Please remain clam, but, according to a host of books, if you look out the window you’ll notice society under threat from marauding packs of adults who refuse to grow up.
It’s hard not to panic when, at any time, you could be run over by fifty year olds on skateboards, but you are urged to stay focused and read on.
Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has concerns about dysfunctional infant adults, apparently the product of non-caring childhoods. Perhaps their parents were busy playing Twister.
We’re told to look at the alarming trends – more American adults between 18 and 49 watch the Cartoon Network than CNN. What’s more, there’s been a rise in the “obscene popularity” of toys and video games among adults.
Oh, come on! Toys? Obscene?
Maybe I’ve been playing Xbox on ganja too much to notice this latest threat to civilization (#3255, I believe). I have seen a few school mums who dress like their daughters. The only threat they pose is to dignity. Mind you, if you squint your eyes really, really tightly, some of them look pretty good.
And, thanks all the same, I’ll take SongeBob over the Late News and Even Stevens over Californication any day.
Where’s the evil?
We’re not talking about Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum – an adult in a child’s body, born with all his intellectual faculties intact and who deliberately stopped growing (I always thought in protest at how disgustingly badly adults behave – his mother’s adultery with her first cousin, for example) and later became a criminal.
On the whole, we’re talking about adults who have evolved as society allows. If you create a nanny-state you end up with a society of babies. If you diminish the importance of individual responsibility why should adults act responsibly?
If the relevance of tradition and social mores has been eclipsed by the rise of rights without concomitant duties, we can all damn well do what we like until we run up against a law. With no authority or guide but the state, we might as well make the most of the free space between it and the individual while we still can.
But this isn’t really about adult irresponsibility. It’s about jealousy, conformity and prosperity.
We're talking about adults who have the resources and time to disengage from real world concerns and indulge in the distractions which modern society has created. If the dude in board shorts at parent teacher night pays his taxes and discharges his responsibilities, it’s nobody’s business but his if he wants to don children’s clothes, play frisbee and spend his time pissed. This makes the guardians of culture uneasy and this "concern" is really about the snootiness and insecurity of the self-appointed intelligentsia.
Around 1890 Wordsworth wrote that the world is too much with us. The intervening century certainly has not made the world less present. Creepy little anti-establishment bugger though he was, those alarmed about the alleged rise of immature adults couldn’t find Oskar’s disengagement uninformed. Could it be that, while some adults indulge themselves childishly because they can afford to do so, others just want to get away from it all?
As ever, I’m talking my lead from poetry and rock ‘n roll.
Keef is only going to stop rocking when he croaks and Led Zep expose the young pretenders as, well, pretenders. As a Welsh drunk wrote:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
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