Category Archives: Articles

Frito Lay’s Senior Moment

Trying to be funny and winding up with something simply ignorant, stupid, and grotesque is not an outcome I would wish on anyone.  And yet, that is what happened to BBDO Worldwide, the advertising agency that created the Frito-Lay “Senior Moment” commercial aired on this year’s Super Bowl broadcast.

The current uproar about the Super Bowl centers on a tasteless half-time show (which I had the good sense not to watch) but I suggest some indignation should be saved for this commercial.

In case you missed it, the 30-second ad shows an old man and an old woman, presumably a couple, vying with one another to reach a bag of potato chips that had fallen on the floor. As the woman lurches toward the prize, the man reaches out, catches her ankle with his cane, and sends her sprawling.

As he totters by her, he presses his cane into her back to keep her down. When he captures the package, he looks back at her triumphantly.  With a gloating grin, however, she looks up at him and holds up a full set of his false teeth.

Does this seem funny to you? A group of MBA students at Washington University in St. Louis voted it the third best among this year’s Super Bowl commercials. This marked the fourth consecutive year in which the students held the competition, after evaluating the ads with faculty members and visiting advertising agency pros.

“Who would have thought ole grandpa had such spunk? Could you ever imagine a  gramma as feisty as she?  What a hoot to see these old codgers ready to do violence to one another for potato chips!” (Such may have been the level of critical response to the ad from these future business leaders of America.)

It escaped them entirely that the ad might have conveyed an image of elderly people that is not only unflattering but full of prejudice. The students are supposed to be whetting their critical intelligence, but instead they accepted as funny a commercial that trades on stereotypes.

Two Harvard undergraduates of my acquaintance, Jackie O’Brien and Stephanie Hurder, also found the ad innocent: “I do not think the ad made fun of the elderly in a harmful way,” says Jackie. Stephanie adds: “Perhaps the reason I found the ad entertaining was that it portrayed old people being feisty, when it’s usually assumed that old people are docile and incapable of physical conflict.”

In stressing humor, they have a point. But I wonder in this instance if they are not missing something. There may be a generational difference at work here. Perhaps you have to be closer to my age to feel offended by ads like this one. And maybe you also need a more seasoned view of American culture and the advertising industry that reflects our values.

I side with longtime ad watcher John Carroll, currently executive producer of “Greater Boston” on WGBH-TV, who labels the ad as the “cheapest, lamest, grasp at a laugh.”

Another friend, Robert Katz, a long-time advertising executive, finds this ad to be in “very poor taste.” My age peer Emerson Stamps regrets “an acting out of the violence of society” while Donna Svrluga says simply: “I was appalled.”

The views of the students at Washington University and at Harvard would be welcomed by the people at Frito-Lay in Dallas. I spoke to the company’s director of public relations, Charles Nicolas, who told me the ad has proved so popular in other countries that Frito-Lay decided to present it on the Super Bowl broadcast. He admits, however, that they have received negative feedback as well as positive.

Nicolas confesses not knowing how to react to the criticism. “It was an attempt at humor,” he says, and adds. “We didn’t mean to offend anyone.” Fortunately, the company has no plans to show it again in this country but it is currently airing it in Mexico and eight other countries.

Maybe they would have profited, as I did, from the work of the “Media Watch,” a committee of the Gray Panthers that used to monitor television programs and commercials for evidence of mistaken views of elders.

Members of this group raised my own consciousness in the 1970s about the often subtle stereotypes of older people that were more common then. Not without a certain militancy, the Panthers would go after the producers of the ads and growl at the networks that showed them.

You may wonder if I am making to big a deal out of this.  After all, it was just an ad. What difference does it make except to sell more potato chips?

But ageism, like racism and sexism, exerts harmful outcomes on society. People lose their jobs because of it. Older Americans get shortchanged in quality health care because of ageist attitudes. And many people are made to feel worthless because growing older is regarded in so many quarters as the road to irrelevance.

The kind of prejudice behind the “Senior Moment” ad (this title itself I find patronizing) is subtle and covered over by an attempt at humor. That does not make it any less objectionable.

Richard Griffin

Fiftieth Anniversary

The day on which I drafted this column, January 31, 2004, was the 50th anniversary of my father’s death.

To me and my three brothers and two sisters, it remains a day of mixed feelings. We still regret his loss at age 56, a death that seems to us premature. He died of stomach ulcers, then often a disease fatal to newspapermen but now an illness easily handled by modern medical remedies.

Ultimately, John Griffin died of the pressures often felt by people in his career. As reporter, columnist, Sunday editor, and finally editor-in-chief of the Boston Post, he lived with constant deadlines and experienced the rise and fall of a publication that went from great journalistic success to complete business failure. In its last days it was taken over by a ne’er do well who ran it into the ground.

For family members, the loss of our father was devastating. It hit my younger siblings especially hard, as it did our mother. Like many other women of that era, she was not prepared for either the practical or the emotional challenges suddenly brought on by death of her husband. To some degree, she never recovered from this loss, despite living four more decades.

Though I was the first-born and already away from home and progressing in my first career, my father’s death had a strong emotional impact on me. I still remember vividly the scene in the New York City hospital room where he died. It was the first time I had ever seen him helpless, as he lay unconscious and laboring to breathe.

I bent over him and wanted to tell him of my love for him but, never having done so previously, could not do so then. This failure continues to cause me regret, as does the emotional tension that I used to feel in his presence when I was a teenager.

The days of grief that followed – – the wake in our home, the crowds of people who came to express condolences, and the funeral attended by hundreds of prominent Bostonians and friends –  – have also maintained their hold deep within my psyche. To some degree, this death remains one that I have never felt entirely reconciled to, even 50 years later.

I regret not having had the opportunity to talk with him when I was grown up and more mature. Conversation when we both were past the time of conflict would have been precious to me. I sometimes fantasize about the two of us sitting down together and talking about the old days. But that never happened.

My father had 20 fewer years of life than I have had thus far. His family depended on him, especially those who were still young children. It all seemed so unfair. Why could he not have lived to be 100 as did his best friend, Elliot Norton, who died only last year?

And yet, he did have time to pass on to us a legacy of precious human values that have continued to benefit us all. The spirituality that meant much to him means much to us also. Family traditions of love for learning and respect for other people owe their origin to our father as well as our mother.

My father’s faith, passed on to me, supports my basic outlook on reality. I believe that his life has continued in a different sphere of being. Long since, I have made my own the words of our funeral liturgy whereby life is “changed, not taken away.” Those same rites call our destination “a place of refreshment, light, and peace.”

I like to think of my father as with God and enjoying the transformed existence that my spiritual tradition describes. That is what I hope for myself when the time comes for me to leave this world.

I feel thankful to my father for the heritage that he passed on to me and my siblings. He was a person who embodied many traits that I have come to value more in my later years.

The anniversary of his death, untimely event that it was, brings back a full store of memories and prompts me to offer thanks to God for my father.

Richard Griffin

Ho Hum – Sleep Problems

This is one column that I hope puts you to sleep. Or, at least, alerts you to the value of dealing with difficulties you may have in sleeping.

I write, not because of personal problems with sleeping but through my awareness that many age peers labor under the burden of insufficient or poor sleep. Sitting through years of dull lectures in an overly long academic program may have given me an unfair advantage.

Professionals who have studied sleep problems estimate that more than one-half of Americans over age 65 have them. About one-third of us suffer from insomnia in particular.

Dr. Robert Butler, whose name looms large on aging issues, says: “The best way to help secure a good night’s rest is to exercise regularly.” Founding Director of the National Institute on Aging and currently President and CEO of the International Longevity Center in New York City, Butler last fall convened a group of experts to explore the subject of older people’s sleep and its relationship to their health.

The medical professionals at this conference rejected the common view that sleep problems are a normal part of the aging process. Not without some inconsistency they do, however, recognize that later life, with its physical and psychic changes, is a time when problems with sleep are more likely to occur.

They see sleep difficulties as linked with such serious issues as memory malfunction, depression, and greater likelihood of falls. Bad effects on the nervous system and a lowering of the immune system’s resistance to disease are other perils that can result from failing to sleep well.

Fred Turek, one of the conference experts, calls these connections a “vicious cycle” because of the ways they affect one another. Problems such as depression can serve as both cause and effect of poor sleeping habits.

Professor Turek is director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology at Northwestern University. I spoke to his colleague, Kathryn Reid, Ph.D., who shared with  me fascinating information about sleep, something she calls “a new area of research.”

I do not know much about circadian rhythms but I often feel like going to bed earlier than I want to retire and I often get up earlier than I wish. That means that the inner clock in my brain and my feelings of fatigue are not entirely in synch.

On most afternoons, I experience a slump period. Usually I take this as a signal for me to nap for 15 or 20 minutes, something I do with pleasure.

Research reveals that naps of this length are better than longer ones. If you sleep more than a half hour, you may awake feeling more tired than when you nodded off. However, Winston Churchill, the patron saint of naps, went in for longer ones, apparently without ill effects of this sort.

Dr. Butler worries about sleeplessness going unrecognized as a medical condition or being treated inappropriately. Physicians sometimes share the stereotype that considers problems in this area simply as a necessary byproduct of aging. Perhaps that is why there is only a 20 percent chance doctors will ask you about your sleep.

Participants in the New York conference freely admit to insufficient knowledge about many sleep issues. Currently, research studies aim to learn more about responses to light therapy, drugs such as melatonin and valerian, and the value of short naps.

Insomnia has never been one of my problems. For that deliverance, I attribute  major influence to a habit formed long ago of winding down at the end of each day. I turn down bright lights, do tasks requiring little serious thought, and settle down interiorly. My goal is to create an atmosphere conducive to falling asleep readily.

Experience has taught me the wisdom of not allowing upsetting thoughts to invade the precincts of my brain during the later hours. Then and during the night such thoughts assume inflated proportions. Faucet drips become floods; minor noises turn into thunderclaps; pygmies grow into giants. Problems that during the day are manageable get magnified a hundred times at night.   

About another problem threatening sound sleep, namely apnea, you’ll have to ask my roommate. I like to think myself unable to snore but I suspect otherwise. At least, I try not to do it during sermons, political speeches, and academic lectures.

Like just about everything else that affects the human body and psyche, sleep and its problems are complicated.

However, even in the face of incomplete knowledge, experts recommend that people with serious sleep problems get medical help. It is unwise to allow such difficulties to fester when appropriate intervention can go far to provide remedies.

A carefully designed program that combines exercise and diet reform, for instance, may reduce one’s weight enough to make sleep much better. It is unwise to be resigned to sleep problems without getting help in investigating them.

If you wish to read either a summary of the report or the complete text, you can find them online at www.ilcusa.org. You will need to select Press Room.  

Richard Griffin

McNamara and His Wars

“I think the human race needs to think more about killing.” This sober advice comes from Robert McNamara in the compelling new documentary film “The Fog of War.”

Interviewed by the marvelously creative Cambridge filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara at age 85 talks at length about his life and the wars (and near-wars) in which he was closely involved. The film held me transfixed for all of its 106 minutes and made me relive the traumatic times it depicts. As Morris himself says, “This is a movie filled with existential dread.”

Besides monumental issues of survival for nations and the civilized world, the documentary raises questions about the life of an individual man whose decisions led to huge and agonizing losses of life. How, in his later years, does he live with himself? After such a record of involvement with mass killing, how can he find any interior peace?

Errol Morris reportedly disagrees with those who see McNamara as not tortured by his past. But the filmmaker does not push him to reveal his inmost thoughts or to admit feelings of guilt. The aged McNamara never says to what extent he regards himself as a person responsible for acting immorally on a grand scale.

Though the Vietnam War looms large in the film, other events in McNamara’s career are shown to have significant consequences. While still in his 20s, the future Secretary of Defense was an officer on the staff of General Curtis LeMay, working to select targets in Japan for raids that firebombed 67 cities in 1945 and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. (LeMay will always connected with the suggestion that we might bomb our enemies “back to the Stone Age.”)

McNamara also gives the 1962 Cuban missile crisis major attention. The former Defense Secretary attributes our narrow escape from nuclear war to blind luck rather than rationality. Yet, he credits a now little-known figure, onetime United States ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, for giving crucial advice to President Kennedy about how to deal with Khrushchev and ignore the Soviet hardliners.

The film takes its structure from 11 lessons that McNamara draws from his experience. For the missile crisis just cited, he advises: “Empathize with your enemy.” Yet he appears not to have done so himself. When, in 1995, he went to visit the wartime leaders of Vietnam, he was amazed to discover that his former enemies viewed the basic conflict in that country as a civil war rather than as part of a Communist campaign to take over southeast Asia.

From my days as an opponent of the United States’ role in that war, I remember clearly the realization I shared with other resisters that the war was indeed an internal struggle between North and South Vietnam. We also knew that the “domino theory” was altogether too shaky a reason to justify intervention. McNamara and Lyndon Johnson seem to have been ignorant of, or to have ignored, both these realities.

The film shows horrific scenes of bombing in both World War II and in Vietnam. How anyone could think it moral to firebomb or clusterbomb civilian populations puzzled me then and still escapes me now. But McNamara judges these actions with a relativity that has already attracted wide attention.

Recognizing that if we had lost World War II he might have been prosecuted as a war criminal, he asks: “But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” The question qualifies as valid but it suggests that he has been adopting an inadequate standard of judging morality in the first place.

The writer and social critic Roger Rosenblatt believes that McNamara is indeed tormented but at the same time unable to ask for compassion. Though in the film his eyes ask us to tell him how to live with himself, Rosenblatt says, he remains technological man, accustomed only to solving problems not to coping with moral issues. However, in this instance, only he can answer the agonizing questions of individual responsibility, no one else.

Were I close to him, I would reach out to him with compassion. Even though so much of his life has been implicated in the killing of fellow human beings, many of them of them innocent, he has done some beneficial things too, as the film brings out.

Among his lessons, number nine reads: “In order to do good, you have to engage in evil.” To me, this adage is flawed but I can understand something of what he means. My own response to McNamara’s situation is to see it as basically spiritual. Like all of us, he must come to grips with the mystery of evil and his part in it.

To an extent, we are all compromised by evil but, unlike the rest of us, he has been implicated in life and death issues on a grand scale. Anyone among us can offer him compassion if he asks; no one of us can offer forgiveness. That goes beyond our power but I believe (and this is faith rather than reason) forgiveness is available.

Richard Griffin

In the Labyrinth

Can reading good books bring one closer to God?  Nancy Malone believes it can and cites long experience as a Roman Catholic nun to support her view.

Can personal humiliation lead a person to a deeper appreciation of God’s role in her life?  Again, Sister Nancy finds in a personal crisis the way to a more honest spirituality.

These are the main messages in her book: “Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading,” recently published by Riverhead Books. As an old friend of the author, I read this work with particular interest and I value its insights into the life of the spirit.

The author does not intend simply to deliver messages, however. She writes a memoir, tracing her life from the early days in Bridgeport, Connecticut to the present, on City Island in the Bronx. Along the way she details many varied experiences leading up to her major crisis.

As Sister Nancy searches for the God within her, she does not proceed by straight lines but by an erratic course of abrupt turns and swings away from the center and then back again. This progress she compares to a labyrinth that brings the traveler to an unseen destination through byways where one often feels lost.

Along her way, she had to discover that “spirituality is meant to be the living breath, the soul, enlivening the creed, moral code, and cult – worship – that constitute any religion.”

She also came to a new appreciation of what reading can do for the spiritual life. In fact, from another author she learned the phrase “book providence” to indicate “that certain books come into our lives at certain times for some God-given purpose.” For Sister Nancy the books she was reading while recuperating from a serious illness led her to change fields and prepare herself to teach theology.

Throughout her book, the author shares appreciation of the books that she has found most valuable. After the last chapter she adds a short list of the writers and books of special value to her and offers appraisals of them. She makes a point of including books that are not considered “spiritual” but which speak to her of human beings in all of our God-given complexity.

The great crisis that has transformed Sister Nancy’s life lasted from 1975 to 1983.  During this period she experienced what she describes as a “dark night.” She felt her spirit to be dead and she could no longer pray or even read. Worse still, she felt “hopelessness, self-loathing, and shame.”

Finally, in January of 1983 she admitted to herself that she was an alcoholic. Facing this fact involved for her the humiliation of acknowledging how far drinking had led her to contradicting the ideals of the religious life to which she had dedicated herself. Recognizing herself as an alcoholic, she gradually came to see that her life would have to change radically. This in itself was painful, to accept the need for transformation of a life that had once seemed straightforward.  

It was through Alcoholic Anonymous that Sister Nancy’s life turned around. Thanks in large part to AA, she has been able to put off the false self that brought her such pain. She praises the AA text “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions” because “it offers as good a description of spirituality as any I’ve read elsewhere.”

Of herself, she now says: “In the years since 1983, I have been in recovery, never cured, with every kind of support in fellowship and from God that I could ask for – and this is where I always hope to be.”

She feels herself to have discovered anew “the meaning of life, a portrayal of who I am called to be.” This discovery now seems to her “what I have been looking for in all the reading that I have done.”

At the same time she continues to feel a deep human aloneness, something she connects with her vow of life-long celibacy. But she also feels it to be an invitation into “God’s interiority.” As she now sees it, that is the destination to which her labyrinth will finally bring her when she completes her adventure of the spirit.

Richard Griffin

Rick Curry

“If I had two hands, I would be more arrogant than I am now, I would have made a lot of money, and I would have hurt a lot of people.”

This is what Rick Curry, a Jesuit brother based in Manhattan, says of his disability. He was born without a right forearm, making him a different person, he is convinced, from what he would have been otherwise.

About his disability he comments further: “My disability means nothing to me and it means everything.” Having only one arm has not stopped him from achieving many of his life goals. And, positively, it has given him a spiritual reach that is making a difference.

Brother Curry founded and directs the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, with a residential school in Maine and a theatre in New York City. Now age 59, he has been working with the disabled (that’s what he calls people with handicaps) for 25 years.

In his experience, disabled performers have special gifts and he identifies four of these. For one, they enjoy much greater powers of concentration than do others. They also understand audiences, as if they were barometers walking into a room. Disabled actors and actresses have learned to “accept their own instrument.” Finally, they understand conflict and drama, and they see into what audiences need to understand but usually do not.

Despite a lifetime of trying to cope with it, Brother Curry still finds challenges in accepting his disability. “It’s very painful to this day to meet people,” he confesses openly. After a recent fundraiser at his theatre, he came home exhausted. Having to encounter so many people and smile at them wore him out.

But he continues to appreciate the spiritual values that disability has brought him. “The great gift of being born different,” he says, “is celebrating others’ differences.” It helps him to know what minorities of all sorts go through. Also this difference is the vehicle for what he calls “the grace of empathy.” He has been enabled to feel for the suffering of other people no matter who they are.

Brother Curry goes so far as to claim: “At this stage of my life, I’d rather have one arm than be bald.” When I asked him if he really meant this, he told me: “I am so secure with my disability now that I don’t want to be left with the problem of cosmetics.” Getting a hair piece or trying to cope with baldness in some other way would be upsetting to him.

Another benefit of disability is that it can stir greater trust in God. But Brother Curry’s record here is mixed. “Every morning I place my trust in God,” he says, “but by noon, I have taken half of it back.” Humbly he confesses: “There are a lot of other problems with me.”

Despite what he says about the importance of trust, he considers his own disability as a source of independence. The role of trust in his life coexists uneasily with the need to make his own way independently in a not always sympathetic world.

In some of his self-assessment, Brother Curry shows this independent streak. “I didn’t go into the religious life to hide,” he explains. Though he knew he could not become a surgeon or a priest, he chose to work in ministry, closely associated with priests. “I love being a brother,” he says, and adds proudly: “I’m an arrogant bastard. I have a Ph.D.”

In phrases that sum up the main convictions of his life, Brother Curry says: “You can only praise the Creator with the gifts God gave you. I believe disability is a gift.”

When I share with him my later life experience of having a lifelong disability, my lighthearted statement makes him laugh out loud. “Other people catch up with you,” I tell him, referring to the physical problems so many older people have. It obviously strikes a chord in him, my noting how aging introduces many to what some of us have always known.

Talking with this vibrant man of spirit has enlarged my worldview. Like the rest of us, Rick Curry is clearly a man of mixed and conflicted feelings about himself. But his central insights into the role of disability in human life offer much to ponder amid the hazards of daily existence.

Richard Griffin

Van Gogh

The great nineteenth-century Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh was a deeply spiritual man. His portraits, on display in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts until September 24th, reveal a man passionately interested in the character and soul of the people whom he drew and painted.

The son of a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, van Gogh himself did theological studies as a young man. For a time, he served as an evangelist reaching out to poor coal miners in Belgium. When, in the last ten years of his life, 1880 to 1990, he devoted himself entirely to art, he brought to this vocation the spiritual concerns that he had long felt.

What one critic has described as van Gogh’s “deep moral earnestness” comes across memorably in the portraits of a postmaster, Joseph Roulin, and his family, residents of Arles in southern France, whom  he painted in his last years. Similarly, the haunting self- portraits of this period bring sensitive viewers into the artist’s soul.

Of this kind of art, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “The painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love or respect for the human being that is portrayed.”  And to his brother again: “I always feel confident when I am doing portraits, knowing that this work has much more depth – it isn’t the right word perhaps, but it is what makes me cultivate whatever is best and deepest in me.”

For these reasons, Vincent preferred to paint ordinary people rather than the rich and powerful. “I often think the servant girls so much more beautiful than the ladies, the workmen more interesting than the gentlemen; and in those common girls and fellows I find a power and vitality which,  if one wants to express them in their peculiar character ought to be painted with a firm brushstroke, with a simple technique.”

For me, van Gogh has special fascination because of the feeling that a friend, Henri Nouwen, had for the man and his work. Henri, also Dutch by birth and upbringing, was a priest who, two years after his death, still has a large and devoted following as a spiritual writer and director.

From 1971 to 1981, Henri was a professor at Yale Divinity School where he taught a course that featured the art of van Gogh. Seven volumes of lecture notes, student papers, and articles survive Father Nouwen and witness to the powerful attraction he felt toward the artist.

In the words of Netannis Arnett, a writer in a newsletter issuing from the Henri Nouwen Literary Center near Toronto, “Van Gogh’s ability to see light in darkness, to see beauty in the struggle, brought Henri to a keener awareness of brokenness and God’s love for all Creation.”

And further: “Henri appreciated van Gogh’s relentless efforts to see the divine in everyone, and to live compassionately with the most disenfranchised. He thought of van Gogh as radical in his convictions in wanting to become part of others’ misery faithfully, and noticed the vocation of a monk in van Gogh’s zeal and action.”

Van Gogh, sensitive and passionate, suffered greatly. After a break in his relationship with a friend and fellow painter Paul Gaugin, Vincent slashed his own ear. And his death, in 1890, came about after he mortally wounded himself with a gunshot. Father Nouwen was also painfully conscious of his own brokenness and could identify with the artist in his suffering.

Netannis Arnett draws the parallel: “Both Henri and van Gogh had a great capacity to capture in words or images the depth of  human experience – the pain and the ecstasy of the human creature in relation to the universe. Inspired by van Gogh’s brilliant palette, Henri found a new way of understanding the belovedness of every creature.”

In his notes Father Nouwen wrote about the spiritual kinship that he felt with van Gogh. Relying on this testimony, the newsletter writer says that Henri considered van Gogh his saint and a kind of spiritual companion.

Knowing my own limited capacity for contemplation, I can only envy my friend Henri’s habit of sitting for hours before a painting or sculpture. He was able to enter into world of van Gogh and appreciate its deep spiritual meaning.

Richard Griffin