This segment on the Today Show managed to be both right on -- and far off the mark.
On the plus side we saw that M.A.C. Cosmetics, a forward-thinker in the beauty industry, is recognizing the fact that may older women are attractive and want to stay that way without the kind of radical, extreme and unsubtle surgeries that make them look like one of the “Real Housewives” -- who aren’t "real" by any definition.
Kudos to Today.
Cut to Donny Deutsch. Now, I have enjoyed Donny, especially when he was in damage control mode on his show trying to counter Coulter Madness, which, unlike the annual NCAA basketball lunacy, tends to run on a 12-month cycle. But Donny got a few major things wrong here. He characterized the Boomer Generation with a weird and wildly inaccurate analogy: as a “bubble” passing through a “python”. A “bubble” bursts and disappears -- or following Donny's analogy -- is processed into Python shit.
He's wrong.
The Boomers are going to have an impact on generations to come. Donny's “follow the money” thesis is going to generate a host of new strategies for making the lives of older people everywhere much, much better. Also off the mark was his “we’re the most selfish generation” comment, probably because he was born in ‘57 and was talking about his generation (or himself?). My generation came of age in the 60s, a time when a lot of us became aware of the wider world and took to the streets to march for civil rights and against an ill-conceived war gone desperately wrong. Since many of us were too white to suffer discrimination and too old to be drafted it sure-as-Hell wasn't selfishness that drove us.
Donny said a lot of important, supportive things about respect for age, the natural beauty of older women and against the obsession our society has with everything "young". But if NBC is putting him out there for his expertise, they need to look at this segment for his lack of it.
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