BOOKS
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And by the time they reached college in the 1960s they were being
widely declared (even by so stern an observer as Hannah Arendt) to be
the most brilliant and moral generation the world had ever seen. Those
whose job it actually was to teach them, and who surely knew better,
surrendered to this line out of fear; and their parents surrendered to it
as well, out of sloth-and most of the young simply grew more and
more enervated by their putative victory.
But at least it can be said of the baby boomers that they had occasioned a
goodly amount of anxiety, whether it was given expression or suppressed.
Their children, on the other hand, seem to be making far less noise and occa–
sioning far less anxiety-so long, that is, as they remember the condoms.
Even so, from her original and truly illuminating angle of vision Kay
Hymowitz has explained a great deal about the emptying of the old
American ethos and the dulling of the American morale. She has per–
haps even helped to shed some light on my own anxiety about the
beautiful and self-mutilated fourteen-year-old
I
spoke of, along with all
her pierced and tattooed and anorexic contemporaries who are so
determinedly doing hurt to themselves. These children's mothers and
fathers could once have set fires in their college libraries, say, or rolled
in the mud at Woodstock, and the world had taken intense notice.
Today's "baby geniuses" in their anticultural world can scarcely raise a
murmur-except perhaps by smoking cigarettes (and even in that case
the politicians and their minions are cheerfully planning budgets based
on the taxes that smoking children can be expected to pay) .
But who knows? Maybe one day (may it be soon) Kay Hymowitz and
associateS will have begun to make a dent. And maybe, again, on that
day my young friend's father will finally stop dead in his tracks and
shout at her, "My God! What the hell have you done to yourself?"
Midge Deeter
The Americanized Psychoanalyst
IDENlITY'S
ARCHITECT:
A BIOGRAPHY OF ERIK H . ERIKSON. By Lawrence
J.
Friedman. Scribner. $35.00.
SPORTING HIS "POST-MODERN" COLORS, Stanley Fish in a recent op-ed
piece declared: "All that biographers can do is to substitute their own
story for the story of their announced subject" because "all biographers
