Growing Up

Here's a wonderful rant from the Telegraph that I somehow missed last week. Here are some highlights:

The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn't have a lifestyle. He didn't need one: he had a life.

I suspect that my grandfather's life was real in a sense that my father's life hasn't quite been, and my life is not at all.

We live on a diet of shadows, and we can only imitate them, stuck in the playpen, waiting to be distracted.

Mistrust anything catchy, whether it's the Axis of Evil, advertising slogans, or blatant branding ('New Labour'). Catchiness exists to prevent thought and to disguise motive. Grown-ups can think for themselves.

Watch our language. Is there really much difference between a six-year-old in a fright-wig and his father's waders shouting 'I'm the Mighty Wurgle-Burgle-Urgley-Goo' and an ostensible grown-up demanding to be called 'Tony Blair's Respect Tsar'?

Many thanks to Dr Albert Mohler, who seems to be very good at spotting these things in the UK press, despite being 1) very busy and 2) American.

It's also worth pointing out that the rant is actually trying to sell the book Big Babies by Michael Bywater, from which it was taken.