In Amsterdam, I toured the Rijksmuseum. On the first floor, I saw a self-portrait of Rembrandt. At 22, a cloud of wild hair hovering over his face, he broods so romantically, I felt a stab of lust. On the third floor, an hour or so later, I came on a second self-portrait, this one painted when Rembrandt was in his sixties. That wild romantic hair replaced by a turban, his face had collapsed into the gorge of old age. The years had deeply scored his forehead and cheeks.I felt I'd witnessed something like Dorian Gray decaying in a matter of minutes, right there on the canvas. I came face to face with an ugly truth: I value beauty unblemished by experience and recoil from the signs of aging. I was reminded of dating sites where men in their fifties and sixties sought women with “no baggage, please.” Dictionary.com defines baggage as “previous knowledge and experience that a person may use or be influenced by in new circumstances.”In other words, these bozos wanted a woman who hadn’t learned a damned thing from all that had happened to them. Or, more probably, they longed for a girl to whom nothing had ever happened.As a child, I unconsciously assumed people came in two varieties: old and young. Of course, logically I knew that my grandmother had not always been wrinkled, that the ropy veins in her hands must have once, like those in my own, lain flat.But, as is true for too many of us, logic did not play an important role in my attitudes. I understood--looking at my Nana--that one of us counted for less than the other.In a couple of days, I will be officially old, not just the old that children define but the old of someone in the final decade or decades of her life. And I have watched the collapse of my own face, not only in the mirror but also in the cold indifference of young people, in the blindness that slides past me to some likelier view.All this started for me years ago in a parking lot at Costco on a stormy night. The battery in my truck died and--newly divorced--for the first time in my life, I was having to deal with an automotive crisis on my own. I'd managed to figure out which battery I needed, to remove the old battery and to purchase and install the new one in the dark, without a flashlight or umbrella. The final step, however, kept eluding me. In my early fifties, standing in the rain trying to strap in the new battery so it wouldn't bounce onto the highway on the way home, I watched with chagrin as dozens of men walked past me and drove away. I was thirty-five miles from home and the battery wouldn’t hold. My cell phone was dead and Costco was closing. After what seemed hours but was probably about forty-five minutes, a young couple approached me and the man took over, quickly strapping the new battery in.What does this mean? Well, I’ve never been a raving beauty but I was the kind of young woman whose distress normally brought a man to the rescue in fairly short order. What, I ask myself, does getting old in a market-based society mean? In other countries, I had observed a very different attitude. In Mexico, men from two to ninety flirt with women from two to ninety. In Brazil, young men stop to help quiet crying babies, even those in shopping carts pushed by grandmothers. In Canada, a teenaged boy stops at a spring garden to exclaim over its exploding colors, tended by a kneeling woman in her sixties.The attitudes displayed by contemporary Americans have been shaped by the confluence of capitalism, psychoanalysis, and hucksterism. Our cultural perfect storm began brewing in the early twentieth century, during World War I, when Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, went to work for Woodrow Wilson on persuading Americans that the War’s main objective was to democratize Europe. Bernays subsequently perfected and unleashed public relations as an art. It has metastasized out of the marketplace into our democratic processes. Because of this, the Supreme Court rules that corporations may freely buy elections, that workers may be threatened into giving over their vote, and that wealth is the only pure value.Nothing sucks up quite as much wealth, returning no hope of increased profitability, like old people. If we have money, we perhaps may be forgiven, although even then--without the advantages of a Mitt Romney--we can be depended upon to consume more than our fair share of taxes. Thus, the Paul Ryans see the elderly as wastrels to be dumped into the streets when our life savings have been exhausted.Our faces don’t sell cars or cigarettes. In skimpy bathing suits, we display the ravages of time and remind people of deeper values than profitability. The image of the Inuit shipping their old folks out on ice floes holds great attraction for people like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. And even though Fox News draws its audience from people wearing Depends and swallowing gallons of Lipitor, the worthlessness of those who do not make money underscores every commentary.

Older Americans account for over one third of all medical spending in this country -- approximately $300 billion a year for their share of the cost. It costs about four times the amount of dollars to treat a 65 year old for health care in a given year than it does to treat a 40 year old. Care for the Elderly

Rumor holds that the bulk of medical treatment dollars are spent caring for the elderly in the final weeks of their lives. This isn’t true. Rumor also has it that in the last weeks of life people spend several times what they have spent in all the years preceding. Also not true. Only ten percent of our medical dollars are spent in the last year of life. Health and Human Services
What accounts for the proliferation of this myth? The same ambition that covets slashes to Social Security and Medicare rather than taxing corporations and the wealthy.
We have admired the dewy bodies of nubile models, the flawless faces putatively resulting from $150 an ounce cold cream, and the slim agility of athletes. Who knew we ourselves would wind up old?