Pacific Views

Faster, Pussycat

By now, everyone's had a chance to laugh hysterically at the Kim duToit essay (Didn't his parents listen to Johnny Cash like normal people? They must have missed the masterpiece psycho-social commentary that is 'A Boy Named Sue.'), the pussification of the western male. As Avedon indicated, an excellent response was Sadly, No's the dickification of the western female. Or perhaps, a commenter's rendition of the genitalization of the western amoeba. But the biscuit taker was the one that James recommended, the duToitification of the western conservative. Where, in fractional part, it says:

...Given all that human beings have gone through in the history of the world, the very idea of blubbering at such length about how hard it is to be a man in twenty-first century America is just about the most embarrassingly weinerly thing I can imagine. C’mon, Kim, buck up. Could you articulate your complaints with a straight face to Leonidas at Thermopylae? Or to General Washington and the boys at Valley Forge? (Look, I know you guys are cold, but this stuff hurts my feelings) ...

Meanwhile, Ampersand responds, 'Please, bless us with pussification!', further adding: "...Wouldn't history have been immeasurably improved if [the previously enumerated list of destructive thugs] were "objectively pro-pussy"?..." And Dwight Meredith simply says, grow up.

I think Dwight's really put his finger on it, here. Because popular culture, not just overgrown boys trying to relive the high school year that never was, has a problem with growing up. Youth culture is, after all, a fine thing. But at a certain point, a continued preoccupation with living it out is merely embarassing. Especially when too many people fail to recognize the harm of being perpetual teenagers until kids start imitating their elders under the mistaken impression that there's nothing more to life than looks, superficial relationships, and the acquisition of trappings without achievement. And so I offer the expurgated...

Childification of the Western Adult

We have become a nation of children.

It wasn't always this way, of course. There was a time when adults put the welfare of family and community above their temporary entertainment, knowing full well that it might mean never getting to own that dream (insert fantasy possession here) they'd always wanted. Their most fervent material desires since the onset of puberty doomed to oblivion, obtained instead by irresponsible credit card addicts. There was a time when children by age wanted to grow up to be adults, instead of children by choice.

There was a time when adults bravely went to their certain boredom, with expressions like "Guess I have to milk the cows again." (Early homesteader discovering the joys of country life, to spouse who replied "Yep. And this tallow won't boil itself, either.")

There was a time when adults had to behave in a dignified and reasonable manner, sometimes enduring the ridicule of their own children, so that civilization wouldn't go straight to hell in a handbasket. And there was a time when adults interceded among arguing parties and tried to get everyone to resolve things rationally because we recognized imminent mayhem in our communities when we saw it, and knew that it was better to prevent problems than solve them.

There was even a time when a President of the United States said "that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations - far away.... We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community. We have learned the simple truth. Emerson said, that 'the only way to have a friend is to be one.' We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust - and with fear." Merely because twice in his lifetime he'd seen the hopes and dreams of whole nations destroyed utterly by unchecked aggression. We once had presidents who knew where the buck stopped, too.

We're not like that anymore.

Now, little children in school are handcuffed for not getting on the floor fast enough when the police come to rifle through their lockers, while watching the adults around them increasingly speak as though belligerence was the sole virtue of humanity. As long as you're one of the demanding uber-toddlers who finally get to Show Everybody Who's Boss.

Now, adults are taught that violence is necessary -- but that sublimated and institutional violence is even better. Because it allows you to avoid blame when people call you on the disastrous results of your passive-aggressive actions, which prosperous and accomplished child-adults are no longer responsible for. Actions for which children and the unfortunate must be held to full account, because it's only okay to be a prat when you know you can blame it on your siblings and Get Away With It.

Now, adults' fashion includes not a businessperson dressed in a three-piece suit, but tight sweaters worn by freaks of nature barely possessing mature secondary sex characteristics.

Now, we need television commercials to remind us that kids need some adult supervision, as though we'd all somehow gotten too preoccupied with being big babies ourselves.

Now, adults are given bread and circuses, so that their natural desires for responsibility, self-actualization, and concern for the broader community can be channelled towards the pettiest sound and fury, instead of encouraged and harnessed.

And finally, our President, who practically described his thirties as 'one youthful indiscretion after another', publicly demonstrated his ritual disinterest in any kind of deep book learning. And was immediately applauded by loads of Harvard and Yale educated wanna-be children, who never got over being called 'nerds' by immature little snots on the playground whose own parents didn't bother to read to them.

How did we get to this?

In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Child. It wasn't always so: there was a time when it was Parent who ruled the home, made sure everyone was safe, had what they needed to survive, and knew when to reward responsibility with greater freedom.

But in the twentieth century, overgrown children became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media -- and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When people stopped having to grow up, it was inevitable that government was going to become more defensive, more intrusive, and more bullying, because children imagine that being an adult means making everybody do what you say all the time and getting all the toys. It was inevitable that their childish influence on politics was going to emphasize the paranoid fear of not being taken seriously, and center on collecting 'complete sets' of all the natural resources that our fuddy-duddy predecessors told us had to be shared with other countries.

I am aware of the hissy fits this statement is going to set off, and I don't care a load of fetid goat bollocks.

What I care about is the fact that since the beginning of the baby boomer era (an appropriately named generation if ever there was one), there has been a concerted campaign to pronounce adults uncool, to reduce them to figures of fun, and to render them helpless, literally. And adults have cooperated every step of the way, by becoming in turns more rigid, childish, and unable to rationally evaluate the consequences of their actions.

I don't see why adults should have become babified, except that we allowed it to happen -- and you know why we let it happen? Because it's the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, we've allowed it to go too far, and our adulthood has become too babified for words.

At this point, I could have gone two ways: the first would be to say, "...and I don't know if we'll get it back. The process has become too entrenched, the cultural zeitgeist of the adult as child redux has become part of the social fabric, and there's not much we can do about it."

But I'm not going to quit. Bugger that. One of the characteristics of the non-babified adult (and this should strike fear into the hearts of pathetic never-getting-a-senior-prom-do-over whiners everywhere) is that they never quit just because it seems like they're completely surrounded by greedy, brutish, intentional ignoramuses who have run everything since the beginning of time. Declaration of Independence, folks.

I want a real adult as President -- not George Bush. An "adult" who had to buy a ranch where he could finally play cowboy in front of the biggest audience ever, and push around every head of state on the planet "prove" to the world that he was finally in charge. When we all know that real adults convey authority by virtue of self-discipline, useful work, and a solid grasp of the workings of their sphere of influence.

I want our culture to become more adult -- not the satirical kind of adult, like The Man Show, or the cartoonish figures of Hugh Grant, Goldie Hawn, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Aniston. (Note to the Hollywood execs: We absolutely sodding loathe kid movies about sixteen year old geniuses saving the world, 22-year old supermodel PhDs, wet-behind-the-ears CEOs that run multi-million dollar companies without ever doing any work, and all that childish mental masturbation. We want more Susan Sarandons, Morgan Freemans, Anthony Stewart Heads, Angelica Hustons, and Robert DeNiros. Never mind that it's complicated -- we can deal with complicated, we are complicated, we are adults -- the world is complicated, and we have come to realize that we can't make it simple by fiat like we always imagined it was before working for a living. City By The Sea was a great movie, and you know why? Because you could have cut out all the childish parts, and it still would have been a great movie, because it was about Real Adults with finite resources making tough choices in bad circumstances. Try cutting out all the kid parts in a typical romance or action adventure movie -- you'd end up with the opening and closing credits.)

Speaking of unrealistic media images, do you want to know why brain-dead reality shows have become such a fad? You know why police aggression is such a problem in so many cities? Why bureaucracies seem to become more rigid and inflexible with each passing year?

It's a reaction: a reaction against being babified and surrounded in projected fantasies, against the abandonment of proper strivings to become a responsible member of the community. And I understand it, completely. Adults need to feel that they're giving back to society, they do push to make things better, they do have a desire not to leave the world worse than they found it, and all this does happen for a purpose.

Because any mammal with functioning genitalia can propagate. But only real adults can give their offspring a good start in life and a better chance of really and truly growing up themselves later on.

And other adults know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because sensible adults still manage to attract each other. Even if no one is going to swoon over them, because people with no desire to be adults fundamentally don't get it, and adults don't swoon.

We'd better get more adult, we'd better make it a national goal like an Apollo Program for greater sanity, because if we don't, our entire more-powerful-than-wise species will become a footnote to history.

Posted by natasha at November 15, 2003 04:32 AM | TrackBack