It’s a pity that the somewhat interesting articles in the AARP magazine are sitting next to some of the most depressing advertising created on or off Madison Avenue. Let’s see, there’s a harvest gold and blue ad that screams: “You are eligible for quality life insurance—GUARANTEED!” The ad for Keebler Club Crackers may have been designed during the Great Depression. And The North American Menopause Society put together a real stunner telling me www.menopause.org has the facts. I also couldn’t be cold enough to wear “The Ultimate Parka” touted for $29.99.
What’s more, the photos and illustrations accompanying the articles are as dreary as the ads, featuring people who looked like they were frozen in 1962.
It’s bad enough that AARP invites us to become members at 50. Does its magazine have to insult us further by associating age with awful taste, bad eyesight and misguided messages? Have these people looked around at the class and intelligence of our generation? “AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that helps people 50 and over improve the quality of their lives as they age,” it says on one of its websites. “As the nation’s largest membership organization for people 50+, AARP is leading a revolution in the way people view life after 50.”
If the AARP is helping me view and improve the quality of my life through this magazine, I am in deep trouble. I am not impressed that it is the “world’s largest circulation magazine.” If it has such a powerful platform, it should use it more wisely.
Please let me know what the AARP has done for you lately.
0 Responses to “This is the way we look!”
William Kuhn says:
Lovely blog! Good work.
Any way you can put me in touch with Gerri Shute? She was featured this month in Chicago Magazine and mentioned my book, Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books, as an inspiration. I’d like to thank her.
Your readers might be interested to know that the happiest period of Jacqueline Onassis’s life was when she was over 50 and working for Viking, then Doubleday. Her publishing career was longer than her two marriages combined. And she went out of her way to help other people in her position, e.g. Princess Grace, find a publisher in their fifties too.
Thanks!
Bill Kuhn