What else is new?

Washington Post reports:
Poland's conservative government took its drive to curb what it sees as homosexual propaganda to the small screen on Monday, taking aim at Tinky Winky and the other Teletubbies. Ewa Sowinska, government-appointed children rights watchdog, told a local magazine published on Monday, May 28th 2007, she was concerned the popular BBC children's show promoted homosexuality. She said she would ask psychologists to advise if this was the case.

Poland's rightist government has upset human rights groups and drawn criticism within the European Union by apparent discrimination against homosexuals. Polish Education Minister Roman Giertych has proposed laws sacking teachers who promote "homosexual lifestyle" and banning "homo-agitation" in schools.

But in a sign that the government wants to distance itself from Sowinska's comments, Parliamentary Speaker Ludwig Dorn said he had warned her against making public comments "that may turn her department into a laughing stock."
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I' heard it all. I thought. Some overpaid psychologists analysing the Teletubbies for homosexual undertones? On a hearsay of some Polish watchdogg idiot? Puppets are not male or female. They are neither. These programmes are aimed at kids aged up to 3 years old who can barely talk in constructed sentences, nevermind sitting watching Teletubbies and thinking 'Mom, I could swear Tinky Winky is a homosexual.'

Its just ludicrous. This is the nanny state gone completely out its mind.

Quick, what does the following list suggest to you:
Lamaze classes;
baby showers;
“parenting skills”;
preschool anxiety all the way up to college;
transitional phases;
timeouts;
chronic credit-card debt;
the indiscriminate wearing of athletic garb;
political correctness;
anti-political correctness;
midlife crises;
couples therapy;
divorce mediation;
Botox;
dermatological fillers;
cosmetic surgery;
the new-and-improved menopause;
wearing sunglasses in winter even though you’re not famous;
comb-overs;
an obsession with the daily lives of the celebrated and merely notorious;
real estate as a means to an end;
a debilitating reliance on takeout dinners;
a preference for esoteric coffee beans;
an aversion to butter;
an uneasy feeling of identification with Bob Dylan;
a denial of death;
cilantro, cilantro, cilantro;
framing every photograph you’ve ever taken;
the belief that your dog/cat is you;
an excessively personalized vision of retirement;
older single mothers;
grandfatherly second-time fathers;
a fear that you’ve become your mother or father;
a free-floating feeling of grievance that you’ve failed to make obscene amounts of money as a hedge-fund manager;
a gut instinct that immortality might be just around the next technological bend.

If you still haven’t figured out that I’m talking about the so-called baby-boomer generation, you might consider the possibility that the reason you are having difficulty making out the fine print of any given subtext is because you need reading glasses.

Once upon a complacent time we may have thought that we were, to quote John Lennon, clever and classless and free. Nowadays, I wager that many of us have come to realize that we are stuck in the muck and mire of habit and convention. We have become chips off the old block, carrying around our parents’ voices in our heads even as we swat away their child-rearing beliefs, conservative spending habits and stoic acceptance of mortality. Behind all this busy reinvention of the wheel of life, of course, sheer dread lies in wait: the fear that we’re fast gaining upon that demarcation line where you stop being young and you start being something else entirely, someone belonging to a different order of nomenclature. (It might well be that the Sturm und Drang of middle age comes down to nothing more significant than a problem of taxonomy.) Heck, if we knew we were going to grow older this quickly, we would have frozen our youth like a carton of ice cream to be savored at a later date.

What generations before us were spared is the relatively recent invention of middle age as a sustained mentality — one predicated on an awareness of its own growing remove from that elusive property known as hipness. Indeed, the enshrinement of hipness as a long-term attitude — the idea that first you’re cool and then you’re uncool and then you die — is probably the worst legacy of the culture of the 60s. The result, the evidence of which is all around us, is a collective failure to maintain our generational integrity. Our lives are characterized by a sophomoric vicariousness: we behave as though our children’s triumphs and disappointments were our own and, facilitated by an increasingly euphemistic attitude toward extinction (now coyly referred to as “passing”), as if our deaths belonged to someone else entirely. They are not, we hurry to reassure ourselves, “ominous and intimately” our own, as John Updike, that connoisseur of waning potential, observed in “Rabbit at Rest.”

We are a strange bunch, we who belong to the New Middle Ages, half intractably cynical and half hopelessly expectant. Many of us, that is, believed we could put in for one order of rose garden, with a schmear on the side. We came of age convinced that life — far from being the vale of tears that people who lived in the Old Middle Ages conceived it to be — was supposed to make us happy in some ineffable but all the same transporting way. I remember many years ago, when I was a very unhappy young woman and had relayed my tale of what I perceived to be overweening early damage (this was before the rise of the ubiquitous dysfunctional family) to a dispassionate and renowned family therapist, he leaned forward in his chair and asked me, “Who gave you your expectations?”

At the time I was more than a bit miffed. Where was his famous therapeutic empathy? Or ordinary human understanding, for that matter? These days, however, I tend to see things more from his viewpoint. Which is to say that while I don’t whistle as I work, I do try to lead a productive life in my own inevitably hobbled way. For one thing, reality has hit me in the eyebrows, where I first started going gray some years ago and where I keep going grayer, underneath renewed coatings of eyebrow tint. For another, both my parents are dead now, which makes me an adult orphan. (Although there must be a statute of limitations on how old you can be and still reasonably consider yourself an orphan.) If there is no way out of it, there are ploys around it. The poet Philip Larkin, for instance, deftly avoided the encroachments of middle age — “This loss of interest, hair and enterprise,” as he characterized it in “Continuing to Live” — by insisting that he had never been youthful in the first place. In the poem “On Being Twenty-Six,” Larkin was already envisioning the dismal and definitive endpoint: “Talent, felicity —/these things withdraw,/And are succeeded by a dingier crop/That come to stop.”

But even Larkin was stumped by the reality of living in time: “Where can we live but days?” Where indeed. Fueled by an increasing fear and demonization of Old Age, ours is a generation bred on the notion of doing it our way, right up to our method of retirement. Given this curious and entitled perspective, middle age becomes a life raft that we can’t afford to fall off — because once we do, we’re going down, down into those depths for which there are no transitional phases or, God knows, “feeder” schools.

Hold on, now. Being young was never as great as it’s made out to be and being middle-aged is not as bad as all that. Take a deep breath. With a modicum of luck, there’s lots up ahead to hold your interest. There’s still time enough to soften your views and limber up your affections, still time to take chances. Still time, you never know, to undo having become exactly what you did not want to be. Bruce Springsteen, one of the very few rock stars to age gracefully, sums up our plight in his anthemic “Thunder Road”: “So you’re scared and you’re thinking/That maybe we ain’t that young anymore.” And then, being Springsteen, he immediately offers us a way out. “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night.”