Death of the Grown Up

Diana West's book

Diana West with Filip Dewinter
of the Belgian Vlaams Belang in Antwerp. 

I just finished reading Diana West's brilliant book "The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization". It is wittily written, and connects many unlikely, but under West's pen, quite convincing, dots.

She attributes this death of the grown up to the "birth of the teenager", which she says occurred around WWII. At this time, teenagers' sudden economic ascendancy gave them financial clout and independence to determined everything from pop music to fashion, and where they would go with their newly bought cars, without their parents’ presence, or even rules.

But I think her rather mildly argued idea that all this might have started during the War, rather than after, more original. Young boys, left behind without the role model of fathers, and with the changing roles of their working mothers, shifted their attitudes about maleness that made the supremacy of the teenager possible. She writes:

Many of these youngsters...had experienced the war as a period of uprootedness: "Shepherded by women, they moved through strange cities and new schools, with only their teenage scenes in which to make sense of the world" [writes Phillih H. Ennis, rock and roll historian].

And who gave them this teenaged centeredness? None other than Elvis Presley, who:

[W]as too young to have seen action in either World War II or Korea. As a result, he gained prominence as a peacetime idol independent of "the adults who guided the nation through the great war." [This gave Presley] a connection with the younger generation of children, kids whose fathers and older brothers had gone to war.

Those future teenagers, guided by rock 'n' roll and an independent capacity to make their own money, which they used for their own enjoyment including buying their own records, no longer needed (or more accurately, allowed) their parents to intervene in their lives.

West's last two chapters deal with our current war against Islam. She attributes our inability to face this war head on to our lost adulthood. So, a cultural abnormality becomes a civilizational disability, which may prevent us from standing up, like true soldiers, to fight this epic battle of our lives.

Ultimately, West gives us hope  that by identifying and recognizing the problem, as she has done so succinctly, we can be lulled out of our false childhood, and return to our normal and necessary maturity.