This just in: a Domenech universe?

When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will start to change.


Children – that is, any person age 25 or younger – live in a world so different from the adult world that it could almost be described as a parallel universe.

This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 62. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies. It set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was ‘Three Coins in the Fountain,’ and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios.

That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Last week, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”

That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change. In 1954, parents didn’t have to pay attention to what was out there; it was all the same. In 2005, parents can’t keep up with what’s out there, even the ones who try. When my kids were teenagers, I watched MTV regularly, because it was the best way to find out what was going on in my kids’ world. I also tried to watch “The Simpsons.” But I failed. Bart didn’t interest me as entertainment. Neither did MTV, though it was fun to mute the sound and play old Patti Page LPs while Madonna and Aerosmith tore up the screen.

Kids today have terrific power. They have the retail industry wrapped around their little finger, and the media furiously develops product that shows children in control of their, if not the, world. In their world, the 2006 kids find it popular to say to anyone outside that world, that is, anyone over 30, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

It must be that power that persuaded The Washington Post to hire the 24-year-old Ben Domenech to be its “conservative blogger.” Talk about a furiously developed product to attract a younger readership. Domenech only lasted three days, because it turned out he was a casual plagiarist, which in journalism is the lowest of the low. He couldn’t deny the line-by-line comparisons, but he did make it a point, that left-wing bloggers, whom he called “leftists with their sharpened knives” had provided all the evidence.

His resignation note reads for all the world like a paraphrase of Richard Nixon’s resignation speech from Aug. 8, 1974. He has lost his support base, but he accepts no responsibility for “the firestorm” that had been created. Karen, my wife, says such behavior is simply sick, in the clinical psychology sense. Refusal to accept responsibility, she says, is a character disorder.

But Domenech’s behavior could also be argued as prototypical of the children who inhabit this parallel universe, growing ever more serene in their power and disturbingly confident that the world must shape itself to them.

The Domenech story is another example of chatter coming from that world. Troubling. It reminds me of “Lord of the Flies.” The little beasts, murderous in their power lust, become little boys again the instant an adult appears. In this story, 2006 may be the instant for adults to appear.
©Michael Grant 2006