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The Death of the Grown-up
How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization
West, Diana
Hardcover
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BOOK SUMMARY
Diana West sees a US filled with middle-age guys playing air guitar and thinks "No wonder we can't stop Islamic terrorism."  She sees Moms Who Mosh and wonders "Is there a single adult left anywhere?"  But, the grown-ups are all gone. 

BOOK SYNOPSIS

AUTHOR BIO
DIANA WEST is a Washington Times op-ed columnist, syndicated by United Media, who has contributed to many other publications including the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, New Criterion, Public Interest, Women's Quarterly and Washington Post Magazine. She has also written fiction for Atlantic Monthly. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.

BOOK EXCERPTS
Chapter One RISE OF THE TEEN AGE If a society is to preserve its stability and a degree of continuity, it must know how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, attitudes, values, and fantasies on everyday life. Eric Hoffer, 19731  Once, there was a world without teenagers. Literally. Teenager, the word itself, doesnt pop into the lexicon much before 1941. This speaks volumes about the last few millennia. In all those many centuries, nobody thought to mention teenagers because there was nothing, apparently, to think of mentioning. In considering what I like to call the death of the grown-up, its important to keep a fix on this fact: that for all but this most recent episode of human history, there were children and there were adults. Children in their teen years aspired to adulthood; significantly, they didnt aspire to adolescence. Certainly, adults didnt aspire to remain teenagers. That doesnt mean youth hasnt always been a source of adult interest: Just think in five hundred years what Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontës, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, Eugene ONeill, and Leonard Bernstein have done with teen material. But something has changed. Actually, a lot of things have changed. For one thing, turning thirteen, instead of bringing children closer to an adult world, now launches them into a teen universe. For another, due to the permanent hold our culture has placed on the maturation process, thats where theyre likely to find most adults. This generational intersection yields plenty of statistics. More adults, ages eighteen to forty-nine, watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN.2 Readers as old as twenty-five are buying young adult fiction written expressly for teens.3 The average video gamester was eighteen in 1990; now hes going on thirty.4 And no wonder: The National Academy of Sciences has, in 2002, redefined adolescence as the period extending from the onset of puberty, around twelve, to age thirty.5 The MacArthur Foundation has gone farther still, funding a major research project that argues that the transition to adulthood doesnt end until age thirty-four.6 This long, drawn-out transition jibes perfectly with two British surveys showing that 27 percent of adult children striking out on their own return home to live at least once; and that 46 percent of adult couples regard their parents houses as their real homes.7 Over in Italy, nearly one in three thirty-somethings never leave that real home in the first place.8 Neither have 25 percent of American men, ages eighteen to thirty.9 Maybe this helps explain why about one-third of the fifty-six million Americans sitting down to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon each month in 2002 were between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine.10 (Nickelodeons core demographic group is between the ages of six and eleven.) These are grown-ups who havent left childhood. Then again, why should they? As movie producer and former Universal marketing executive Kathy Jones put it, There isnt any clear demarcation of whats for parents and whats for kids. We like the same music, we dress similarly.11 How did this happen? When did this happen? And why? More than a little cultural detective work is required to answer these questions. Its one thing to sift through the decades looking for clues; its quite another to evaluate them from a distance that is more than merely temporal. We have changed. Our conceptions of life have changed. Just as we may read with a detached noncomprehension how man lived under the divine right of monarchs, for example, it may be that difficult to relate to a time when the adolescent wasnt king. About a hundred years ago, Booth Tarkington wrote Seventeen, probably the first novel about adolescence. Set in small-town America, the plot hinges on seventeen-year-old William Baxters ability to borrow, on the sly, his fathers dinner jacket, which the teenager wants to wear to impress the new girl in town. In other words, its not a pierced tongue or a tattoo that wins the babe: its a tuxedo. William dons the ceremonial guise of adulthood to stand outfavorablyfrom the other boys. That was then. These days, of course, father and son dress more or less alike, from message-emblazoned T-shirts to chunky athletic shoes, both equally at ease in the baggy rumple of eternal summer camp. In the mature male, these trappings of adolescence have become more than a matter of comfort or style; they reveal a state of mind, a reflection of a personality that hasnt fully developed, and doesnt want toor worse, doesnt know how. By now, the ubiquity of the mind-set provides cover, making it unremarkable, indeed, the norm. But there is something jarring in the everyday, ordinary sight of adults, full-grown men and women both, outfitted in crop tops and flip-flops, spandex and fanny packs, T-shirts, hip-huggers, sweatpants, and running shoes. And whats with the captain of industry (Bill Gates), the movie mogul (Steven Spielberg), the president (Bill Clinton), the financier (Warren Buffet), all being as likely to walk out the door in a baseball cap as the Beave? The leading man (Leonardo DiCaprio) even wears it backward. Though he will leave the hotel later with a baseball cap turned backwards . . . he is not so much the boy anmore, The Washington Post observes of the thirty-year-old actor. No, not so much.12 If youve grown up withor just grown withthe perpetual adolescent, you see nothing amiss in these familiar images. It is the mature look of men from Joe DiMaggio to FDRthe camel hair coats, the double-breasted suits, the fedorasthat seems only slightly less fantastic to the modern eye than lace-collared Elizabethan dandies. The image of man, particularly as it has been made indelible on the movie screen, has changed from when Cary Grant starred in The Philadelphia Story, or William Powell starred in anything. In an essay called The Children Who Wont Grow Up, British sociology professor Frank Furedi sums up the difference. John Travolta nearly bust a gut being cute in Look Whos Talking, while Robin Williams demonstrated he was adorable as Peter Pan in Hook. Tom Hanks is always cutea child trapped in a mans body in Big, and then Forrest Gump, the child-man that personifies the new virtues of infantilism.13 Such virtues require little effort besides dodging maturity. Im not old enough to be a mister, goes the middle-aged refrain, a reflexive denial of the difference between old and young. This plaintive little protest is no throwaway line. Rather, its a motto, even a prayer, that attests to our civilizations near-religious devotion to perpetual adolescence. Such devotion is quickly caricatured in the adulation of the craggy rock star, age sixty-three, still singing (I Cant Get No) Satisfaction. But the desiccated oldster cavorting like the restless youngster is hardly the end of the phenomenon. In a world where distinctions between child and adult have eroded, giving rise to a universal mode of behavior more infantile than mature, Old Micks are no more prevalent than Baby Britneyswhich is as good a name as any for the artless five-  or six-year-olds taught to orgasmo-writhe (à la poppette du jour), belly bare and buttocks wrapped like sausages. At one time, so sexually charged a display by a child would have appalled the adults around her; now, Baby Britneysand they are legiondelight their elders, winning from them praise, Halloween candy, even Girl Scout music badges. What caused the change? Even now, the Baby Boom figures into any explanation of our cultural mentality. But before the first Boomers came of age, a tectonic shift in sensibilities was already taking place that the multitudes of adolescents in the making would later magnify, accelerate, and institutionalize. To make a snapshot case, consider the respective images of two screen goddesses that took shape on either side of World War II: Jean Harlow, the archetypal platinum blonde of the 1930s, and Marilyn Monroe, the definitive 1950s sexpot. While both womens lives ended prematurely, Harlow from illness, Monroe from suicide, it is Monroe who lives on as the icon everlasting, the symbol of an industry to which her contributions are surprisingly limited. The salient point is this: Prewar Harlow, who began her career at age nineteen (and died at age twenty-six), never played anything but womanly roles. Prostitute, stage star, executive secretary, or social climber, she always projected an adult sensibility. Postwar Monroe, on the other hand, made a career out of exuding a breathy, helpless sexuality that, in spite of her mature age (she died at thirty-five), was consistently and relentlessly childlike. Theres a reason movie audiences were willing to redirect their screen idolatry from the younger femme fatale (emphasis on femme) to the older sex kitten (emphasis on kitten). That is, the sequential popularity of such actresses reflects more than a simple variation on a theme of blonde loveliness. Rather, it reflects a changing paradigm of womanhood itself, a shift that signifies, to borrow a phrase from the late Senator Moynihan, the dumbing down of sexuality, a force at the crux of the infantilizing processand the sexual revolution to come. It came. Instead of sifting through the rubble of the old social structureblasted to bits, of course, as new sexual behaviors and attitudes volcanically emergedlets look at Baby Britney again. Some three decades after the sexual revolution, she rises from the ruins to symbolize the extent to which sexuality, particularly female sexuality, has been snatched from its traditional time and place in human developmentas a rite of passage to adulthood, to marriage, to having childrenand grafted onto girlhood, even toddlerhood, much to the regret of those among us who persist in costuming our wee ones on Halloween as cats, princesses, and cowgirls. Why the regret? Because not everyone has gone along with the new order. A sizable segment of the population still resists the pressure to transfer the milestones of maturityincluding, besides sexuality, a large chunk of financial and other freedomsto the very young. These are people who instinctively acknowledge differences between adults and children, and who harbor, maybe secretly, a nostalgic appreciation for the old-fashioned maturation process. Even as age has been eliminated from the aging process, they have a hunch that society has stamped out more than gray hair, smile lines, and cellulite. What has also disappeared is an appreciation for what goes along with maturity: forbearance and honor, patience and responsibility, perspective and wisdom, sobriety, decorum, and mannersand the wisdom to know what is appropriate, and when. This is not to say that gray lives and blue noses offer the only anchors against the hedonistic currents of the times. There is a wide and complex range of experienceemotional, aesthetic, physical, mental, and spiritualfor which only the maturing human being is even eligible. Of this, of course, the immortal bards were well aware; todays artists are numb to it. Etched onto our consciousnesses, in the universal shorthand of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, is the notion that life is either wild or boring; cool or uncool; unzipped or straitlaced; at least secretly licentious or just plain dead. And framing these stark and paltry choices for us is the same kind of black-and-white sermonizing that once preached milk-and-honey visions of heaven and fire-and-brimstone visions of hell. Instead of eternal salvation, of course, we now seek instant fulfillment; instead of damnation, we do anything it takes to avoid the deep, dark rut of middle-class convention. Or so we claim. Thats why, between the Very Beginning and Journeys End, an important aspect of Middle Age has gone missingthe prime of making a life. The phrase is Lionel Trillings, the esteemed critic and English professor, who, in the shank of the 1960s, saw that this work of making a life, once salient in Western culture, as he put it, was effectively over. This act of conceiving of human existence, ones own or anothers, as if it were a work of art that could be judged by established criteria, he wrote, was what virtually all novels used to be about; how you were born, reared, and shaped, and then how you took over and managed for yourself as best you could. And cognate with the idea of making a life, a nicely proportioned one, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, was the idea of making a self, a good self.14 We still, of course, have the beginning, but the middle only stretches on in a graceless vector that stops, one day, at an endpoint. Such a life is not, in Trillings words, nicely proportioned, but it is, as he shrewdly thought, propelled by a new cultural taboo against admitting personal limitationone of the tribal beliefs that sets Baby Boomers apart from their parents. As Trilling could see, If you set yourself to shaping a self, a life, you limit yourself to that self and that life. And limitation, particularly to the perpetual adolescent, is bad. Copyright © 2007 by Diana West. All rights reserved.  

BOOK REVIEWS
Diana Wests analysis of American culture and society is filled with sharp insights and critical judgments that are illuminating and provocative. The Death of the Grown-Up delivers an honest perspective on the many forces and pressures challenging 21st century Americans.
Lou Dobbs, CNN
 
 The most intriguing question about American culture today--even more intriguing than, "When and why did men start to hug each other?"--is the question Diana West tackles in this penetrating and witty book: "When and why did Americans decide to stop growing up?" Actually, I have a depressing feeling that the two questions are related.
George F. Will This is a vigorously argued, far-reaching and timely book which should be read especially by those content to drift along with the noxious tide of fashion.Paul Johnson

Diana West's brilliant and irreverent skewering of America's fixation on youth is a wake-up call for every individual who wants to see Western civilization endure. West makes the provocative case that a mass cultural obsession with perpetual adolescence has eliminated adulthood from the human experience, leaving our society effectively undefended as we confront the challenges ahead, especially the menace of Islamofascism.Tony Blankley

With keen wit and unparalleled insight, Diana West traces the national decline of adulthood and the rise of the permanent adolescent class in American life. From James Dean to Elvis to Bill Clinton, from "anything goes" to "whatever," un-parents have succumbed to the Teen Age. But what makes West's invaluable analysis stand apart is her connection of the death of the grown-up to the post-9/11 political, intellectual, and moral paralysis that imperils us today. Her impassioned message: We cannot defend our identity if we have no clue about who we were and are and should be. We cannot defend our existence as long as we mollycoddle a generation of self-absorbed brats. West administers an overdue spanking to the cultural relativists: Wise up or we will all pay dearly.
Michelle Malkin
This is a brilliant book that devastatingly dissects our politically correct society. In a book that will be read for generations, Diana West has written one of the most important books on our culture, politics and society that I have ever read. Diana has masterfully recognized and explained how certain trends within Western culture have fundamentally altered Western identity and weakened our resolve to combat a fierce enemy, radical Islam. A must read for anyone
who wants to understand why, all too often, many in the West are apologetic when confronted with the excesses of radical Islam and what we need to do to win the war on terror. This is a phenomenal book that will truly alter the way you view society. It is masterful.Steven Emerson
 
Diana West has written a book not to be missed by anyone concerned about the future of America and the West.  With wide-   ranging scholarship and a lucid and sprightly prose style, she chronicles and analyzes the unprecedented transfer of cultural authority from adults to teenagers. The unhappy consequences range from the obliteration of traditional standards in almost all areas of life to a multicultural relativism that lowers our defenses against elements of a civilization that would destroy us.  West has mounted a much-needed counterattack in the service of Western values and common sense.Judge Robert Bork

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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0312340486
ISBN(13-digit): 9780312340483
Dewey Decimal: 305.240973/09045
Library of Congress: 2007014402
Book Publisher: St Martins Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 256

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