From the NYTimes comes this:

Op-Ed Columnist, Gail Collins, The Stump Theory

On Tuesday, a 10-year-old Sussex spaniel named Stump won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club, becoming the oldest dog to win the title in the show’s 133-year history.

Yet another sign of the emerging trend of 2009:

Old is in.

This is not exactly what we were expecting from the Age of Obama. When a 47-year-old becomes president by trouncing a 72-year-old opponent, there’s every reason to think that the tide is turning youthward.

For a minute or so, that seemed to be the case. The most high-profile cabinet job, Treasury secretary, went to Timothy Geithner, 47. Over at the bank bailout, a 35-year-old was in charge of the Office of Financial Stability. Hillary Clinton, 61, is headed to Bangalore and Beijing, leaving a 42-year-old replacement in her Senate seat. There was almost no one left in Washington who knew what Sputnik was, let alone the words to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.”

Now, less than a month into the new administration, we’ve got generational backlash. Everybody who watched Geithner explain how he was going to rescue the banking system thought he sounded like a callow youth. Where’s gravitas when you need it? Time to bring on Paul Volcker (81).

Meanwhile, the great national heroes are US Airways pilot Sully Sullenberger (58) and flight attendants Donna Dent (51), Sheila Dail (57) and Doreen Welsh (58). Admit it, when you get on a plane these days, you feel worried if the crew members don’t look as though they’re receiving bulletins from the AARP.

The movie star du jour is Mickey Rourke, 56. Rourke has truly been preparing for this moment all his life, since thanks to some interesting lifestyle changes, he has looked 56 since around 1987.

Is this a baby-boomer plot? In 1972, The Times’s Russell Baker noted that the people he had always thought of as “the kids” did not seem to be reproducing. Baker decided that the Woodstock generation was conspiring to cut the birth rate so they would always be in the majority and could “go on being the kids for the rest of their lives.”

And what do you know? Mick Jagger is still touring.

My own personal theory is that we’re witnessing a defense mechanism triggered by the current economic unpleasantness.

Since it appears that nobody is ever going to be able to afford to retire, we’re moving into an era in which having your car fixed or your tonsils removed by a 75-year-old will need to seem normal. Meanwhile, young people are going to have to stay in school and keep their heads down since their elders have no intention of creating any job openings in the near future. So it’s better if we readjust our thinking and start regarding everybody as 20 years younger than the calendar suggests. Then you will feel much better when the 80-year-old postman delivers your mail and it includes a request for money from your 38-year-old offspring doing post-post-post-doctoral work at Ohio State.

At least this will be good news for anybody under the age of 40 who gets into a jam. If the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and the Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez have drug issues, who cares? In the new adjusted way of viewing the country, Phelps is just a toddler and Rodriguez is barely in puberty.

And in their place, we have Stump. You may have missed his great star turn on Tuesday night. Strangely, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show does not get as much attention as, say, the Super Bowl, even though there are way more Americans who own dogs than play football. Perhaps if Bruce Springsteen (59) had done a half-time show at Westminster involving huge amounts of jumping around and a crotch-first slide into the camera, things would be different.

Stump, whose hobbies are sleeping and sleeping, is actually Champion Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee, but nobody his age can remember all that. After a refreshing workout that involved a short walk around the driveway, he trotted onto the stage and wiped the floor with his younger competition, the most notable of which was a poodle that was conceived with the 25-year-old semen of a long-dead champion named Snapper.

Stump would be around 70 in human years, but Snapper — wow. Even given the fact that it was frozen, Snapper’s seed has to have been the equivalent of at least 150.

And so it goes. This week at the Grammy Awards, every other prize went to Alison Krauss, the 37-year-old bluegrass star, who had made the canny career choice of pairing up with the former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant, 60. “In the old days, we would have called this selling out,” Plant said as he scooped up his five awards.

Maybe not selling out is going to come back into fashion, too. But if there’s nobody left doing any buying, does it still count?