House of Eratosthenes

Hot trend in America: It’s becoming toddler nation. The bald eagle is being replaced by a Teletubby.

Remember when it was considered an insult to call Adam Sandler movies “adolescent”? If he is 15 forever mentally, at least he’s got about 10 developmental years on Allison Williams and Bee Shaffer when they snuggled up in their PJs on Instagram.

No wonder Sandler’s career has faded — his shtick isn’t absurd anymore. If they made “Billy Madison 2” or “Grown-Ups 3” today, they’d have to be documentaries.
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A decade or so ago I noticed something about well-shod young women in Manhattan: They were weirdly concerned with this thing called “birthday parties,” which I vaguely remembered from the “Mork and Mindy” era. “Birthday parties” seemed a strange activity for an adult to participate in. You’re going to solicit presents from your friends while punishing outcasts by denying them invitations? Odd, distinctly odd.

Equally odd were the Hello Kitty backpacks you started to see on (grown-up) girls around town, while Carrie Bradshaw was prancing around in fairy-princess wear. At the time I was a book review editor, and I loved to peek at what people were reading on trains. Whenever I saw someone with a fat hardcover book, my heart leapt — books are alive! But it was always Harry Potter. Then it was “Twilight,” then “The Hunger Games.”

Men, it had been noticed for years, were taking the opportunity — post-draft and post-sexual revolution — to stop trying to prove themselves worthy of women in any way except “being cool,” and so they lapsed into a universe of Barcaloungers, video games, and T-shirts and sneakers as the official uniform for all things. Sitcom after sitcom played off mature, sensible women rolling their eyes at the man-child antics of their boyfriends and husbands.

What’s the difference between now, and the age of “rugged fellas”? The most obvious two things are: Natural predators, and the discernible need for stuff getting built that had not yet been built. Thinking like a builder has a lot to do with thinking like a Real Man, and now, the shit’s all been built, there are no obvious natural dangers, in fact the few dangers we can define are located well outside our sphere of control. The very few daily pressures with which people have to contend, are mostly concerned with proving one’s worthiness for maintaining membership in the InCrowd^tm. Which is the everyday pastime of the three-to-twenty-year-old set; the kids. Adulthood is on indefinite leave, because reasons to act like an adult are on indefinite leave.

But that is not all of it. That is only the ignition point; there is a self-accelerating and self-perpetuating quality to this vicious cycle, as it feeds off its own energy to hang around, and grow some more. There is the female-male dynamic. Societies are always going to mold themselves around a shape defined by: What do the women want in their men? Well, ask them. They’re not going to, in any large numbers, say something like “He can fix things” or “He knows how to drive all sorts of trucks” or “He can open jars and kill spiders.” The predominant answer you’ll get back is “He makes me laugh!” and this is sincere. Two generations of convincing kids, their parents, teachers, and everyone else who is around kids that boys are just flawed copies of the girl-prototype, that all men are potential rapists and that might as well make ’em rapists, and women can do everything men can do — that has put us here. I’m not even getting into the “sitcoms playing off mature, sensible women rolling their eyes at the man-child antics” thing, and that’s true too.

Why do we have men? Nobody seems to know.

So women, when & where they still look for men, look for clowns. They don’t know how to look for, nor are they encouraged by society to look for, anything else. Men respond by being clowns. Fathers abandon their children, the moms look for a replacement-stepdad, and they find some guy who has the room to take on the whole brood because he got divorced — and his kids are being raised by some other dude.

Then there are the politics. The politicians. Someone was writing a couple years ago, “Mitt Romney lost the election because he said ‘I’ll put the country back to work!’ and 52% of the voters said ‘Well, fuck that!'” Sadly, there’s a lot of truth in that. What should the politicians promise us? The right to work without joining a union, cheaper gas we can use to get to work, more likely employment prospects and a friendlier business climate — more and more every year, these seem to be things people wanted back when our parents and grandparents were voting. The democrat party has become the “Fuck you, I want my num nums” party; the other parties don’t seem that far behind. We can only get so far in debt, so someone has to work to create, preserve, safeguard and embiggen the assets so that something of value is being generated somewhere. But, why be that guy? And why be the candidate running for public office, who seeks to appeal to that guy, when his population is dwindling and the “Fuck you I want my num nums” party is going to ruin you, both professionally and personally?

There is a perception in all this that there are sensible advantages here, that fun is important and adults don’t know how to have fun. That, too, has a ring of truth to it; fun is important. But lots of other things are just as important, in fact even more. With all that stuff requiring attention and maintenance, and only the “vital fun” actually getting it, an ugly truth emerges.

Besides, I’m old enough to remember when fun was earned. You start off with this lengthy and expansive list of things you have to do today, and you make a big enough dent by 4 or 5 in the afternoon that you can take a breather. That’s why a house involved in some level of luxury would have a “wet bar,” but this led to an associated stigma of alcoholism. Now the wet bar is something you see in a really old movie, maybe a Twilight Zone episode from the first couple seasons, because we’ve gotten rid of alcoholism and replaced it with addiction to marijuana, crack, meth and illegally-acquired prescription drugs, along with the legal stuff to do something about our made-up “learning disabilities.” The casualty in all this is not the addictive lifestyle, what we’ve gotten rid of is the idea that you start with the work, and finish with the leisure which is predicated on the work actually getting done. That’s been consigned to the ash heap of history, at least within this romper room stately pleasure dome we’ve constructed for ourselves.

Within which, so few people can be preoccupied with anything that actually matters, because it requires two hands and that’s hard to manage when you’re carrying around a giant lollipop.

“Remember when it was considered an insult to call Adam Sandler movies “adolescent”?”
No, actually. Did I miss something?
- CaptDMO | 07/16/2015 @ 07:47
Yeah, I agree with Capt, sort of. I just used to call them garbage. Although personally I still love and still use the Ben Stiller line from Happy Gilmore…”How would you like a nice, warm glass of Shut the Hell Up?”
Frankly, I’d love to find a girl that says “He makes me laugh.” I don’t think that’s ever been said in seriousness. But I need a job, I don’t need a girl. I’d love to “get put back to work.” It’s been nearly eight months since I lost my tech job to outsourcing. I’m almost…almost…to the point where I’ll vote for “anyone*” who can fix the economy.
*(Offer does not currently include libtards, criminals, socialists, or commies. Offer void in Taxachusettes.)
- P_Ang | 07/16/2015 @ 08:39
I agree with everything you said. I’d like to emphasize this bit:

there are no obvious natural dangers, in fact the few dangers we can define are located well outside our sphere of control.

Back when psychoanalysis was a thing, they had a term for what you’re describing in this post: Displacement activity. Ostriches don’t really stick their heads in the sand, but that’s a classic example of displacement activity — faced with multiple threats it has no idea how to handle, the ostrich “displaces” the stress by doing something, anything, even if it’s bizarre and counterproductive.

Welcome to America, 2015. We know the economy is fucked, that Iran is going to nuke Israel, that the EBT cards will soon stop working, that race riots will follow, that “health care” will soon be a pair of aspirin prescribed by some Haitian with a mail-order MD, &c. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can do about any of it. Nothing will fix it, but we have to do something to relieve the stress. So we shop, or have birthday parties, or play video games, or play dress-up with surgery.

[That’s my theory, anyway. Notice one interesting implication — it’s liberals who are displacing most frantically, because they’re the ones most directly responsible, and on some level they damn well know it. Conservatives displace by gunning up, or going to a Donald Trump rally, or hiding out in fantasy football, or blogging about Fascism. But nothing would change if our preferred policies were enacted; the country’d still be fucked. Not so with the liberals — if they quit, yeah, we’d still be fucked, but it’d be a lot slower, and at least we’d have some lube. What this means for our ongoing war with the left is anyone’s guess, but I find it interesting].
- Severian | 07/16/2015 @ 13:55
[…] Morgan Freeberg is old enough to remember when fun was actually earned: […]
- dustbury.com » Quote of the week | 07/18/2015 @ 09:30

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“The Bald Eagle is Being Replaced by a Teletubby”Thursday, July 16th, 2015

“The Bald Eagle is Being Replaced by a Teletubby”
Thursday, July 16th, 2015