Political Observer opens a door?

Mr. Ganesh’s ‘politicking’ reaches into the the most unlikely places, and chooses unlikely persons to make his arguments! Wedded to self-congratulation about his imagined victory about ‘low birth rates’ and the underserving retirees: ‘old people will have to remain productive a bit longer’ ! In its way it echoes Mitt Romney 47 % of
2012, that cost him the election. The perpetual Boulevardier now steps into the quicksand of a variety of exhausted Neo-Liberal cliches, without the rhetorical curlicues, that once set apart his pronouncements.

Now that the world agrees with me about children, birth rates are low. This means too few workers for too many pensioners. To keep the state solvent, old people will have to remain productive a bit longer. Expect, therefore, ever more eulogies from politicians and bosses about the advantages of age in the workplace. Prudence, caution, restraint. The moderating hand. All will be cited.

And all will miss the point. The most dramatic mental change that comes with age is a loss of interest in what others think. And that allows for more, not less, risk-taking.

This weekend, Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather, stands to win his fifth Champions League title as a coach. Even if Real Madrid lose, his late-career success stands out in an ever-younger profession. (The coach of the German national team is 36.) What explains the resurgence of a man who was sputtering out at Everton in 2021?

Over the past decade or so, football became regimented. A modern coach micromanages the passing sequences, the distances between teammates, the number of seconds a “press” goes on for. Even a casual watcher of the sport might have noticed the extinction of the Number 10, the glamour role, in which a team’s most gifted individual is licensed to roam and improvise. In place of Zidane and Özil: “machine football”.

Now that the world agrees with me about children, birth rates are low. This means too few workers for too many pensioners. To keep the state solvent, old people will have to remain productive a bit longer. Expect, therefore, ever more eulogies from politicians and bosses about the advantages of age in the workplace. Prudence, caution, restraint. The moderating hand. All will be cited.

And all will miss the point. The most dramatic mental change that comes with age is a loss of interest in what others think. And that allows for more, not less, risk-taking.

This weekend, Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather, stands to win his fifth Champions League title as a coach. Even if Real Madrid lose, his late-career success stands out in an ever-younger profession. (The coach of the German national team is 36.) What explains the resurgence of a man who was sputtering out at Everton in 2021?

Over the past decade or so, football became regimented. A modern coach micromanages the passing sequences, the distances between teammates, the number of seconds a “press” goes on for. Even a casual watcher of the sport might have noticed the extinction of the Number 10, the glamour role, in which a team’s most gifted individual is licensed to roam and improvise. In place of Zidane and Özil: “machine football”.

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https://www.ft.com/content/2d3f1019-0981-4f39-8e4f-653aea1344e0

Establishing with The Reader that he is ‘one of the fellas’ buy way of this enthusiasm for the game, and choosing ‘Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather’ as paradigmatic of those ‘old people will have to remain productive a bit longer’ ?

Editor: But Ganesh can’t seem to self-emancipate from evocative references:

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And now look. I don’t know if another Champions League title with this loose and expressive Madrid team will bring, in some kind of Hegelian antithesis, a turn in the tide against over-coaching.

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The value of Ancelotti’s age isn’t prudence, then. It is almost the opposite: a defiance of convention, born of being long past caring about one’s reputation. Some of that insouciance was innate, no doubt. But it would have grown, not waned, with time.

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With his tariffs and subsidies, Joe Biden, 81, building on the work of Donald Trump, 77, has changed the world. (For the worse, I think.)

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Editor: Ganesh political reach at high velocity:

America’s pro-trade consensus was paper-thin to begin with. The 2008 financial crash then enhanced the prestige of the state. The speed with which protectionism has become the new common sense in Washington suggests the two men were pushing at an open door.

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Editor: the pejorative ‘old people’ : in sum its reduced to a trans-generational conflict ?

Sometimes, in old people, it manifests as rudeness. But it has a constructive upside in this appetite for heresy.

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It is hard to know the active ingredient that makes people carefree with age. It might be that near-term unpopularity seems trivial next to death.

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Either way, the equation of youth with risk-taking, and age with conformism, needs adjustment.

Editor: In the final paragraphs Ganesh reverts to Cultural Critique, steeped in  disingenuousness garnished with the fatuous!

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There is an exhibition at the British Museum now on Michelangelo’s last decades. The drawings show the artist in furious argument with himself. Here he changes the head of a figure beside the crucified Jesus. There he has several goes at an airborne angel on the one page. It is like looking at the scribbled marginalia of Shakespeare.

Well, we are going to need late-life restlessness from more and more citizens. Reducing their potential contribution to that of temperance and caution isn’t just a cliché. It ignores a world that is being turned upside down by those who aren’t long for it.

Political Observer