Please, Not A Country For Old Men

I’m not entirely certain what a country for old white men would look and feel like, but I have been thinking about that image/concept ever since I first saw the movie, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy’s neo-western of the same name. In the senior living facility where I’m currently living old women far outnumber old men like me. I’ll likely die here, though surely not in the kind of violence and with the hail of bullets that explode in McCarthy’s novel and in the movie, No Country for Old Men. All the old men and old women here are Democrats. There doesn’t seem to be a single Trumper in this place; if there is, that person is in hiding.

My friend S. calls this senior living facility a “dormitory.” It does have similarities with campus buildings where students sleep before, during and after classes. I prefer to think of my new home—and any studio apartment on the ninth floor—not as a dormitory, but as a hotel, though the place could also be described as a “country” for old men and old women, though they like to be thought of as elderly not old. It’s its own little world, and not a microcosm of the US. I moved here at the end of August from Ocean Beach in San Francisco because I got tired of the wind and the fog and the cold. It’s sunnier here on Post Street.

Like me, the residents have their own apartments, some larger than others, some smaller than others. We have kitchenettes and bathrooms. Downstairs in the dining room we can and usually do eat three meals a day: breakfast, lunch and supper. Tables have white tablecloths. Red and white wine is available. Waiters and waitresses do the serving; entrees are different every night and every noon. There’s a new movie on a big screen every day, seven days of the week, plus concerts and talks. Last Monday, I watched the 49ers beat the Jets on a big screen. I also saw Hitchcock’s Dial M for Muder.

It’s a luxury and a privilege to live here. I'm thankful for my pension that makes it possible.

I have met two-dozen or so residents and have made friends with seven or eight of them, most in their 90s, most mentally alert and physically frail, hard of hearing and reliant on canes and walkers. The director and the head chef are men, so this place can't really be called a matriarchy, though women do set the tone of serenity and practice good manners which are contagious. Arthur, who sits in a wheelchair at meals, will celebrate his 100th birthday in November. He remembers more than a dozen U.S. presidents, all men: Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, the Bushes, father and son, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. FDR was his favorite. Does the U.S. have a problem with gender? It would seem so.

Arthur and the other elderly men and elderly women in this hotel/dormitory have lived through wars and revolutions in Europe and Asia, as well as depressions and recessions in the US. Several survived fascism. A few of the residents rarely emerge from their apartments, but most residents come out for meals, conversations, events and films. It would be challenging to feel isolated, lonely and alienated here, though I’m sure that masochists and nihilists could talk themselves into states of alienation and loneliness.

If everyone, especially the old and the elderly, had the opportunity to live in a dormitory/hotel like the one where I live, they would probably not feel lost and lonely, at least not for long. Someone would come knocking on their door and invite them to come out and play. That’s what happens here. I’m not allowed to hide and sulk and that’s a good thing.

Slash the military budget the residents say and build housing that will bring people together in communities that will undermine the epidemic of loneliness that blankets the nation and that some have said is worse than the pandemic itself.

On September 10th almost all of the residents watched the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the candidate who would like to turn the US into a country for old white men like himself, preferably wealthy, and definitely conservative. The residents here were jazzed by the debate. They think that Kamala came out the winner, but they’re worried and rightfully so about a Trump presidency. They believe he’ll try to wreck the government and become even more dictatorial than he was when he was president.

Kamala Harris might not win this time around, but in many ways, residents say, she represents the future, or at least a possible future, which is bound to be multi-ethnic. We are not yet only a country for old white men, so say the elderly men and elderly women in this facility, though we’re coming dangerously close.

My fellow residents believe that a vote for Trump is a vote for fossilized old white men. A vote for Harris is a vote for the future, they tell me. I know that some of my friends will argue about that. They’ll point out Harris’s flaws and faults of which there are many. True, we don’t know everything about her, as they insist, but we do know that she’s a woman, a person of color and that she’s brave enough to defy an old white man bound for the grave.