THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 7, 1996 TAG: 9607080187
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: 72 lines
Dad's missing. Mom wants to be. The kids are, literally and metaphorically, abandoned to TV.
And they remain kids.
``People don't bother to grow up,'' observes American poet and culture critic Robert Bly, ``and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults.''
He makes a compelling case in The Sibling Society (Addison-Wesley, 329 pp., $25).
While the country rants on about ``family values,'' however they may be construed by whatever political party, it presides over the ongoing dissolution of the family unit.
``Adults regress toward adolescence,'' complains the author, ``and adolescents - seeing that - have no desire to become adults.''
Unsurprisingly, adolescents make bum parents.
One ogre in the scenario is the omnipresent TV, which is in the relentless business of selling. It acculturates us early into the persistent habit of buying. And so the Pepsi Generation, mesmerized by its own gimme image in an artificially youthful mirror, becomes stuck in time.
Dobie Gillis meets Dorian Gray.
And the much-heralded renaissance of the computer is nothing more than TV on steroids.
Bly, the Jung-at-heart guru of the men's movement, wrote persuasively in Iron John and elsewhere of ``soft males,'' a consequence of absent father figures and unambiguous rites of passage after the Industrial Revolution.
Some feminists said fine.
Bly quotes columnist Katha Pollitt: ``Why not have a child of one's own? Children are a joy; many men are not.''
Bad answer.
``The solution some sociologists have proposed to solve the problem of anger by removing fathers has had a serious effect on human culture as a whole,'' Bly maintains, ``an effect we now see in the aggression of fatherless gangs among the disadvantaged, and the presence of depressed and passive youngsters among the advantaged.''
Fatherless Jack trades his mother's cow for seeds. He scales the beanstalk, steals the gold. Brings the giant down.
And his mother is stuck, ever after, with Jack.
Who keeps a computer in his room.
So the soft male becomes the immature husband, if he marries, or the permanent houseguest, if he does not.
Or perhaps, if neither of the above, the fantasy-ridden avenging angel with an automatic weapon who, survivors always say, always seemed a little odd but fairly innocuous.
Now women, Bly notes, are backing off and out as well. They've had it. The children have been consigned to day care and the elders to old folks' homes.
In the long run, it's self-destructive.
``All of us who have been angry at the fathers rejoiced at first when the fathers lost authority,'' Bly contends, ``but the picture becomes more somber when we realize that the forces that destroyed the father will not be satisfied and are moving toward the mothers.
``Mothers are discounted everywhere.
``When mothers and fathers are both dismembered, we will have a society of orphans, or, more exactly, a culture of adolescent orphans.''
A sibling society that squabbles.
That fills its winnowed time with toys.
That ignores, denies, has no notion of obligation.
Bly offers hope that ``a genuine equality'' may be established between modern husbands and wives that may mitigate some of this.
Partnership, he feels, is possible.
So is adulthood - if we can see beyond our siblings.
Says Bly, ``The look associated with gratitude - upward - breaks our contact with the mirrors.'' MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. by CNB