It should’ve been a joke. There, in my subway car, alongside ads for personal injury lawyers and TOEFL classes—an admonition not to ride on the outside of the train! For those without the benefit of a TOEFL class, there was even a photo of a man taking what we may safely assume was his last trip.
No joke: Section 1050.9d of the MTA Rules of Conduct states that “no person may ride on the roof . . . or on any other area outside any subway car or bus or other conveyance.” I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Section 1050.9e prohibits standing stock-still in front of an oncoming train.
Such warnings are the nursery-murals of the nanny state; I might not have noticed this one had I not been reading Big Babies, a comical tantrum against cultural infantilization. Our regression is a Jack that cannot easily be put back in its Box. Still, we have to try. Threats foreign and domestic call for the adult resolve of the generation that fought (as my grandfather still calls it) the Big One. The danger is clear: When you stare for very long into the playpen, the playpen also stares into you.
Much of the Big Baby’s ruin lies in toys. That includes music, movies, and books, handbags, tiny dogs, and perfume, sneakers, iMacs, and “graphic novels.” Owning these things is fine, so far as it goes, but defining oneself by them is a rather poor substitute for being something. Bywater writes:
It is one thing to reveal, to one’s beloved, a secret craving for Cheez Whizz or Bailey’s Irish Cream, another to have interchangeable supermarket executives knowing it. The old saw that “the innocent have nothing to hide” fails to persuade us . . . . Having something to hide is contingent not on guilt but on autonomy. Choosing who knows what about us . . . is a sign . . . that we are grown-up.
The trouble is, no one wants to choose. Why should he? The child with the right toys makes the most friends, after all, and what is a MySpace webpage or a Friendster profile if not an itemization of one’s favorite distractions?
It’s no wonder, to take one example, that so many tolerate Gmail’s direct marketing, which reads our correspondence and then decides, often perversely, what to sell to us. (When I hear from a friend in Baghdad, I’m offered wholesale prices on sterile gauze.) We love to be reminded this way of who we are, but we’re nobody, really: “Poor postmodern man becomes entirely dependent on external ratification. . . . Authenticity is the one thing he will never feel.”
Given certain advantages, one can crawl through life without ever risking, enduring, or doing. True danger is ever “over there,” while the illusion of domestic safety is conjured up by OSHA regulation, signage, automated scolding: “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” Education gives way to the buffet dilettantism that flatters narrow concerns while punishing intelligence. Sacrifice, never demanded, is rarely offered. Work is easy. Lifestyle is all.
The modern man is, in Bywater’s words, asking for a smack—and in all probability he is going to get it. Early on, Bywater asks us to “look at the notices ticking you off for things you haven’t done yet . . . . Look how many little rhymes and jingles . . . . See how many times you are warned about things that anyone with the intellect of a fern would know are dangerous . . . . See (this will be a low number) how many things you can identify which treat you with dignity.”
Bywater does not ask, though he ought to, “Now why shouldn’t you be left on a hillside to die?”
Big Babies is funny, but sobering. Though vociferously anti-Bush and -Blair in parts, it has plenty in common with Mark Steyn’s America Alone. No shock there: for those who dread the impending crisis, humor may be the only nuke-proof bunker. Laughter distinguishes us from the animals—the ones in kaffiyehs and Semtex vests, that is.