Posted on 12/11/2007 7:03:56 AM PST by bs9021
Peter Pan Nation
by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 11, 2007
If it seems that America’s establishment figures have been getting increasingly immature as the years go by, you are not imagining things. Gifted writer Diana West catalogues this trend to a fare-thee-well in her admirable book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.
“More than a syllabus is at stake; more than the ethnic makeup of college students is at issue; more than the feminization of the hard sciences is under consideration,” she writes. “Looking back, it becomes clear that there was a great luxury in fighting a culture war in the classroom or boardroom.”
“But if the settings were somehow artificial, the hits taken were very real, disabling faculties of judgment and discernment, and undermining confidence and authority.” The daughter of a distinct cultural minority—a conservative Hollywood screenwriter—West has fought those battles from a very tender age.
Currently, she is a columnist for The Washington Times. “In other words, it came as no shock to learn, for example, that in our public elementary school in Westchester County, New York, third-graders devote a hefty part of a semester to studying Kenya,” West remembers. “They don’t know who discovered the Hudson River, who is buried in Grant’s Tomb, or where the Battle of White Plains was fought, but they come home with plaudits for Kenya’s health care system—which, incredible as it may seem, I had never heard of.”
“This, I recognized, was par for the PC course, as were the stories that came home about cow’s-blood cuisine and earlobe enhancement, which the kids found relishingly disgusting.” West shows just how disabled our “faculties of judgment and discernment” have become.
We make F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Lost Generation look level-headed. Consider:
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
OK, now you’re going to hae to tell me what an Anarthrous professional signifier is.
We are not the country we used to be. Militarily, we are still the tops. But in so many ways, we are a weakened, and broken nation. It's almost like their was a plan to bring us down from our position of awesome strength.
This is when the unobstructed expansion of the federal bureaucracy began. With the war out of the way, Washington turned it's attention to the domestic issues, armed with it's new found power to regulate anything they could "find" that "substantially affects interstate commerce". We've been infantilized by the nanny state bureaucracy of the New Deal.
I disagree. You are, no doubt, correct in theory. In practice the Left is highly judgmental.
It's just that their judgment somehow invariably winds up finding that their own society is the fount of all evil in the world. The neat thing, for them, is that the very act of denunciation of their own society sets them apart from that society and so therefore they are not included in the denunciation.
True Leftists aren't really much interested in any of the "causes" they champion: women, workers, the environment, indigenous peoples, endangered species, people of color, etc.. Except to the extent these causes function as a convenient club for attacking western society.
For instance, African-American studies (or African history, for that matter) is actually no such thing. It is the study of the oppression of Africans and African-Americans by whitey. They have very little interest in any other aspects of the history of these peoples.
IMHO, you will never understand Leftism until you fully comprehend that feminism, multi-culturalism, Marxism, environmentalism, and all the other multifarious fellow traveling causes have very little to do with creating their antagonism towards our society. The antagonism came first and is central. The cause to which the antagonism is attached is primarily a rationalization for the antagonism, and is thus easily dropped for another rationalization without breaking stride whenever that is convenient.
“Anarthrous professional signifier” is a noun identifying a profession, preceded by an adjective modifying the noun, but lacking an article. “Gifted writer” Diana West. The construction was made famous by Dan Brown, of “DaVinci Code” fame, and it’s a running joke between Clyde Asbury and me.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001628.html
Naaannnnnnnnnnnyyyyy, Naaaaannnnnnyyyyy, Naaaaaannnnnnyyyyy Naaaaattttiiiiooooonnnnn. Nanny Nation USA.
When you have time, read the links, listen to the heritage foundation speech and get back to me.
IMO, Sayet is right on the money.
What you’re seeing as “judgement” of our society stems from their refusal to judge other cultures as inferior.
I say this because of another facet of liberalism - the rejection of an objective truth (from the Creator), which stems from the same desire to have no objective judgements on their choices or behaviors.
I re-read your last paragraph. You assert that their hatred of our society and culture is the cause, and I’m asserting that it is the result.
I can see where you’re coming from, check out the Sayet stuff to see where I’m coming from.
Maybe Sayet (and I) are attributing too much rationality to the Left, assuming that there must be some “rational” underpinning to their f’d up mindset.
I watch CNN, whenever Greta Van Susteran’s mug pops up on fox.
I will do that. No time right now.
But I believe you’ve got it exactly backwards. They dislike our society, which leads them to exalt all others by comparison. They know little and care less about the actual facts of those societies.
If they truly believe in no objective truths, how can they denounce racism, sexism, ethnocentrism and all the other “bad things” they oppose with a straight face? Is not the belief that racism, sexism, etc. are bad itself a cultural judgment inherently no more valid than any other? Yet somehow they have no problem believing that everything THEY hate is objectively bad.
The hate comes first, the rationale for that hate second (and variable at need).
BTW, for most this is all subconcious. They truly believe their dislike and contempt for our society is rationally founded in one of their pet causes.
“This is when the unobstructed expansion of the federal bureaucracy began.”
It was also when taxes were taken DIRECTLY from the paycheck. Men came back from a war, and when they started working for that paycheck, the taxes were automatically taken out. This was not the case before the war. I guess everyone was so happy that the war was over, complaining about their taxes seemed wrong somehow. But this one thing was allowed the extensive growth of the federal government to this very day. We citizens have no power to have a “tea party” if we wished too. Remember the threads about the amnesty? All people could do was call their “representative”. The greatest generation came back to a country that did not exist in terms of the freedoms they fought so hard to keep. Without one peep.
Everyone complains about the “hippies”, as if they arrived one day on a spaceship.
I ran into that “thought process” at University. A professor claimed that all cultures are equal, and none are any better than any other. With the horrific blood-letting that more or less defines the 20th century in mind, I pointed that it follows by that logic, no cultures are any worse either, by definition, and he agreed without hesitation.
The whole point of the liberal-arts portion of a university education today is to confuse the young mind, to chip away their allegiences to parents, authority, “the establishment”, etc, any sort of religious based mores or values, any sort of so-called individualist thinking, isolate and weed out free thinkers, etc. EVERYTHING is political with these folks.
1945?? Factory pay was excellent starting about 1940, everybody new the war was coming. Hell, the Pentagon construction started before Pearl Harbor.
Going a lot farther back, Ford doubled the going industry wage to 5 (five) dollars a day in 1914 for his factory workers, (maybe $150- $200 today) and so many applicants showed up they had to be driven away with firehoses. In January.
If you really believe this, let me suggest the book War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence H. Keeley. It quite irrefutably establishes that almost all primitive societies are far more violent than even those of the 20th century.
The average "primitive society" studied by him had violent death rates at least 10 times higher than those suffered in war during the 20th century.
IOW, if the 20th century had been as violent as the leftists' beloved "wise and peaceful indigenous peoples," 1B to 2B people would have been killed rather than the 100M to 200M that were.
The 20th century killed large numbers of people, but this is much more a function of the high population than of the intrinsic level of violence.
Respected FReeper Mrs. Don-o lurched through the Peter Pan Nation thread, struggling to grasp the arcane intellectual jokes irrelevantly inserted by notoriously multiparous forumista Tax-chick.
Got it. Thank you. :o)
“I WON’T GROW UP!”
That's good news. The cartoons don't crap on my country and military like CNN and CN didn't plant lefties at the Republican debates!
• “Readers as old as twenty-nine are buying ‘young adult’ fiction written expressly for teens.” 'Cuz everything else is written by, about and for weird old Baby boomer women!
• “The average video gamester was eighteen in 1990; now he’s going on thirty.”
'Cuz the movies suck lately.
• “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.”
Studies owned and performed by boomers--it makes the boomers feel younger.
• “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.”
Spongebob is miles better than the snarky leftist sitcoms.... Miles better than 'Sex in the City'
I watch the shows that don't make me wanna put a bullet through my TV. I end up watching a lot of cartoons....
Gen-X happens to be a sliver genertaion between the Baby Boom and the "Echo Boom" that there isn't much for us in the culture between the geriatric boomers and the 'young adults'
So if you are in your mid-30's, you're not going to be enjoying boomer culture and everyone that drives the marketing is younger: There's just not much there in culture between Linsday Lohan and Sharon Stone....
Very good. Polysyllabic as well as anarthrous.
You make a good point. While I agree with the authors main thesis, I don't find his bullet points very persuasive, because they deal mostly with leisure activities. To decide which are more mature is largely subjective. As you pointed out, it's hard to make the case that one choice of leisure activity (watching SpongeBob) is more mature than another (watching Sex And The City).
Well said. After all, 50 or 100 years ago a predominant form of American entertainment was to watch grown men trying to smack a ball with a wooden stick.
IMO, a legal adult who is self-supporting, law-abiding, civic-minded, and respectful of others is a "grown-up", even if he reads Harry Potter books. A much more persuasive argument could be made by showing how fewer American men step forward to take care of the children they create, or how people are less responsible with handling their debts now vs. X years ago.
Of course, this has already been written about in hundreds of books and is not nearly as amusing as reading about Spongebob.
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