The end is near

From where I sit at the tail end of the post-war baby boom, things look pretty good. Every time I have to spend some more precious and increasingly expensive gasoline, there are a dozen classic hits stations to choose from on the radio. Let's do the time warp again!

The last time I was in Tennessee, I learned something that should have been obvious. There are actually classic country stations, playing the music I grew up avoiding like the plague.

Why is this? Why should a bunch of middle-aged fossils like me dominate the dial? No, it's not the fact that we're still so uncool that we actually buy music instead of finding it on some file-sharing server in what we still quaintly think of as the Warsaw Pact. It's for the same reason Social Security needed to be (and was) rescued in 1983 - we're the biggest demographic ... ever. That's why every business sector in the economy has always catered to our every whim.

Or, anyway, we have been the biggest demo. But our days are numbered. For one thing, we've started to die off. For another, we don't spend money the way people who don't have much stuff do. The kids upgrade cell phones every year or so; I, for example, still have a five- or six-year-old, scratched up cell phone. I don't need to watch low-res concert video just because Verizon wants me to.

Soon - way too soon for me - Gen Y is going to slam our music into a wheelchair (where, thankfully, our clothing fashions long ago disappeared) and try to force it into a home. The "classic" radio will play rap, giving us all headaches, and cars won't even come with CD players any more. If we have MP3 players, if, they won't integrate with anything, since MP8 players will be the latest thing, and we won't be able to make the retinal scan interface play anything but Barry Manilow - and how the hell did that crap get TiVoed on there?

The jig is going to be up, and we're really going to miss it. We're finally going to understand how the WWII generation felt when we cavalierly abandoned their nightclub torch song Sinatra-ville.

It isn't going to sit well with us. There are far too many narcissists among us who won't be able to deal with the world not telling them every five minutes that they are the most important people on earth. Or at least the most important wallets.

At least we'll still dominate the nursing home market.