Hot trend in publishing: coloring books for grownups, with 1.4 million copies of Johanna Basford’s “Secret Garden” sold.
Hot trend in schooling: In Brooklyn, people closer to middle age than middle school are going back to kindergarten to hone their skills at dressing up in monster costumes, finger-painting and singing “Wheels on the Bus.”
Hot trend in fashion: Celebrities are posting pictures of themselves having a night on the town while wearing matchy-matchy pajamas.
Hot trend in America: It’s becoming toddler nation. The bald eagle is being replaced by a Teletubby.
Remember when it was considered an insult to call Adam Sandler movies “adolescent”? If he is 15 forever mentally, at least he’s got about 10 developmental years on Allison Williams and Bee Shaffer when they snuggled up in their PJs on Instagram.
No wonder Sandler’s career has faded — his shtick isn’t absurd anymore. If they made “Billy Madison 2” or “Grown-Ups 3” today, they’d have to be documentaries.
There’s been much talk this week about how Donald Trump is the presidential candidate predicted by “Idiocracy,” the 2006 dystopian comedy that supposed a reverse Darwinism was at work in America — dumb people have lots of kids while the Alexandras and Sebastians put off parenting until their 40s and then produce one severely overprotected child who is likely to spend half her life in emergency rooms and the other half in therapy due to allergies to gluten, dust and negative thoughts.
But Trump is unlikely to duplicate the electoral success of President Camacho (full name Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, porn star and ultimate smackdown wrestling champ). Idiocracy may be a little ways off, but kiddie-ocracy is already here.
For the past generation, instead of teaching our younglings to be tough, independent and responsible, we’ve been bubble-wrapping them against the world. That’s bad enough. Now we’re saying, “Scootch over, it’s comfy in here. I brought Blow Pops!”
Rarely do you hear people say, “Boys will be boys” anymore. Forty years ago people would say this about actual boys; 20 years ago they’d say it about immature men. Today, though, everybody’s yearning for the thumb-sucking years.
A decade or so ago I noticed something about well-shod young women in Manhattan: They were weirdly concerned with this thing called “birthday parties,” which I vaguely remembered from the “Mork and Mindy” era (and thanks, Mom, for that Robin Williams comedy album you got me in 1979: so, so filthy). “Birthday parties” seemed a strange activity for an adult to participate in. You’re going to solicit presents from your friends while punishing outcasts by denying them invitations? Odd, distinctly odd.
Equally odd were the Hello Kitty backpacks you started to see on (grown-up) girls around town, while Carrie Bradshaw was prancing around in fairy-princess wear. At the time I was a book review editor, and I loved to peek at what people were reading on trains. Whenever I saw someone with a fat hardcover book, my heart leapt — books are alive! But it was always Harry Potter. Then it was “Twilight,” then “The Hunger Games.”
Now women have joined us in the rush back in time: The commenters on Basford’s Facebook page are, overwhelmingly, ladies. The pictures of the students at the Brooklyn preschool are mostly female. In a similar way, women are now proclaiming triumph at being as crude as guys (Amy Schumer), as comic-booky as guys (Comic-Con interest is now about 50-50) — and, we can only hope, getting in fistfights outside bars like guys. As the ads used to say when urging women toward lung-cancer parity: You’ve come a long way, baby.
Men aren’t naturally inclined to be grown-ups; most of us would love to eat Count Chocula and play World of Warcraft all day, but the need to impress women makes us get out of bed, put on pants and go out into the world to slay the beast, or at least be the best darn middle managers we can be. If women are saying, “Everybody into the sandbox,” dudes will be only too happy to grab our pails.