“It is as if they have been sailing on a boat all their life...”

Aidan Walker, among other things Creator-in-Residence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes about his appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.I don’t understand what exactly he was there to talk about, other than that it had something to do with memes. What saved the piece for me, though, was this paragraph, referring to Maher:You must feel empathy for the Boomer marooned in a world he is not adapted to exist within. It is as if they have been sailing on a boat all their life, a boat which they understood had some problems and was not always pleasant, but it remained afloat. And now that entire boat is sinking, at the same moment they are growing weak and feeble, approaching death. They reach for any kind of floating material they can wrap their hands around. With media types — the people who look into cameras for a living — this clutching is especially desperate because so much of their power came not just from youthful good looks but from an ability to…