Don't Trust Anyone Over Seventy.

 We live, as the news keeps informing us, in an aging society.
 Advances in medicine and the declining birth rate mean that society is tipping, as a whole, towards the older end of the spectrum.
 There are obvious examples - nobody went to see that action movie that Taylor Lautner made, but everyone went to The Expendables 2 - but creeping in amongst it is the insidious, sycophantic and worrying idea that the people we grew up watching and listening to are infallible.
 Take Clint Eastwood.
 Everyone loves Clint. He's reached a level somewhere far beyond "icon." Even my children will probably understand what a great symbol of outlaw masculinity Clint Eastwood was, in the same way that I understand the concept of "John Wayne" as an archetype, despite being born the best part of a decade after his death.
 Clint Eastwood is one of the few people left alive who is genuinely deserving of the term "legend." But that doesn't mean we should all nod along when he spends ten minutes lecturing an empty chair.
 Clint has, at worst, turned senile, based on that evidence. At best, he's become the sort of closed-minded ideologue who will support a candidate who is on record as saying that his favourite books are the Bible and Battlefield Earth.
 So, it's official. After a stellar career, we should stop listening to Clint Eastwood.
 Simillarly, after nearly a decade of stealing other peoples' material without any sign of remorse, Bob Dylan came out fighting this week to complain that plagiarism should be okay because it's traditional.
 This is the same Bob Dylan, incidentally, who once claimed - not without grounds - that he was solely responsible for the end of derivative, Tin Pan Alley songwriting.
 Now he's bitching when people call him out for stealing material, something he did as early as 2001's "Love and Theft" album, which at least managed some charm, and then shamelessly on albums like 2006's "Modern Times."
 So what's the answer?
 Maybe it's inevitable. My cousin and I were discussing the Clint Eastwood incident the other day and worried that it'll happen to all action heroes soon; you won't be able to move for senile former ass-kickers doing something weird. We'll all nod and smile and pretend that it's normal that Clint is down at MFI, having a conversation with an empty kitchen set, or that Kurt Russell has been scavenging at the bins again.
 Or, we could act realistically, and understand that upholding the ideas of our cultural forbears is not usually a good idea.
 Chuck Norris is seventy two - yes, really - and recently said that if the democrats win the upcoming election, it will lead to a thousand years of darkness.
 I don't care how much you like Chuck Norris or where you stand on the political spectrum: If you have a brain in your head, you know that those are the ramblings of a crazy, paranoid old man.
 I'm not saying that all old people are nuts - there are plenty of older people that I have immense respect for - but let's be honest: Agreeing with someone because they were cool forty years ago is never going to be the road to progress.
 Rock Hudson was seen as a very cool guy in his day, but was so ashamed of his homosexuality that he didn't bring it up until it killed him. The same can be said, more tellingly, for Freddie Mercury, a man who would only have been sixty-six today, far younger than someone like Ian McKellen, who is openly gay and, crucially, seems to have all his mental faculties intact. These days, Freddie's attitude would have been seen as embarrassing, no matter how much he is venerated as a musician.
 We need to stop worshiping people for being famous and, more importantly, we REALLY need to stop giving weight to peoples' opinions just because they've been famous for a long time.