After America

violence” like gibbering lunatics in a padded cell, and then think whether you’d really want to take that bet. The craven submission to political correctness, the willingness to leave your marbles with the Diversity Cafe hat-check girl, the wish for a quiet life leads to death, and not that quietly. When the chief of staff of the United States Army has got the disease, you’re in big (and probably terminal) trouble. And when the guy’s on the table firing wildly and screaming “Allahu akbar!” the PC kindergarten teachers won’t be there for you.

…WE ARE THE CHILDREN

Political correctness is the authoritarian end of a broader infantilization.

Hardly a week goes by where you don’t read a lifestyle feature such as this, from New York magazine:

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.⁹³

Death Cab for Cutie, the band, took its name from “Death Cab for Cutie,” the song. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band sang it back in the Sixties, a parody of Top 40 death anthems (“Teen Angel,” “Leader of the Pack”) with Vivian Stanshall Elvising up the refrain as the taxi runs a red light and meets its rendezvous with destiny: “Someone’s going to make you pay your fare.”

One wouldn’t want to place too great a metaphorical burden on an obscure novelty number, but to the jaundiced eye America’s Eloi can easily seem like infantilized cuties unaware they’re riding in a death cab. In the old days, there were, broadly, two phases of human existence: You were a child until thirteen. Then you were a working adult. Then you died. Now there are four phases: You’re a child until twelve, eleven, nine—or whenever enlightened jurisdictions think you’re entitled to go on the pill without parental notification. Then you’re an “adolescent,” an ever more elastic term of art now stretching lazily across the decades. Then you work, after a fashion. Then you quit at sixty-five, sixty, fifty-five in France, fifty in Greece, whatever you can get away with, and enjoy a three-decade retirement at public expense. The tedious business of being a grown-up is that ever-shrinking space between adolescence and retirement.

Let Barack Obama explain things: “I see some young people in the audience,” began the president at one of his “town hall meetings” in Ohio.⁹⁴

Not that young. For he assured them that, under ObamaCare, they’d be eligible to remain on their parents’ health coverage until they were twenty-six.

The audience applauded.

Why?

Because, as the politicians say, “it’s about the future of all our children.”

And in the future we’ll all be children. For most of human history, across all societies, a 26-year-old has been considered an adult—and not starting out on adulthood but well into it. Not someone who remains a dependent of his parents, but someone who would be expected to have parental responsibilities himself. But not anymore. Sure, come your twenty-seventh birthday, it’ll be time to move out of your parents’ insurance agency—at least until Obama’s next piece of child-friendly legislation. But till then, here’s looking at you, kid.

This ought to be deeply insulting to any self-respecting 26-and-a-half-year-old. As for the rest of us, the kind of society in which 26-year-olds are considered children is a society in decline—in economic decline, cultural decline, spiritual decline, in demographic decline (as Europe already is), in terminal decline. The western world lives increasingly in a state of deferred adulthood. We enter adolescence earlier and earlier and we leave it later and later, if at all.

As everyone knows, our bodies “mature” earlier so it would be unreasonable to expect our grade-schoolers not to be rogering anything that moves, and the most we can hope to do is ensure there’s a government-funded condom dispenser nearby. But even as our bodies reach “maturity” earlier and earlier, it would likewise be unreasonable to expect people who’ve been fully expert in “sexually transmitted infections” for a decade and a half to assume responsibility for their broader health-care arrangements.

And, come to think of it, isn’t it unreasonable to expect 30-year-olds who’ve been sexually active since sixth grade to assume responsibility for their sexual activity? As the Washington Post reported: High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small and that getting them from school nurses is “just like asking grandma or auntie.”

So DC officials have decided to stock up on Trojan condoms, including the company’s super-size Magnum variety, and they have begun to authorize teachers or counselors, preferably male, to distribute condoms to students if the teachers complete a 30-minute online training course called “WrapMC”—for Master of Condoms.

“If people get what they don’t want, they are just going to trash them,” said T. Squalls, 30, who attends the University of the District of Columbia. “So why not spend a few extra dollars and get what people want?”⁹⁵

That last paragraph deserves to be chiseled on the tombstone of the Republic. As April Gavaza, the blogger Hyacinth Girl, responded: “Hey, T., why don’t you spend a few extra dollars and buy your own, jackass?”⁹⁶

Fair enough. Why should T. Squalls, thirty, bill D.C. taxpayers for his sex life? Thirty is so old you’re not even eligible for Obama’s child health-care coverage. Thirty is what less evolved societies used to call “early middle age.”

Why is Washington Post chairman Donald Graham (to pluck a D.C. householder at random) buying condoms for 30-year-old men he doesn’t know?

Because that’s Big Government for you: you start a free-condom program for sexually active fourth graders, and next thing you know elderly swingers in the twelfth year of Social Construct Studies want in. The D.C. condompalooza is a perfect example of progressive thinking’s malign paradox: it both destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood, leaving a big chunk of the populace as eternal teenagers.

What was it the hippies said? Never trust anybody over thirty? Advice to D.C. women: Never trust anybody over thirty who expects the government to buy his condoms.

As the recession hit, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile on a hip new social phenomenon: “funemployment.”⁹⁷ They had good jobs, great pay, and then they lost them. But if you’re not married and your parents have kept your old bedroom open, what’s the diff? Two of the funemployed, Andy Deemer, thirty-six, and Amanda Rounsaville, thirty-four, connected through Facebook and took off in search of Asian mystics. They visited a fortuneteller in Burma, a tarot card reader in Thailand, some Saffron Revolution monks on the border, and, after spending ten days tracking her down, a reindeer-herding shaman in Mongolia.

Only the last advised them to “go back to work.”

Whoa! Heavy, man! But maybe they went off to Bhutan to get a second opinion from a shaman-herding reindeer.

In the Sixties, privileged youth used to go off to find themselves in the year before college. Now they go off to find themselves when they’re pushing forty. They seek the company of reindeer-herders at the age previous generations sought the company of Elks Lodgers.

“They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies,” writes Adam Sternbergh in New York. “It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.”

I think we know the answer to that.