Yet again my students prove they cannot listen—that simply hearing is beyond them. They must be distracted because otherwise they might actually start thinking about something in the world around them, or, worse yet, they might start thinking about something in the past or something in the world that is not immediately around them, maybe something from a cubicle or from a rat-infested Mumbai slum. They might accidentally think about some massive machine slowly leaking fluid onto a factory floor. They might realize there’s a price somebody else pays for their comfort or that others unknown pay for their suffering. Aside from the children of the very rich, the children of America’s middle class are the most privileged beings on the face of the earth. They—which is to say “we,” as I was one too—do not suffer in the sense that others do, from famine or war or the violence and paranoia of political oppression. Yet any one of them will moan of a terrible life, of privation from all that’s holy and cool, of a series of arbitrary parental usurpations of rights and entitlements. He’ll also tell you that the poor just don’t work hard enough, that the wealthy have all earned what they have, that the smart are far from cool. They’ll tell you that they’re all going to be basketball stars and captains of industry, rappers and designer clothing moguls, actors and celebrities-without-portfolio, that the future is boundless and full of glory on the court, the screen, and the stage.
The American adolescent is a creation of marketing. No one is more sure of who she is than the American adolescent, and one of the things she’s sure of is that she’s “finding herself,” that this is a “difficult” and an “awkward” age. He knows this because he’s been told it. She knows what she is supposed to listen to on her iPod, indeed that she should be listening to it on an iPod. Jazz is off-limits, classical is for commercials when an air of sophistication is meant to be portrayed. Everything is better with a hip-hop beat. These are a people sure that carpenter pants are out for now and that ripped jeans are back in. They know precisely what’s bad or ugly or old skool and precisely what’s hawt and new; though they may very well disagree on the particulars, that does not change the precision of their opinions.
The American adolescent wears his neediness like an American Eagle t-shirt that she changes from day-to-day. She wears it as a badge of her hurt and her vulnerability which she’s sure of because that is part of what’s packaged as adolescence. Margaret Meade may have been the first to recognize adolescence as a Western concept, but now we must wrangle with it as a product of marketing. Adolescence is an exploitation of the indulged offspring of the middle class, whose buying power itself is a projection of the status of their parents. The best training they’ll ever get in being consumers happens here, and as such it is a de facto right of passage. Here is learned that there is no distinction between their best interests and their “style,” that individual style is a definition of self, and, because of this, that there is no distinction between political liberty and consumer choice. This pattern is maintained long into, if not throughout, adulthood, with style and image-creation largely supplanting personality. Image is a boon to marketers, since it must be continually updated, continually groomed for the next life stage.
And so Americans don’t develop much until they are in their 20s, and may not develop at all, or may never develop past their glory days of being marketed-to at 16 or 17 or so. This is not here, as it may be in some societies, a detriment. It may even be an asset. The current president of the United States was elected precisely for his adolescent brashness, bullheadedness, and peevishness, all of which we find endearing.
The irony is that many Americans who view themselves as most grown-up are the ones who encourage and promote perpetual adolescence: America’s conservatives. Conservatism in America is associated with fanatical militantism, intolerance, black-and-white thinking, an absolute hatred of ambiguity, and an unswerving faith in marketing and in the private sector generally. It also worships power, and so American conservatives encourage in their children behavior that would be seen as outré in most civilized societies: bullying, schoolyard vigilantism, unwarranted aggression of the field of play. Indeed, American football can be seen as perhaps the condensation of the American conservative ethic; it is hierarchical but also anarchical, violent, competitive for its own sake, and reliant on a purely externalized set of purposes and goals. It is no surprise that many notable American conservatives are football fanatics, from Patton to Nixon to Condoleeza Rice. This is something they share with many male American adolescents.
The confluence of politics and marketing creates perpetual consumers, perpetual adolescents, and a group of people absolutely certain of what they’re about, as their values-as-lifestyle-choice are reinforced at very turn. That we would blunder into Iraq the way we did, and that this particular president would do it, should not surprise us at all.