Real adolescents have the excuse of raging hormones and uncontrollable urges. The new PMS is a post-menopausal syndrome demanding the recapture of youth, a kind of boot for the mind behind the wrinkled brow. It was not ever thus. The adolescent of the '50s was mythologized in the movies "Rebel Without a Cause" and "The Wild One." When a perplexed grown-up asked Marlon Brandon, the wild one, "What are you rebelling against?" he replied: "Watcha got?" The baby boomers that followed discovered lots to rebel against, growing up and becoming wise most of all. The teenage temper tantrum worked. The kids got their way as the grown-ups lost theirs.
Some people blamed the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon for leading to the forfeiture of the respect adults had always counted on. My mother thought the introduction of flip-flops as permissible footwear was what started it all. Behavior that was once "good" or "bad" was reduced merely to "appropriate" and "inappropriate." Little girls exchanged their dolls with diapers for Bratz Babyz with fishnet stockings and flimsy tank tops. Little boys learned about pimps and hos from popular music.
Boomers came of age eager to offend everybody but were so indulged that anything that offended them became taboo. The social slights sensitive adolescents always decried were writ large with narcissistic perception codified in political correctness.
Edgar Friedenberg's "Vanishing Adolescent" has been succeeded by books analyzing perpetual adolescence. Charles Sykes, in his "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School," looks at what happens to children and grandchildren of boomers who suffered institutional and parental permissiveness. Rule 4 of the rules not learned: "You are not entitled." Examples include "the double latte with cream, Michael Jordan running shoes, a cell phone with limitless text-messaging." "You'll have to work for all of it," he writes, "and then figure out how to pay for it."
Diana West in her book, "The Death of the Grown-Up," says trouble began when children started aspiring to adolescence rather than adulthood. They replaced information with animation: "More adults, ages 18 to 49, watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN."
An adolescent lurches within minutes from fear and insecurity to self-confidence and bravado. A culture sustains perpetual adolescence at deadly peril. It's our collective identity crisis.