Youth & Manhood – A Sad Future
I’m not a big fan of George Will. He possesses too much of the condescending “inside the beltway elitism” attitude that I find disgusting. However he does, on occasion, knock one out of the park with his commentary. Such is the case with a recent piece in Newsweek. Here’s a few choice quotes:
Mike Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, the liberal graduate student in All in the Family, reflected society’s belief in the cultural superiority of youth, but he was a leading indicator of something else: He lived in his father-in-law Archie Bunker’s home. What are today’s “basement boys” doing down there? Perhaps watching Friends and Seinfeld reruns about a culture of extended youth utterly unlike the world of young adults in previous generations.
And . . .
Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became “a retreat into childish tantrums” symptomatic “of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation.” And the boomers’ children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster’s, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese’s for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.
As I sometimes try to drive home this point to other young men with whom I’m attempting to mentor, I’ll ask them to try this:
“Picture, in your mind, your ideal representation of the manly hero – a George Washington, a Robert E. Lee, a George Patton, a Douglas MacArthur – and then try to picture them sitting in front of the TV in baggy shorts, an earring, a wine cooler watching Friends and reacting to something by saying Dude! What’s wrong with that picture? Now, ask yourself: How do you want to be thought of?”
Not all readers will understand my point. I hope most of you over 40 will.
You can read the rest of Will’s piece here.






