an interest in social issues, whether they’re education, government, environment, criminal justice, social services or immigration specialists or general assignment reporters. For more information, visit Center for Health Journalism or email program consultant Martha Shirk at Cahealth@usc.edu. To improve your prospects for success, we strongly recommend that you discuss your project idea with us in advance of applying.
3. INVISIBLE AGEISM IN PLAIN SIGHT
*** Beyond SNL’s Ageist Slurs — Simple examples of ageism, set up like T-ball, are important to swing at, of course, but are easy targets. Saturday Night Live’s ugly recent “rap” (March 27) attacking elders for hoarding Covid-19 inoculations was especially egregious. (“Baby Boomers, Greatest Generation, got all the money, and got the vaccinations.”)
The nearly 4-minute music video was somewhat offset by John Oliver’s incisive, yet far less viewed April 11 edition of “Last Week Tonight.” Oliver incisively exposed the pandemic’s nursing home devastation and the long-range need for truly caring long-term care.
SNL’s perpetrated its sorry case of ageism despite pervasive media coverage of the pandemic’s disproportionate infliction of suffering and death among older people. And it perpetuated the underlying falsehoods of Boomer’s “Me-Generation” selfishness along with the stereotype of burdensome aging population with little to contribute. It’s a bias that continues to underlie much economic and demographic messaging — and reporting — even in presumably liberal media.
Two dismaying news examples appeared during the first week of May in the New York Times.
The May 4 issue of the NYT’s usually astute podcast, The Daily, focused on widely covered new census data in which, the podcast stated, “the U.S. government revealed that the country’s population is growing at the slowest rate in nearly a century.” The nearly half-hour program, titled, “A Population Slowdown in the U.S.” with transcript link included, ostensibly examined two key reasons.
First is the sharp decline in U.S. immigration, especially from Mexico. That’s due not only to recent strictures at the border, but also because of economic improvements in Mexico slowing the need to emigrate northward.
Second is the diminishing U.S. birth rate, initially begun in the wake of the Great Depression and, surprisingly to demographers, continuing to fall as the overall economy recovered.
The Daily’s usual host, Michael Barbaro, turned the mike over to Astead W. Herndon for this special report, in which he led the usual questioning of one Times reporter, in this case veteran staffer Sabrina Tavernise. (Also, see her print story online.) [https://tinyurl.com/bkdnejkh] The program credits Luke Vander Ploeg and Eric Krupke as its producers and Paige Cowett as editor. That is, many intelligent hands missed even acknowledging the central, longstanding critique of the view that growing numbers of older people pose an impending social and economic burden.
Elders Using Up Too Much
Filtering down through the story’s informative accounts of multiple stressors and choices in modern life is the detritus of well challenged, often discredited conservative economic arguments that too many old people threaten to drag down national economies. The broadcast offers fascinating glimpse into such factors as declining teenage births, stemming partly from the years-long campaign against teen pregnancy; of Millennials forestalling childbirth while trying to establish careers as they struggle against unaffordable childcare and student debt; reductions in Latinx family size as Latinas increasingly experience the benefits of more opportunities; and other factors.
Like a virus, the toxic spoor of “zero sum” messaging — that a mass of declining elders with undermine a presumably limited economic future for generations — continues to grow, even in environments warmed by otherwise thoughtful reporting.
Why worry about falling birthrates? Tavernise recites the long-disputed canard that too many old people overwhelm the declining proportion of younger workers to care for their elders’ care. This old age “dependency ratio” has been misused for over 40 years, in calls for curtailing entitlement spending or privatizing Social Security.
Why would greater longevity jeopardize the welfare of the young? Tavernise explains, “Americans are living much, much longer lives. And they are living at the end of their life with lots of care from caretakers who tend to be disproportionately young, disproportionately female. That is also a concern— who will take care of these people? Who will take care of the mostly-older Americans once we get down the road into this demographic future?”
She adds, “But the economic effects also kind of trickle down into the culture.” Her notion of trickle-down lands home for Tavernise, in her own small Western Massachusetts hometown. There, the young have left, leaving seniors, such as her octogenarian parents, without even “someone to come shovel out their walk because there’s not the large population of young people that there used to be.” As daunting as the aging of rural America, don’t innumerable local challenges reflect more on the forces rural-urban pressures of industrialization and political decisions, rather than on having too many sick old people?
Where Tavernise fails to see modern economic advantages trickle up, though, is from her own discussion. For instance, in contrast to the US, she examines the ability of younger women in Scandinavian countries to thrive with strong social safety nets: “They want precisely the number of children that they are actually having, . . . they’ve developed careers, they have rising pay in relation to men.”
For the old, though, her narrative never brings similarly modern advances into the conversation. Consider, for instance, the economic contributions likely to accrue from reductions in age discrimination and acceptance of age diversity in the workplace. AARP, for example, is working with OECD and the World Economic Forum to encourage corporate recruitment and retention of older employees due to the long-predicted labor shortage of younger workers. Greater productivity (and tax paying) well beyond age 65 are already being pursued internationally through changes in employment culture and applications of in new technology to lessen physically and mentally stressful work.
Add to that more opportunities for entrepreneurship among an older population with elevated health and fitness. These are all trends and developments many GBONews readers have been reporting on – yet all Tavernise and her editorial crew saw was costly decrepitude among the old.
NYT Mag’s “Secrets of Longevity” Advises, Don’t Live Too Long
One might think the wisdom of Mr. Spok – “Live long and prosper” – would underscore the NYT Magazine’s Sunday, May 2, special issue on “The Secrets of Longevity.” The lead story, “The Living Century,” is an excerpt from Steven Johnson’s new book and four-part PBS series Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer.
Yet, another article recounts the scientific debate over how long humans might live before it loses sight of the science and lapses into speculation about the “profound implications” of extended life spans for the “future of the planet.”
In his essay, “How Long Can We Live?” Ferris Jabr writes, “Lingering multitudes of superseniors, some experts add, would stifle new generations and impede social progress. ‘There is a wisdom to the evolutionary process of letting the older generation disappear,’ said Paul Root Wolpe, the director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, during one public debate on life extension. ‘If the World War I generation and World War II generation and perhaps, you know, the Civil War generation were still alive, do you really think that we would have civil rights in this country? Gay marriage?’”
However, didn’t the Union win the Civil War and pass the 13th Amendment? Yes, Jim Crow then prevailed for decades, yet, but so would women’s suffrage. Today’s gay marriage, while struggling, has held sway in the courts and public opinion. Meanwhile, American’s extreme right wing stormed the U.S. Capitol with old and young. Reactionary forces will always tug its war against progressive values across ages and cultures.
Too many supercentenarians grousing, “Get off my lawn”? Did Jabr survey a range of scientific opinion to gauge how many might counter Wolpe with the age-old notion that for many, age might come with wisdom?
Not merely citing one scientist’s political conjecture, Jabr concludes the otherwise factual article by turning to fiction: “The Immortal” is a fine tale by Jorge Luis Borges about a Roman soldier who drinks the waters of youth only to live unhappily for centuries until he chances on a spring of morality and can rest, at last, in peace. No one would want, say, a literary great such as Borges to sink into decrepitude, of course, but what reader wouldn’t have loved to imbibe the insights he might have proffered beyond the 87 years that the muses gave him?
From the obvious anti-aging bias of Saturday Night Live to the thickly veiled attitudes-as-reportage by these major media writers, journalists would do well to ask, “What’s this saying, exactly? In what mindset? And to whose benefit?” Messaging that old people present a burden of sickness and economic strain, while having nothing much to offer, or that longevity is fine, but not for too many, whether incanted crudely or with sophistication, constitute an assault on human life and its aspirations at any age.
–Paul Kleyman
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Beyond SNL – PUL-EASE! Meanwhile, in last Saturday’s SNL “Weekend Update” nooz segment, co-anchor Colin Jost stated, “I don’t understand why the entire Republican Party is betting its future on Trump.” Promising start – but, he goes on, “He turns 75 next month. It’s like saying, ‘Hey, Kids, invest all your emotions in this.’”
That howling you might have heard was not laughter but the dismay arising from the kennels of groups like Muttville Senior Dog Rescue. They place older canines left behind because of a move, illness or death of the owner, with new dog lovers, including families with children. A good story for reporters on aging.
Of course, some aging pooches keep snapping from early on, Colin. Maybe one of them can take a bite out of a facile comedy writer still getting away with cheap-shot ageism.
*** Paula Span’s “Happy Announcement”: A granddaughter, for sure, but also the New York Times “New Old Age”columnist just issued forth an audiocast, The Bubbe Diaries: A Not-Quite Guide for Modern Grandparents, released in April as an Audible Original. Span emailed GBONews, “I’ve adapted the grandparenting columns I’ve been writing into an audio work. I’m calling it a reported memoir, because it combines information from experts in child development and family dynamics with my own experiences with my granddaughter Bartola, now four-and-a-half. (The half, as she will tell you, is VERY important.)”
Span notes, “Somewhat to my surprise, I wound up reading this myself, recording it in my bedroom in January.” She quipped, “I had Bette Midler in mind as the narrator, but apparently she had other plans.”
No matter, Midler missed her chance on this one. Span explains that although her immigrant antecedents chose to be modernly called “grandparents,” she decided to go old world and be called “Bubbe” (enunciated with a long “ee” with its faint wafting of Kosher pickles).
GBONews’s editor can relate in his own way. My Zaidi, my Dad’s father, ran dingy Abe Kleyman’s Grocery in West St. Paul. My Mom’s parents, although of the same era and Russian origins, were warm and thoroughly modern Grandpa and Grandma. Still, at my daughter’s announcement of her pregnancy, my thoughts of heritage briefly echoed, “Zaidi.”
The dissonance of this familial locution became moot, though, when before our “JD”—James Dylan—turned one, I awoke at 7:30 a.m., on the first morning of a visit to hear a light knocking and tiny voice at the guest room door. “Grandpop. Grandpop.” Oh, the genius of originality in a child’s ear! And so he’s called me since he stole my heart at that early hour seven years ago.
That moment returned to me as I started listening to the nearly three-hour-long Bubbe Diaries. I expect that many others, regardless of their language, will hear their own ears tickle with elderhood at the harmony of legacy and chick-small peeps.
Span, though, takes her theme well beyond her own Bubbe-hood with extensively researched information combining reporting with personal reflections. In sourcing the stories, she found herself “surprised at how little research there is on grandparenting, when it is such a big part of later life for so many of us.”
The chapters, says the website, incorporate recent research “on sleep, safety and bonding; explores why mothers-in-law may have tension with daughters-in-law; and shows how baby boomers are finding their own way through grandparenting. Along the way she shares sweet and funny stories about helping to raise Bartola.
To request gratis access the audio book, contact Vanessa Harris at Audible.
*** UCLA Minority-Aging Leader Steve Wallace Dies, 63: In the topic area of longevity, cemeteries come with the territory. Still, that abstract thought doesn’t feel like the gut punch of certain deaths. The sudden loss of Prof. Steven P. Wallace, at only 63, left many devoted to the study and revelations of multicultural aging feeling hard punched.
Steve brought his demographic command of our aging nation to every Journalists in Aging Fellows Program training we presented since its start in 2010. He was the only expert we, at GBONews’ parent, the Journalists Network on Generations, along with The Gerontological Society of America, invited to do so. Steve was our lead-off hitter, ever able to map the diverse complexities of America’s rapid aging in clear terms and illustrate the societal and personal ramifications. Sfeve’s facts were hard, his smile infectious.
His career achievements trace the contours of ethnic studies in aging over the past four decades. “Indeed he was my graduate student and collaborator over the years, said Carroll L. Estes, founding director of the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. In an email to GBONews she added, “Such a flying star and person of integrity and ethical principle, I can hear him laugh right now. He is absolutely unique and irreplaceable.”
To learn more about him, read this memorial tribute to him published in the UCLA Bruin (May 3, 2021).
*** AHCJ Website Editor Pia Christensen, Succumbs to Cancer at 50: The Association of Health Care Journalists reported that long-time website editor and staffer, Pia Christensen, died from cancer at her home in Loomis, Calif., in early May. She was on the staff of the Missouri School of Journalism, which houses AHJCJ, for the past 20 years.
“We’ve experienced a terrible loss in our AHCJ family,” said Senior Adviser Len Bruzzese in the association’s announcement. He hired Pia at Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2001, and then “stole her away” to AHCJ, when started heading the organization in 2006. Previously, she did copy editing and online producing at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Marin (Calif.) Independent Journal after studying journalism at San Francisco State University.
Pia often worked with us at the Journalists Network on Generations and GBONews in helping to promote fellowship programs and develop AHCJ educational sessions on aging for reporters. She was always a pleasure to work with and we’ll miss her.
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2021 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
To subscribe for free or unsubscribe, or if you have technical problems receiving issues of GBO or if you’d like to be removed from the list, e-mail me at paul.kleyman@earthlink.net, or pfkleyman@gmail.com or phone me at 415-821-2801.
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https://www.facebook.com/app_scoped_user_id/100000973913260/ Ruth Migdal Taber