The Page 99 Test: Margaret Morganroth Gullette's "American Eldercide"

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Margaret Morganroth Gullette's "American Eldercide"

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and anti-ageism pioneer whose prize-winning work is foundational in critical age studies. She is the author of several books,

including Agewise, Aged by Culture, and Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic, Nation, and the Boston Globe. She is a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Gullette applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It, and reported the following:

American Eldercide concerns a dreadful failure of social justice in the COVID Era. It starts as an investigation of how the Trump administration, Congress, and the states abandoned the 1,400,000 residents of nursing facilities early in the Era. People who happened to be living in those government-supervised facilities were twenty-six times more likely to die than the rest of us.

Many were exposed to the virus when they could have been protected. Discarded as if they were expendable. Dependent on authorities who seemed distant or witless. Unable to get away to greater safety. Often dying alone. Yet saving them would have been doable: There were only 1.4 million of them. And they were resilient, not at all ready to die. The catastrophe was due not to the residents’ “biology” but to the well-known, ongoing failures of the public-health system.

Books about COVID ignore or slight these indigent people, mostly women, most on Medicaid, often disabled. This book, fueled by righteous anger, has to explain how they came to be ignored and, by now, forgotten. Americans were trained to accept a terrifying, widespread new form of ageist ableism, that youth would survive, but another falsely homogeneous category called “The Old” would die. Neither stereotype was empirically true, but a panicky, distracted, misled, self-absorbed, and fearful society had some reasons to think so. Page 99, as continued on page 100, works well to present one of the key reasons.
. . . . Overriding distinctions of age, race, and class, transcending the surges and lulls, another number, growing only in one fierce and fatal direction, mesmerized the population: [the total number of American deaths.]. Thinking about death could be forced on anyone, daily. A writer in the Boston Globe condensed common impressions from that period:
It’s hard to remember a year when death was so in your face from morning to night—from pages of obituaries in the morning paper to the nightly news with its images of mobile morgues parked outside overwhelmed hospitals and cemetery workers burying bodies as fast as possible with few mourners present. [top p. 100]: As early as July 2020, a new statistic circulated, that 80 percent of the US dead were over the age of sixty-five. The headline “1 of Every 100 Older Americans Has Perished” appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 2021. The early blare of announcements that residents composed 40 percent of the dead, and in some states over half, was overshadowed. . . . Residents had made up only 0.42 percent of the population. Everyone over sixty-five constituted 16 percent.
Receiving less attention, the residents’ dire conditions may have caused less concern or regret. The most succinct definition of “the expendables” I have found is “people whose disappearance wouldn’t draw attention.” With the onset of a more encompassing dread, that small hapless group was exiled, farther still, from the social embrace.
American Eldercide closely studies a historical moment, the new COVID Era, that was full of unnoticed crises. In this tightly structured book, many themes and feelings from these two pages recur: the role of the media, the misuse of statistics, the fear that is called mortality salience, the mass-mind created by fear, the psychology of divergent groups within that mass.

The previous chapter, “The Hidden Truths of a Corrupt World,” details Trump’s narcissistic ageism and reveals how his administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid carefully disguised malfeasance.

American Eldercide is also full of antidotes to such strange, grim material: reliable facts and warmer ways to feel; policy proposals for reforming the system from public-health experts, and life-saving rules from the Biden administration. The real embrace of justice can come only from anti-ageism--a powerful intersection of feminism, anti-racism, disability activism, progressive theory, and responsible caring.