James Lileks had an absolute humdinger of a screed the other day concerning the manifest childishness of what passes for “culture” and “intellectual thought” these days. The whole thing is worth a read, but I think these brief excerpts really go a long way towards capturing the overall feel of the piece:
I’m not going to defend [Senator Joe] McCarthy, because he was a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades. To say that he was sorta right, in the sense that there were Commies about, is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a salutory effect on Japanese urban renewal. I’m not interested in those debates right now. I’d just like to point out that it’s a little late in the game to trot out a play about the mean old witch-hunts. The bravery of the scrappy idealists! The piggish philistinism of the anti-commie brutes! The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis! (Did you know they didn’t show him below the waist on TV, at first! True! It was horrible, the Fifties; no one had sex without weeping in shame afterwards. Sometimes during.) It’s just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated?
[…]
There’s a clinical psychological term for all this, and it’s “Pissed at Daddy.â€
It made me think (I was weeding today, doing lawnwork, and that lends itself to crank-think) of the perpetual adolescent strain in post-WW2 culture. Before the 50s, when there were actual problems like an interminable Depression and Nazis, adolescents were mostly unseen in the culture. You had kids, and you had grown-ups. Adolescents were young grownups, expected to adhere to the same general rules of behavior. It was an adult culture, and adolescents were the interns. The culture would tolerate some things like Bobby Soxers, but with wry eye-rolling amusement. After the war, though, the adolescent was not only the focus of the culture’s attention, he was taken seriously. He was an inarticulate oracle, a mumbling sage, a jeering jester with a switchblade. One of the dumbest lines in cinema is one of the most famous: asked what he’s rebelling against, Marlin Brando’s character in the “The Wild Ones†says “Whaddya got?â€
I, too, wonder what has happened to our society. Why do we expect so little from our adolescents? Why can’t we honestly expect adult-like behavior from our “young adults”, instead of constantly infantilising them? Is this phenomenon connected to the Nation of Wimps trend that we’ve talked about previously?
We treat our children like children and we treat our teens like children, at least in most social situations, but then if a parent decides to ban their children from, say, The Simpsons or Shock! Horreur! decry the exposure of Janet Jackson’s mamary terminus on live national TV, they are derided as a prude and a backwards-looking Puritan. So what’s a genuinely concerned parent to do?
