Adults only - visits to Miami, Fl, New Orleans, LA, and Port Arkansas, TX uncover what is socially wrong with adults who refuse to act their age - Column

National Review, July 11, 1994 by Digby Anderson

After a rather good lunch at the Sagua in Miami's South Beach (grouper, snapper, and Rioja), Mrs. A. and I were gently wandering back to the beach for a nap, some sun, swimming, and that joy that beaches afford so well, the opportunity to eavesdrop on other people's conversations. They are on the beach so long they cannot not talk about themselves, which in the U.S.A. usually means their "relationships." The best place is near the water's edge, where there is always a slight breeze so they have to raise their voices. Get downwind and you can learn about the life of the world.

Anyway, as we were crossing Collins Avenue, I saw a rather frail elderly white man. You may picture him, if you wish, sitting peacefully under a front-porch palm in slacks, open-necked shirt, and Panama, with a gin and angostura in one hand and a Chesterton novel in the other. But that is not what he looked like or what he was doing. He was sweating heavily and looked in distress - what you could see of him, that is: for he had a baseball cap on his head, turned back to front, and dark, reflective glasses covered his eyes. He wore a skimpy T-shirt with dark sweat patches under the armpits, very tight latex shorts also with dark stains, and he was all wired up to a machine producing, I imagine, lower-class music. He was coming slowly but remorselessly toward us, out of control, on roller skates.

There is no record of Saint Paul visiting South Beach, but he should have. Indeed I would have liked him with us there and on other parts of the trip, for instance in New Orleans, and indeed in places I didn't go this time such as San Francisco: can you imagine the First, Second, and no doubt there would have to be a Third Epistle to the San Franciscans? Saint Paul is sound on sodomy but he is also sound on social divisions, on class - masters and servants - and of course on ladies and gents. But it is less often noted how sound he is on the behavior becoming different ages. Sometimes he writes explicitly of the characteristics of full Christian adulthood. But I was thinking more of the implicit assumptions: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, I roller skated as children do; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Roller-skates are, except for a few sports skaters, toys, children's things. But they had not been put away.

Back on the beach, we found much to our pleasure that a couple of ladies had set up their chairs just next to us in full hearing. They wore curious bikinis that did not seem to have any backs to them and they had big bottoms. Round the girls was a crowd of chaps bantering away furiously. They talked about their own and their friends' relationships, which club the gang had all been to last night, where they would all meet tonight. Nothing unusual or wrong in young people enjoying being in largish peer groups with all the showing off, joshing, and uniformity that characterizes such groups. That's how many 14-year-olds behave. Except that the bottoms and their admirers were all aged 40.

Now it would be quite wrong to suggest that all South Beach was full of people who had not grown up. Many people on the beach were "being their age," enjoying themselves, relaxing without any toys or adolescent habits. But my group of overgrown children were not the only ones. What is more important, no one seemed to find them unusual or odd.

New Orleans was another story. All along the levees were new-generation hippies, proudly, in their shifty, lazy way, refusing the responsibilities of adulthood. Around ten they got up and shambled to the far side of Decatur where they begged - able-bodied 25-year-olds begging with the monotonous bleat, "Can you spare some change?" When they were given some they grunted, then giggled with their friends. And they too were tolerated. No one moved them on. No one looked shocked. Begging is not shocking, of course, but able-bodied adults begging are.

How odd that hippiedom dare show its face again. We know now where peace and love ended, in squalor, in the extension of drug addiction to the middle classes, in crime, in the collapse of the academy. We know where it would have liked to end up too: in the West losing the Cold War. So why is it back and why is it not mocked and persecuted out of existence? In a bar the radio was playing Seventies favorites, including one song the only words of which I could make out were the chorus: "Things are only as important as you want them to be." Life, of course, is about learning the exact opposite, that a petulant refusal to face the way things are and the rights of others is a reaction tolerable only in the youngest of children and not to be encouraged even in them. There were many things wrong with hippiedom but its essence was childishness, saying "I won't" to the world.

In Port Aransas, Texas, I saw no adult children. Plenty of adults enjoying themselves, mostly fishing, but no infantilism. The last instance of that was in Yucatan, and it was quite different from the absurdity of the geriatric roller-skater or the pathetic hippies. In Playa del Carmen a group of middle-class American 40-year-olds were out celebrating one of their number's birthday. They ordered quite well: lobster tails (which I'm sure were frozen), octopus ceviche, snapper. With this food, three of them drank Coca-Cola. Now hold on. I like Coca-Cola. I approve of Coca- Cola. I drink Coca-Cola. But you don't drink it with fine fish. You drink dry white wine. Who says? Tradition says. The-way-things-have-been-found-to-be says. People with better taste than you, I, and the three diners say. You don't care what tradition or good taste says? You want it and you're going to have it? That is the reaction of a child.