An America without adults
The crisis-saturated year 2020 has found us lacking the requisite character to deal with it
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I’m an adjunct lecturer in the history of rock and roll at the local campus of our largest state university. The textbook I use, and have for the twenty years I’ve been teaching the course, is Flowers in the Dustbin by James Miller. It was first published in the early 1990s, and obviously lots of books on the subject have come down the pike since then.
In fact, Miller’s book is not really a textbook. It doesn’t claim to strive for comprehensive mention of every star, genre, or label. There are no review questions a the end of each chapter. Each of its chapters is a vignette that opens a window onto the significance of the moment in which the story occurs. Examples include the recording of Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” Elvis Presley getting noticed in the waiting lobby at Sun Records in the summer of 1953 by Marion Keisker, Sam Phillips’s office manager, the releases of the films Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without A Cause in 1955, Brian Epstein wandering into the Cavern Club in November 1961 to check out The Beatles.
I concur with Miller’s point that rock had finished evolving by the late 1970s and that everything that has transpired since has been a derivation of something that happened from the late 1940s to the late 70s. Students have taken me to task over this conclusion, but I remain unconvinced by arguments to the contrary.
My reason for continuing to choose Flowers is that it is far more intelligently written than any of the “real” textbooks that show up in my faculty mailbox. Miller’s bona fides are in order. He started writing record reviews for Rolling Stone in 1967 and branched out to contributing essays to the New York Times, The New Republic and Newsweek, writing books on the student radical movement of the 1960s, French philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel Foucault, and becoming a professor of political science at the Graduate Faculty School at the New School for Social Research.
Another point that Miller stresses in various ways throughout is that rock and roll happened as generations of adolescents in the West, beginning with the one that emerged in the mid-1950s, and every one since, has enjoyed a level of material convenience, technological advancement, and independence scarcely imaginable to teens of any earlier time in human history. Starting in the mid-1950s, clever marketers of entertainment, recreation, appliances, electronics and vehicles catered to youth, such that that enterprise became an industry unto itself.
One time about ten years ago, on the last night of class, two ladies - I’d say they were in their early 30s - who’d sat together in the back of the classroom all semester raised their hands and said, “We’ve concluded that Miller doesn’t like rock and roll.”
It led to the most interesting discussion of the semester. It was gratifying to finally see a realization among my students that the point of the course was to take an objective look at the role of this music in a larger context.
Cultural developments such as a decline in family formation, church attendance and civic affiliations have transpired over the seventy-plus years that rock has become the soundtrack to Western life. These in turn have led to an increasing number of people in our society seeing no reason to set aside the disregard for norms and conventions with which they’d been inculcated that had characterized their formative years. Witness the decline in formal dress in public, the mainstreaming of crude language, the preoccupation with “relationships” rather than marriage issues well into adulthood.
Two works have come along in the years since I’ve been teaching this course that have greatly influenced the way I go about presenting the subject matter. In 2004, the now-defunct Weekly Standard published an essay by Joseph Epstein called “The Perpetual Adolescent”, and in 2007, columnist Diana West released the book The Death of the Grown-Up. The titles pretty much indicate the common thrust: maturity has lost most of its value in our society.
For those unfamiliar with these works, I can’t recommend them strongly enough. Their relevance increases with each year. Each day.
2020, the contours of which have been established by a pandemic, an economic collapse and a race-based societal convulsion, has put our character to the test and we have been found wanting.
Donald Trump’s tweets and press conferences make a good Exhibit A. Two of his signature forms of arrested development, whining and self-glorification, were on display in outbursts so far this week.
The whine:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
If I wasn’t constantly harassed for three years by fake and illegal investigations, Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Hoax, I’d be up by 25 points on Sleepy Joe and the Do Nothing Democrats. Very unfair, but it is what it is!!!
The self-glorification:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
I built the greatest economy in the World, the best the U.S. has ever had. I am doing it again!
The adolescent urge to engage in displays of self-congratulation over shallow moral positions has manifested itself in a couple of singularly embarrassing ways in the last few days.
There is the take-a-knee photo op in the Capitol building indulged in by a group of House Democrats, who decided to add to their already-fraught-with-symbolic-baggage choice of a physical gesture the donning of kente, a colorful Ghanian fabric with particular cultural and historical significance to the people of that country. It did not go over well.
Not to be outdone, a gaggle from the yee-haw crowd saw fit to pack as much in-your-face imagery into a stunt in South Jersey as possible, staging a mock re-enactment of George Floyd’s murder - with Trump 2020 flags as backdrop - at a point along the route of a march by activists of the opposite persuasion.
In the spirit of the teens who turn their high school into a chaotic hellhole in the movie Blackboard Jungle, a mob has torn down a statue of Christopher Columbus in downtown Richmond, Virginia and thrown it in a nearby lake.
In Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West writes of the tension between chaperoning parents at a high-school dance and teens on the dance floor engaging various mock-sexual activities, the question of whether to shut the dance down looming large, her point being that those in a position to uphold norms such as order and decency increasingly lack the courage to do so.
Will authorities in Richmond put the Columbus statue back on the pedestal? Something to watch.
The Minneapolis city council has voted to disband the city’s police force. Council president Lisa Bender and others have sought to mollify those alarmed by “explaining” that it will be an incremental process, reducing the department’s role as various “alternative” social services are brought on board. Are you buying it?
This enumeration of alarming and embarrassing instances of rapid breakdown could go on for pages. The point is hopefully clear by now, though. America is responding to its perfect storm of daunting challenges in ways that are destined to invite yet more calamity.
We are witnessing nothing less than the orgiastic celebration of the stomping-out of human dignity.
Rock on!