O tempura, O morays

American culture has always rated Youth too highly, other parents have always over-indulged their children, and this dotage has always been reaching an unprecedented level. Thus it has always been, so the basic precepts of Burkean conservatism decree that it will always remain thus in the future.

Ha ha silly Uncle Smut! Have you been at the Rosehip-&-Nightshade parsnip scrumpy again?

To shut the pieholes, disrespectful whippersnappers. It contains vitamins and everything for health. Also, if one's parents criticised their contemporaries for sloppy permissive parenting, while one's grandparents were critical of parenting practices in their generation, then it is TRADITION.

It also contains the bones of small animals.

The parsnip scrumpy? Filtering it ruins the flavour. Now give me back my ear-trumpet and I will tell you a story.

We struggle to conceal our enthusiasm.

Via Yastreblansky, here's Randall Jarrell with a few words from 'Pictures from an Institution' (1954). The character of Irene Rosenbaum is a satire on bumptious numpties who open their faceholes and let the facile uninformed generalisations fall out.

A conservative columnist and 1960s revanchist whom we shall address as GFW somehow fell under a contractual obligation or geas to cite the book at decade intervals.

He should have read the fine print in his Faustian bargain.

Indeed he should have. Don't interrupt.

Sorry Uncle Smut.

Starting in 1980, in a syndicated Summer reading list, the book was a "wickedly funny dissection of contemporary liberalism".

In 1991, GFW turned the opportunity of a book review into a stalking horse to bring his rhetorical flamethrower to bear upon the strawman of Liberal Juvenophilia.

Is that enough metaphors? 

The task of shoehorning additional ones into the sentence is left as an exercise for the reader. This time it was convenient for GFW's purpose to endorse Irene's ill-observed opinions as if they were Jarrell's own aperçus:

Ellis in his way, and Morrison in his, illustrate a particular fate for certain youths. In Randall Jarrell's novel "Pictures from an Institution" a foreign visitor says, "You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause." The problem is juvenophilia.

Why are conservative columnists so down on Juvenal when they are always extolling the virtues of Martial ?

The aesthetic rankings of Roman poets is a mystery beyond our ken.
The "inciting children" line appears again in a 2000 column which GFW palmed off on Newsweek, but by this time it served as a generic indictment of the Culture; parental indulgence as a synecdoche for liberalism required no clarification, for it had become an automatic nervous tic. The column is literally a remix of the 1980 reading list, because Newsweek won't care.

August, the last month before the academic follies begin again, is when to read Randall Jarrell's "Pictures From an Institution" (1954). It is a hilarious--and, alas, timeless--portrait of campus culture ("they longed for men to be discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren't prejudiced toward moon men") and liberalism generally ("You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause").

GFW's views on Juvenophilia are shared by a second salaried opinionator and Christopher Lasch impersonator 'DB', to whom our attention rolls now, much in the manner of the poet's eye. DB also believes in the damage wrought by excessive parental love (his Thanksgiving family reunions are fraught with tight-lipped silences). He believes in the importance of Mawwiage, Twoo wuv, both as economic asset and as totem of moral orthodoxy; such is DB's dedication to Mawwiage that he recently divorced from his wife and freed them both to bring other people into that desirable condition. More to the point, it turns out that DB is also a victim of the geas, forcing him to write as follows:

There are two great defining features of child-rearing today. First, children are now praised to an unprecedented degree. As Dorothy Parker once joked, American children aren’t raised; they are incited. They are given food, shelter and applause. That’s a thousand times more true today. Children are incessantly told how special they are.

Rosenbaum's blather about excessive praise for children 60 years ago has been repurposed as precedent and proof of the assertion that current levels of praise are even unprecedentedly higher.

Never mind that, Uncle Smut; how did Jarrell's words get put through the Voice Empassiviser for extra flaccidity --

-- Flaccor.

Flaccor is not a word. And then put in the mouth of Dorothy Parker?

I'm glad you asked me that. It turns out that DB is plagiarising the work of one DB, a decade earlier:

Yastreblansky has a theory for how DB originally came by the misattribution which has remained ever since on his "Great Quotations" collection of fridge poetry magnets, beyond the reach of fact-checking or correction. Or perhaps it's a geas.

As a way of paying homage to the Ouroborean self-plagiarism self-sufficiency, the intellectual Biosphere 2 that American conservative thought has become, this post is a recycled version of Yastreblansky's inquiries, and of blog comments here and here.