Last week, when not inciting mob murder in the Middle East, liberals were whimpering about iPods.  Though once chic, the New York Times said, the Apple digital music players are quickly becoming passé -- ironically, much like the New York Times.  As it turns out, a pretty good indication of inherent coolness is the Times’ disapproval.  In addition to opposing iPods, the Times opposes -- brace yourselves -- the Rolling Stones. 

I know you can’t always get what you want, but with the Times you never get what you want.

Under the words “Old and Overscheduled,” writer Henry Fountain reports that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are “active seniors” -- as opposed to inactive seniors, whom we call “dead.”  But Mr. Fountain wasn’t done.  “[M]ust older people,” he asks, “aspire to prance around singing Jumpin’ Jack Flash?”

In the 1950s, parents were afraid of letting their kids listen to rock music.  Today, kids are afraid of letting their parents play rock music.

To state the mind-numbingly obvious:  Most older people needn’t aspire to prance or sing, since most older people, like most younger people, are capable of neither.  But most older people aren’t part of the Rolling Stones.

Recall that in the 1980s one of the preferred arguments against Ronald Reagan was that he was plagued by senility.  Liberals said he couldn’t be president because he was just too old, and with old age comes lethargy.  (We still don’t know what comes with Walter Mondale.)  Now we’ve got the reverse:  indolence is required after the big 6-0.

Recall, also, that Reagan won the Cold War.

The Times article cites the British writer Virginia Ironside, who thinks old people should be content with BINGO and denture adhesive.  “[Old age] is the time to wind down,” she says.  “I’d like to piddle about.”  Interestingly, Ms. Ironside, 60, is writing a book.  To repeat:  the old lady who says old people should “piddle about” is working.  Chew on that.

The sinister intentions behind this creepiness are completely unsettling.  I’m so worried that even my usual post-Times bottle of Pepto-Bismol isn’t working.  A major contributor to American consciousness is urging people over 60 -- 60! -- to surrender their lives to nothingness.  For Goodness sake, haven’t they ever seen Golden Girls?

It should absolutely go without saying that age should be a barrier to nothing.  Doris Eaton Travis is 101-years-old, forty years older than Jagger and Richards, and she’s currently back on Broadway.  A dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies from 1918-1920, Ms. Travis rehearsed for and performed in an AIDS benefit in New York City just this week.  One wonders if she pirouetted next to the Times Building.

I would go along with the Stones-are-too-old thesis only if the Times could produce, say, five or six thirty-year-olds with the energy of Mick Jagger.  Try fifty-year-olds.  Let’s put Paul Krugman in skin-tight, hot-green stretch-o pants and ask him to wail a few notes of Under My Thumb.  That would be interesting. 

On the bright side, I did learn one thing from the article.  It turns out that -- and this is top-secret, so watch out -- “there is a financial incentive for staying active.”  EXTRA! EXTRA! BREAKING NEWS! PERFORMERS MAKE MONEY WHEN THEY PERFORM! YOU’LL ONLY READ IT HERE!

I just love these liberals who still haven’t grasped “capitalism.”  They hear about it over and over, but only a few catch on.  Financial gain for productivity? You mean, it’s like trading money for entertainment?  And people do this, like, in real life?

“Keith and Mick personify the Busy Ethic,” reads the blurb under the article’s accompanying photo, “which means no sitting on the porch.”  That’s exactly right.  Jagger prefers a stage to a porch, and he doesn’t often sit.  He’s too busy taking advantage of that “financial incentive.” 

One of the funniest things we’ve gotten out of the new Stones tour is Bob Herbert, Times columnist, trying to feign hipness.  “The Stones were fun,” he wrote this week, adding, “[t]he whole key to the Stones was that they were masters of make-believe.”  Actually, I was always under the impression that the whole key to the Stones was that they made good music.  No one ever listened to Ruby Tuesday because it was “make-believe.”

Luckily, they’re still making good music.  Apparently, defying all odds, they sometimes manage to hobble out of their beds, slip on cardigans, and write hits.  Bob Herbert still hasn’t mastered that last part.

Isaiah Z. Sterrett, a resident of Aptos, California, is a Lifetime Member of the California Junior Scholarship Federation and a Sustaining Member of the Republican National Committee.

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