AMERICA THE PUERILE

We have seen how, in modern society, classical music, as well as all sophisticated and complex music, has been marginalized until its only aficionados are those who favor it solely because it is old and hence safe. How did this happen? Why did it happen? What caused this situation?

A clue can be found in the August 18, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, which contains a review of several books about society in ages past and in particular how childhood was spent then. The books are separate volumes of The History of the European Family based on research done at Yale University in response to a book by a clever Frenchman. (If ze Germans is zo schmart, why is it that all the truly novel ideas come from the French or Jews?)

...In 1960, the French social historian Philippe Ariés produced a book, "Centuries of Childhood," arguing that for most of history what we call the family—above all, what we call childhood—did not exist, and that only modern liberal ideas created it. According to Ariés, medieval children joined the world of adults from the moment they were weaned, and no one made a fuss about how little and cute they were; Ariés did not approve of this development.

The idea that children are properly sequestered into a separate fantasy life full of cartoons and stuffed animals and imaginary figures is fairly recent one in human history. In ages past, children were treated like smaller adults, and as soon as they could walk were given chores to perform. Even today, the birthrate is high in undeveloped nations because more children means more hands to help with the urgent business of survival (as well as more people to take care of you when you're disabled or too old to work). Children were dressed like small adults and were expected to behave like adults as well. Among the upper classes, proper table etiquette was enforced. (One need only sit in a crowded restaurant near a table with a child to know that this is no longer the case.)

Children were expected at an early age to assume the responsibility of being productive members of society. They were sent off from home to work—the boys on farms and the girls as domestic help. "As late as the nineteenth century, seventy-five percent of boys and fifty percent of girls in northwestern Europe were in service." There were no hours squandered watching television or playing video games.

As with many things regressive, the United States played a leading role in banishing children to a fantasy land. St. Nicholas was a historical figure, but the modern concept of Santa Claus was invented by an American, Clement C. Moore (1779-1863). The idea that someone named Jesus was horribly murdered but rose from the dead like a zombie is somewhat unpleasant, so instead, America invented the Easter Bunny, who brings children hard-boiled eggs or a doomed duckling. Starting with child labor laws in the 1880s and then with universal compulsory education, America was a pioneer in segregating children from society as a whole. (The Yale study in The New Yorker review maintains that in barring children from honest work, "They lost their independence and their street smarts. Meanwhile their parents were left with a hole in the family budget.")

In the name of reform, US laws excused children for their criminal behavior and corporal punishment was abandoned. (This has eventually led to the fact that in most US cities, a minor, even one weighing 80kg, who is caught breaking into your house and stealing your possessions will only be scolded and released to his parents: the reformatories being filled to capacity with homicidal youth.) But in Europe, children were subject to public execution as late as the nineteenth century. UCLA historian Eugen Weber reports that:

In the 1840s, a twelve-year-old girl could be sentenced to fourteen days' hard labor for stealing a small prayer book from school, with the magistrate expressing his regret that he could not order her to be whipped as well.

The United States is also the home of the curious notion that children must be kept protected from all matters relating to reproduction and must be kept completely ignorant of the reproductive arts. The result of this strange attitude is that there are more sexual deviants and transgressives per square inch here than anyplace else on Earth. For many years pornography has been freely available and openly displayed in Scandinavian countries, and European television commonly features nudity and sexual situations, yet no place in Europe has the high rates of teen pregnancy common in the USA. (One of the women who used to clean my house didn't tell her daughter anything about sex until after the daughter became pregnant at 14. )

This is doubly ironic since every Caucasian in the US is descended from peasantry, and everyone's ancestors were conceived in the same pile of straw that their older siblings slept in. Now Americans are apparently overcompensating for centuries of witnessing parental intimacy by shielding their children from any and all things sexual.

Absolving children from all responsibility and placing them in a cartoon fantasy world has an inevitable consequence: children no longer acquire the skills of responsibility that they need as adults. Americans have no idea how to handle money and are commonly in debt up to their sternums. Having so much free time allows youths plot attacks on their school and other antisocial acts. Americans no longer have good work habits and are notorious for calling-in sick at the slightest excuse. As children, Americans learn that nothing bad will ever happen to them (other than a bad-hair day) and if it does, someone—their parents or someonein loco parentis—will come to their rescue. If they're really unhappy over something, they are now entitled to initiate a lawsuit and become rich.

The average person of the United Snakes never really seems to become a complete adult. This is hardly surprising as the present scheme of things mandates that people remain in the cartoon fantasy mode until they are 18 to 21, then instantly perform a complete metamorphosis. But they never do, and this is especially true of those adults with their own children and who must immerse themselves anew in the make-believe fantasy world.

This is why Americans have such wretched taste in food. Instead of learning, out of necessity, to eat adult food, Americans never advance beyond the food that children prefer. Adults in America commonly eat heavily sweetened breakfast cereal, and the entrées on most menus are the very same as those featured on the children's menu, merely with larger portions. Children don't love hot dogs (frankfurters) because that's what adults eat; adults love hot-dogs because that's what children eat.

The traditional fairy tales of Europe as recorded by the Grimm brothers, La Fontaine, Perrault and others, feature terrifying scenes of people being burned alive or eaten. Children in them are threatened by wolves, rats, ogres and trolls. Compare those grisly tales to the bowdlerized versions as issued by the Disney corporation, or the fare displayed in the children's section of your local bookstore. The old stories prepared children for the vicissitudes of a harsh and unpredictable life, but modern children's entertainment teaches only that animals all speak English and that cartoon characters and puppets are real individuals.

I see by the commercials that Disney World is now an attractive destination for adults sans children. Even as a child I had no desire to visit theme parks and witness an adult point to some poor grunt in a giant foam rubber mouse costume and say in a high voice, "Ooooh! Look! There's Mickeyyyy!" That seemed to border on insanity. But adults in the US, having spent their entire childhood immersed in such fare, never seem to loose their preference for things juvenile.

This has not been the case in other more traditional societies. I fondly recall sitting in my cold and drafty kitchen some years ago reading, for about the tenth or twelfth time, a story in the New York Times about the utter failure of Euro Disney. Each time I'd finish the article, I'd slap the table and exclaim, This calls for another drink! But as the miasma of American pop culture corrupts and vitiates the Earth, it is only a matter of time until people everywhere are likewise brought up in an artificial environment of imaginary characters and talking animals.

Devotion to an artificial childhood followed by a state of perpetual adolescence also explains why it is that Americans elect actors to political office. Just as frightened children must be reminded that "it's only a movie," adult Americans are possessed of a child's sense of reality, and often assault the villains of daytime television dramas (commonly called "soap operas" because they are sponsored by the makers of detergents) should they be seen walking down the street. Because Americans actually prefer fantasy to reality, they assume that John Wayne and Ronald Reagan actually were war heroes, and that their state would be better off with someone who possesses a cyborg's superpowers in command. I'm genuinely surprised that neither Batman nor Spiderman has been elected to high office (yet).

But America the Puerile manifests itself most plainly in its music. Only the fact that, instead of being encouraged to accept responsibility and emulate adults, American children are sequestered in a toyland would explain why it is that (as discussed in the previous screeds of History of the Death of Music in the 20th Century, parts 1 & 2) Americans typically listen all their adult lives to the same music they listened to when they were adolescents. Thus, people now in their 60s, seniors, still listen to Danny & the Juniors playing "Let's Go to the Hop." The bizarre incongruity of this can only be accounted for by the fact that the intellectual development of Americans has been permanently retarded by Sesame StreetandCaptain KangarooandMr. Rogers' NeighborhoodandPee Wee's Playhouseand all the other inane and nonsensical fare that has been deemed "appropriate" for children. With their early development thus trammeled, is it any wonder that Americans never make it past adolescence?

Just as children who are tragically deprived of conversation during early stages of development are unable to acquire language skills later in life, the American obsession with "childhood" has doomed its society to a lifetime of listening to juvenile music. If Americans were exposed to sophisticated music early in life, they might come to prefer such music when they mature, but the state of perpetual financial crisis in education has forced the elimination of music programs in many districts, while playing with an inflated ball gets increased support.

Conversely, a friend recently remarked to me about how in the family shops and restaurants owned by oriental immigrants to America, children are often seen manning the till or otherwise employed. It is no coincidence that this culture that demands adult behavior from their children now provides some of the world's finest classical musicians—e.g., Sarah Chang, Midori, Yo MaMa, Marat Bisengaliev, Sumi Jo, Myung Whun Chung—or that Japan is a lucrative market for classical recordings, and that the NAXOS label got its start in Hong Kong.

Mozart and Beethoven and Saint-Saëns were each denied a childhood as they were forced to become wages earners by their performance skills. With a population of 282 million, the USA likely contains a number of people with the talent of Mozart or Beethoven, but growing up in Neverland caused their musical talent to be focused instead on fad toys, video games, comic books, movies based on comic books, teen movies, teen music, fast food and a pathological aversion to anything not mired in the modern concept of childhood innocence.