RUSH: There was a piece by Maureen Callahan in the New York Post a couple of days ago. It’s right on the money. I’ll spend some time on it today. I was thinking yesterday when I was doing the various monologues on climate change, I feel like the only adult sometimes in this world. I remember when I was a kid and I thought something whacko my dad would sit me down, “Son, are you kidding? That’s ridiculous. That can’t possibly be.”
And he would tell me why logically and so forth and I would see the light. There’s nobody doing that today within the political structure. Everybody’s a kid. Nobody has to grow up. There aren’t any adults, particularly in the Democrat Party. There are none. There is nobody to tell these people what they’re doing is nonsensical. There’s nobody to tell these people that what they’re doing is senseless and devoid of total common sense and intelligence. There aren’t any adults.
And one of the bits of evidence and Maureen Callahan cites, look at the popular movies. They’re all cartoons: X Men this, Ironman here, Superman over here, Star Wars over there. Every hit movie is a cartoon, and adults are going to see them. They’re not growing up. And look at all these Millennials living at home with their parents, not having to grow up. Parents don’t know how to raise them anymore. Thus they’re becoming like their kids.
It’s true, I think. I think there is an absence throughout our society. It’s certainly not present on college campuses anymore. They’re aren’t any adults talking sense to people. There’s nobody talking sense. This madness of getting rid of fossil fuels is literal insanity. It’s madness. There’s not a single person to tell them how crazy and impossible it is because there aren’t any adults.
That’s how to view me. You youthful people in the audience, you young people, you Millennials, I am what you used to have. I am an adult looking out for you, trying to help you, trying to help you grow up, face reality. That’s how to see me. The adult in your life.
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RUSH: Here’s the Maureen Callahan piece: “Americans Have Become Children — Demanding, Dependent and Needy.” She doesn’t take it nearly as far as I do. It’s not only that Americans have become children. Not everybody, but the trend… It’s just there aren’t any adults. Adults are afraid to be adults. You get attacked. You get accused. They hit you up and say you’re violating somebody’s rights. You’re offending somebody if you treat a young person as an adult would.
“As a population, it’s exotic to the point of extinction, vanishing in plain sight: the American adult. As a trend, this has been gestating for at least the past [ten years], from Judd Apatow’s glorified man-babies to Lena Dunham’s ostensibly grown ‘Girls’ to the…” See, these people use Hollywood, what’s happening in Hollywood as their examples, and it works to a point. (laughing) I mean, the movies are all animations and cartoons. And adults are the ones, not just kids, going to see them.
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RUSH: There’s not a single adult, not a single adult at CNN to tell them how they’ve gone off the rails, to bring them back to just simple maturity. And this absence of adults is all over the place. I’m happy, by the way, to fulfill the role. I’m more than qualified. I am an adult. I am imbued with an over-abundance of common sense, and I am happy to share it with people as we continue our quest to always help.
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RUSH: To the phones we return, Sam in Birmingham, Alabama, you’re next. Welcome to Open Line Friday.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Earlier in the show you had made some commentary about where the adults are in the room and one of the things that you mentioned was that even our movies today are all based around cartoons. And I had a slightly different take on that than you did. I think that the rise of these cartoon movies, these superhero movies, came during the Obama Administration. I look at the generation that goes to these and what I see is that these are mostly the young people who grew up in a post-9/11 America. And they voted for this superstar kind of president who had a lot of these star qualities about them, right?
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: But what he said was: This is the new America. You’re not going to be able to live at the same level that your parents and grandparents did.
RUSH: That’s true. He did say that.
CALLER: It’s a new age and they inherently knew something was wrong with that, and they wanted a superhero to come fix it. And that is when these movies began to really gain in popularity.
RUSH: Okay. So your theorem is that it is the actual content, the actual message that is responsible for the popularity of these movies, not the fact that people are still kids and like cartoons, but that they like superheroes triumphing over what they’ve been told was the future in the negative, and the good guys do win, the bad guys do get creamed and all that. There may be something — that may be an element of it. But let me, after the upcoming obscene profit break, expand on this a bit.
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RUSH: So our last caller was bouncing off something I said earlier. Let me go back and retrace steps. I have here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, a column that appeared in the New York Post a couple days ago by the estimable Maureen Callahan, and the headline of the column: ” Americans Have Become Children — Demanding, Dependent and Needy.”
The opening line, “As a population, it’s exotic to the point of extinction, vanishing in plain sight: the American adult.” I happen to agree with this for a whole host of reasons. In addition, that there haven’t been any real adult role models ever since baby boomers decided to be friends with their kids rather than raise them, and so there’s no adult role models. With no adults, there are no authority figures, folks.
And when you let teenagers and early-20s think they’re authorities, they haven’t lived long enough to know nearly enough to be an authority on anything. They have their opinions, but there is no wisdom. They haven’t lived long enough to have them. There are exceptions, of course, but there need to be responsible adults.
How many of you are football fans and watching the situation between the Oakland Raiders and Antonio Brown? What’s absent? An adult. There’s somebody trying to be an adult. Mike Mayock, the general manager, but the pressures on him to not be an adult are immense. That’s why this situation is out of control. And it’s why the inmates are running the asylum in so many places.
And authority figures feel guilty now, “It’s not fair, it’s so mean.” No, it’s not rooted in mean, it’s rooted in love. It’s rooted in wanting the best for people, helping them try to learn, grow and understand things, rather than indulging whatever they don’t know as cute or, “Well, they’re trying,” or, “Well, it’s their opinion and who am I to say they’re wrong?” Exactly. An adult, when somebody is wrong and it’s a young person, it’s your kid, you tell them. You tell them why.
But there is an absence of adults. And Maureen Callahan in this piece cites a bunch of things as evidence. One of them is this. She quotes someone here named — let’s see — well, strangely enough, Alec Baldwin. Let me put this in context.
She starts out by saying: “Take prime-time TV.” Now, I understand people in journalism like to bounce off Hollywood, television shows, Hollywood. How many times do you run into people who think reality is something they saw in a movie? Or they compare reality to something they saw in a movie.
Movie is fiction, made-up, written, acted, and yet how many people say, “Yeah, I saw that on TV,” and, “Have you seen that movie?” Because there are analogies. And in some cases there are life lessons being taught. But she says: “Take prime-time TV. This summer was awash in game shows, major stars — including Justin Timberlake, Jimmy Kimmel, Rob Lowe, Ellen DeGeneres, Alec Baldwin, Tiffany Haddish, Elizabeth Banks, Duane Johnson,” producing or emceeing game shows.
“What it comes down to is that the movie business has changed,” Baldwin says. “They’re going to put up a lot of money, including big fees for ‘Iron Man’ and those kind of tentpole films. [But] everything else, the fees in the movie business have collapsed.” Meaning box office, people don’t want to go watch people act roles; they want to watch superheroes and cartoons and animation.
So Maureen Callahan says: “To Baldwin’s point, just look at the five top-grossing films this summer: ‘The Lion King,'” which has already been around. The Lion King is a remake. “Toy Story 4,” there’s already been three of them. These are kids’ movies that are leading in the box office because adults are going. Spiderman: Far From Home. Aladdin. How many times has Aladdin been done? The best thing about The Lion King is Elton John’s song Circle of Life.
And John Wick 3. Have you seen a John Wick movie? Oh, man, it’s indescribable. Keanu Reeves stars as John Wick. John Wick 3 is out now, and because I’m doing a study on this, I watched it on the plane flying home the other day. And after 45 minutes, I’m sorry, I tried. I had to leave it. It is a never-ending fight scene. Two and a half hours of a fight scene that never ends, with impossible things. John Wick defeating an army of 10 martial artists with axes and knives and guns and he doesn’t even get but one scrape.
Anyway, it’s pure fantasy. And he broke the rules. There’s this hotel called The Continental. All the bad guys go into this hotel. When you’re there, you can’t be a bad guy, you’ve got to obey the rules. Well, he killed somebody in the hotel. So now all the world’s bad guys have a $14 million contract out to kill him. So the movie is about how he stays alive with the world trying to kill him. It’s got stunt after stunt.
What else? “The biggest album release of the summer, if not the year, came awash in pastel colors, animation, dollhouses and heart-shaped glitter-bombs: The ostensibly adult-themed ‘Lover’ by Taylor Swift, age 29. A recent front-page story in The Wall Street Journal reported on recess for grownups.” I saw this story and I didn’t get to it. There is recess for adults at work now. Recess! Not lunch, recess. At 10:15, recess.
“A recent front-page story in The Wall Street Journal reported on recess for grownups, a new industry in which otherwise high-functioning adults pay good money to play dodge ball, kickball, hopscotch and gorge on grilled cheese and chicken nuggets. Quieter [adults] play with Lincoln Logs, Play-Doh or Silly Putty.”
It’s a frontpage story. It may not be widespread yet, but it’s spreading. This is the point, it’s becoming a trend. Yeah, the timeout cannot be far behind. And then we’re going to equate it to the school day, somebody is going to get out at 2:45 or 3:15. Who are these people? Who are these people? American liberals.
We played the sound bites for you at this socialist conference in Atlanta. “Can you please stop the gender identification? Can we stop the noise? I’ve got a lot of problems here, can you just stop, I’m very sensitive to the noise.” That’s who it is.
“And for those who prefer more traditional summer escapes — taking, say, a cruise — Carnival Cruises, headquartered in Florida, announced the first cruise ship to have a roller coaster on deck. And for any guest averse to riding 187 feet above sea level at 40 miles per hour, they can play ‘Family Feud Live’ on a recreated set.”
Everybody can pretend to be on TV. So it’s these things that Ms. Callahan postulates why adults have vanished. I think in the case of these movies, the Lion King times two, Toy Story times four, Aladdin times 12. Gosh, how many times have there been Aladdin? John Wick times three. I think it’s true. I think there are fewer and fewer adults, and I think the evidence is far greater than this.
There’s a bunch of childish, immature behavior that nobody is just standing up and telling young people to stop it anymore, for their own good. We don’t have the guts. We don’t have the courage. And then these people grow up and they become journalists, like at CNN, or worse.
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RUSH: You know, one of the interesting things in this Wall Street Journal story about recess for adults, is that many schools have canceled recess for kids. And it was long ago — Mr. Snerdley, you’ll remember — long ago dodgeball was banned in grade school. You know why? Because it was dangerous. And it was mean. Because some kids were targeting others and missing others. And it was really mean. It was humiliating if you couldn’t get out of the way of the dodgeball. So we canceled dodgeball.
Nobody can ever lose. Nobody can ever be told “no.” Nobody can ever experience the realities of life that teach you how to face and overcome adversity. We’ve tried to take all of that out of our young people’s lives. So now at adult recess they’re out playing dodgeball, until somebody is going to come along and tell them they can’t because it’s humiliating and it’s embarrassing.