Death of the Grown-up How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

"It's difficult to tell the grown-ups from the children in a landscape littered with Baby Britneys, Moms Who Mosh, and Dads too "young" to call themselves "mister." Surveying this sorry scene, Diana West makes a much larger statement about our place in the world: "No wonder we can't stop Islamic terrorism. We haven't put away our toys!" As far as West is concerned, grown-ups are extinct. The disease that killed them emerged in the fifties, was incubated in the sixties, and became an epidemic in the seventies, leaving behind a nation of eternal adolescents who can't say no, a politically correct population that doesn't know right from wrong." "The result of such indecisiveness is, ultimately, the end of Western civilization as we know it. The reason is that the inability to take on the grown-up role of gatekeeper influences more than whether a sixteen-year-old should attend a Marilyn Manson concert. It also fosters the dithering cultural relativism that arose from the "culture wars" in the eighties and which now undermines our efforts in the real culture war of the twenty-first century - the War on Terror." "Diana West takes readers on an odyssey through culture and politics, from the rise of rock 'n' roll to the rise of multiculturalism, from the loss of identity to the discovery of "diversity," from the emasculation of the heroic ideal to the PCing of Mary Poppins, all the while building a compelling case against the childishness that is subverting the struggle against jihadist Islam in a mixed-up, post-9/11 world."--BOOK JACKET.West, Diana is the author of 'Death of the Grown-up How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization', published 2007 under ISBN 9780312340483 and ISBN 0312340486.