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邹 琦 105014079820f3 — Every so often, you read a book that gives you pause, that challenges you to rethink some prior notions on life, society or the human condition. If you're fortunate, you may discover a work that literally changes your life, a true gem that throws your entire worldview for a loop. "The Death of the Grownup" is one of those books. In this brilliantly researched study on the place of childhood within the modern American (and, by extension, Western) cultural matrix, Diana West argues that we, as a society, are in serious trouble. Here's why. Over the past seven decades, the norm in the parent-child relationship has shifted from a focus on the child's responsibility toward his parents to an emphasis on the parents' responsibility toward their children. The notion of childhood has thereby evolved (devolved?) significantly since 1940; what was once considered a temporary developmental stage on the road to eventual maturity and adulthood has become an end in itself. The goal of "growing up" has been largely abandoned in favor of a perpetual adolescence. (Remember those Toys 'R' Us ads from the 1980s?) This societal Peter Pan Syndrome has allowed behaviors and social mores once shunned by mainstream society as childish, or even obscene, to gain widespread acceptance; indeed, those formerly immature, fringe behaviors have redefined the mainstream. Examples abound. West enumerates, among other symptoms, the widespread proliferation of rock music and its many variants, the ever-aging segment of the population that plays video games, the childish modes of dress preferred by many adults, the loss of respect for age-old institutions such as marital fidelity, and the continual breakdown of moral restraint exhibited by adults. Before 1941, the word "teenager" was absent from the American lexicon; today, a vast corporate empire exists to cater to teenage wants, whims and "needs." Today's torrent of silly, vapid reading material aimed at teenagers (almost exclusively girls) began in 1944 with the initial publication of "Seventeen" magazine. One could easily dismiss today's cultural childishness as a harmless development; after all, don't all societies undergo transformations in their literary, artistic and social norms? Perhaps, but for the first time in human history, the children are running the show. Worse, the adults are virtually nowhere to be found; childishness has become the new mainstream. The effects on the individual and the society are insidious. With the loss of adulthood comes a loss of personal identity, an inability to articulate a set of bedrock virtues on which individual and societal vitality can be based. The loss of adulthood also means an inability to make moral distinctions between different societies and cultures. The World War II generation knew nothing of multiculturalism; we were good, the Nazis were evil, and good had to triumph over evil. In contrast, the leaders of today's less mature, more multicultural Western world have failed to articulate a clear moral distinction between the values of the West (human rights, legal equality of men and women, religious tolerance, freedom of rational thought and expression, to name a few) with those of the Islamic fundamentalists who strive to subdue the Western world through violent and cultural jihad (values including slavery, legalized spousal abuse, honor killings, persecution of religious minorities, and amputation as a legal penalty for theft, among others). It's hard to win a war when one can neither identify the enemy nor assert the rightness of his own cause. West's book should be required reading for anyone who has a stake in the continued existence of American or Western life as we know it. It's a coherent call for help. Will the real adults please stand up?

Ricardo Eirado eirado — Contemporary conservative Catholic intellectual, writer, and poet Zmirak retells--in blank verse, no less--Dostoevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor. Weird and challenging, provocative but ultimately unsatisying. I would like to read this again, though, after taking on both Paradise Lost (the source of the blank verse style) and the original parable in the context of The Brothers Karamazov .