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The death at the age of 100 of my fellow New Hampshirite and sometime Senate candidate Granny D reminds me of one of the curious features of the 2000 presidential campaign: roadside grannies. With hindsight, their preoccupations were a portent of what was to come. Here's what I wrote in National Review:
Hi, everybody. A friend of Bob Dole here. You know it's a little embarrassing to talk about ED. Especially for us conservatives, Republicans, whatever. Every four years many of us on the right find we're coming down with a worse case of it. Yet Electoral Dysfunction is nothing to be ashamed of. Unlike many diseases you get when you're old, this is one you get from the old. If you're a Republican candidate, talk to your doctor about it and he'll tell you the chances of getting a vote from any of his elderly patients are about as low as drug prices in Saskatchewan.
Old people vote Democratic: Gore's strongest demographic is 65+. The MTV shots, the Gap leisurewear, that's just a front. He should be campaigning in checkered stretch pants and guesting on reruns of Lawrence Welk, which he probably did invent. If we cut off the vote at retirement age, Dubya would be a shoo-in. Instead, after our first black president, Gore's going to be our first geriatric president. For his inauguration, his motorcade drivers should ride low in the seat with only their fishing hats visible.
Don't get me wrong. I like old people. I like old movies. I like old songs: I'll take "Moonlight Becomes You" over "Yo, Bitch! Sit on This" any day. I like old broads: I'd rather date Debbie Reynolds than Cameron Diaz. I like old footwear: How come nobody wears spats any more?
And yet . . . the phrase "the greatest generation" is beginning to stick in my throat like a bottleful of cheap Medicare Viagra before Swingers' Night at the lodge. The elderly are currently the most malign influence on our politics, the beneficiaries of the most outrageous affirmative-action scam in the country, the practitioners of identity politics so ruthless they make the gays look like the Boy Scouts they'd like to be. Statistical fact: America spends more on its old than on its children. When Dubya says, "Leave no child behind," that's code for: Let's leave these whining old coots behind.
But we can't. American electoral politics is currently one nightmare movie with nothing but Jessica Tandy roles. Miss one roadside granny, there'll be another one along in a minute. First, it was Granny D, the New Hampshire granny, walking across the continent for campaign-finance reform. Then she started picking up aluminum cans along the way. No, hang on, that's Granny Winnie, the Iowa granny, who's forced to pick up discarded cans and claim back the deposit to pay for her prescription drugs. Even then, she found she was reduced to sneaking down to her black Labrador's kennel in the middle of the night and stealing the key to his canine medicine cabinet. Oh, no, wait a minute, that's Granny Aitcheson, the Pennsylvania Avenue granny, who's apparently forced to climb into the Lassie suit, get down on her arthritic limbs, and limp off to the vet - presumably because it gives Al a laugh.
Now I like a heartwarming human-interest vignette as much as the next guy, but I'm grannied out. If Granny D had her way, and campaign-finance reform got passed, the only lovable old-timers picking up cans along the road would be Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms trying to raise enough to scrape together one lousy radio ad to counter the tide of big-time Clymers in the media. As for Granny Winnie, I was initially sympathetic. You know how many Dr. Peppers you have to pick up just to get enough for a bottle of Ibuprofen? So I was happy to do my bit and swing through Des Moines, chucking cases of Bud out the window. But it turns out she chooses to pick up cans for a living. Her son's a successful businessman, but, although she let him pay for her new roof and her property taxes, she won't accept money from him for prescription drugs because she feels strongly that you - yes, you the taxpayer - should pay for them instead. I'm no trained professional, but, if you'll forgive a touch of the Gail Sheehys, my diagnosis would be that Granny Winnie has some weird aluminum-can fetish hitherto unknown to medical science.
There are genuine issues here: It's outrageous that many seniors are forced to choose between their weekly prescription and Robert Goulet in dinner theater. But the truth is Granny Winnie doesn't need money from America's working stiffs: Diane Sawyer, Jane Pauley, and Bryant Gumbel are desperate to get her on the air, and if every American senior did just one high-paying network interview, they could chug down all the prescription drugs they want. CBS already runs a commendable AARP pilot program, allowing many seniors to enjoy a little light, undemanding work in their twilight years - it's called, I believe, "the news division" - and there's no reason why this couldn't be greatly expanded.
Instead, Congress is considering a law to allow Americans to import cheap drugs from other countries, such as Canada. It's true drug prices are lower in Canada. Here's something else that's lower up there, too:
Your salary.
Conversely, here's something that's way, way higher:
Your tax bill.
But the life of a Canuck senior is pretty cushy. Not only are the pills cheaper, but so's pretty much everything else. Your apartment's cheaper, restaurants are cheaper, computer software is cheaper. Indeed, life is cheaper, as you'll discover when you're lying on a gurney in the corridor at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. Not only are Prozac pills a third cheaper, but you'll need twice as many of them to see you through to spring while you're waiting to hear whether you've been scheduled for cancer treatment. In the U.S., you'll wait, on average, ten days. In Canada, you'll wait 35 to 45 days, maybe more in Quebec, though eventually they send you down to Plattsburgh, N.Y., or Burlington, Vt., so you can die in a foreign hospital, unsurrounded by tiresome loved ones. Average wait for a cranial MRI scan? In the U.S., three days. In Canada, 150 days. Best of all, you'll have plenty of time to sit around the waiting room, reading the aptly named northern seniors' publication, CARP News, which recently deplored the "astounding" statistic that 40 percent of elderly Canadians are regular drinkers. So don't expect to sip the occasional daiquiri-laced Ensure without being hectored about it.
But hey, it's the good life you've heard so much about from Sen. Jim Jeffords and others, isn't it? So don't let me stop you. Matter of fact, why don't you leave right now? That way, you won't be around on November 7, Florida will return to the Bush column where it belongs, and the free world won't be consigned to eight years of Al Gore because you cranky ingrates don't feel you're being pandered to enough.
Now it's true that in Quebec average life expectancy is 78, a tad higher than in the U.S. On the other hand, in Albania average life expectancy is 73. Albania is the unhealthiest country in Europe: a decayed, impoverished, lawless, nasty little basket case of a state, where there's no health system to speak of, 98 percent of the population are chain smokers, the prescription-drug program involves swimming to Italy, and any Albanian Granny Winnie tramping along the rutted highways is unlikely to find many soda cans because, thanks to the late Enver Hoxha's ban on vehicular traffic, there are no cars to throw them out the windows of. (Incidentally, Hoxha's eco-Stalinist Albania is a reasonable approximation of what Al Gore's America would look like if he decided to implement the full Earth in the Balance platform.) Yet Albanian life expectancy is closing in on America's, and even Canada's: These old guys are indestructible. Nonetheless, I understand the urgent need to improve life expectancy in the U.S. God forbid any of the codgers should kick off halfway through Gore's second term, before they've had a chance to vote for Hillary in 2008.
Canadians, for their part, tend to fret about the 40 million Americans without health insurance. The vast bulk of these tend to be healthy youngsters in their first jobs; if you're a 19-year-old waitress, having no medical coverage is a very sound bet. As to those pills, one reason they cost more down here is because if Granny Winnie's a little short of breath from a hard day's can-collecting and gets one of the tablets stuck in her throat, she can sue the pharmaceutical companies into oblivion for making them too big. You can't do that in Canada. That's another reason why even those drugs not covered by the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board cost half the price in Canada that they do in America.
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I can't help feeling that the geriatric hammerlock on American democracy is part of some vast left-wing plot. Conservatives often complain about the liberal bias of the media, but it seems to me that, as we nitpick over the comments of TV news anchors, that we're missing the most obvious liberal bias of all: the ads. To sit through a network newscast is to be exposed to a barrage of incontinence pads, laxatives, and those funny chairs that carry you up and down stairs. I'd never heard of male itch till I watched Tom Brokaw; I'd never had male itch till I watched Dan Rather. The ads on the news are expressly designed to make younger viewers -i.e., more-Republican viewers - flee in terror to the wrestling channel, leaving only cranky old bastards to follow current events. You're not telling me this is pure coincidence.
Oh, well. Maybe those Floridians will come to their senses. Maybe come the big day they'll pop a couple of Viagra, set the Barcalounger to cruise control, call the nurse over, and never get to the polls at all. Then America's politicians can forget about devising even more ways to kiss up to them, and get on with more pressing issues like Social Security privatization before the worker-retiree ratio increases to the point where one pimply burger-flipper will be supporting entire gated communities. In the meantime, as someone once said, never trust anyone over 30. And, in that vein, let me recommend an old film from the Swingin' Sixties, Wild in the Streets, in which the voting age is lowered to 14, rock star Max Frost is elected president and - acting on the principle that you can't trust them - has everyone over 30 dragged off and stuffed with LSD. A nonprescription drug, admittedly, but I'd like to think Granny Winnie would approve.
from National Review, October 23rd 2000
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