Infantilized playgrounds

Sometime later I'll write up a more in-depth history of the movement to prevent kids from having fun on playgrounds, or even having recess at school, which started when the violence level began plummeting after 1992.

But in the meantime, here are some pictures of what a contemporary playground looks like, for those who haven't been to one in awhile. My poor nephew who I took here had no monkey bars, tire swing, merry-go-round, or teeter-totter to horse around on, these subversive devices having been more or less banned by the government, under pressure from the helicopter parent majority.

The first major addition from when I was little is one of those annoying follow-the-experts labels that tells you between what ages your kid must be to read the book, play with the toy, or even use the playground. (Click to enlarge)

In reality, this playground was designed for children who are negative two years old.

But really, you can't trust the idiot parents to follow your initial warning about how the playground must be used, so you have to hammer them over the head with even more graphic warning signs:


I guess a skull and crossbones would have been too frightening. And anyway, as a kid I choked to death when my drawstring caught on the slide, and I turned out all right.

You can guess what the rest of the crap looks like if you've ever passed by a park in the last 15-20 years, although the new-and-improved swings really deserve a closer look. Better start converting the bike racks to stroller stations at all the country's high schools.

Video game culture during wilder vs. safer times

For me video games have never been a central part of what was going on culturally, but since they've grown so much in popularity that they've eclipsed music as the main thing that young people are fascinated by, I guess it's worth a quick look at how different the world of video games was in rising-crime times, using four of the recurring themes I've noted before as a guide.

First, games were a lot harder, and it had nothing to do with technical limitations. Rather, it reflected a demand-side desire for being put to a challenge and honing skills instead of waltzing through a game and not needing skills at all. You died easily and often in games up through the early '90s. Even by the mid-'90s, games like Super Metroid had all kinds of health refills that enemies dropped, plus rooms that totally refilled your health. Not to mention the direction that Castlevania games took with Symphony of the Night, where a save room is never more than a few screens away, and which totally refills your health. By now, these so-called realistic first-person shooter games allow you to recover your health automatically as long as you hide in a corner like a little girl and don't get shot any further.

How do I know this change is due to the wussification of audience demand, and not some technological improvement on the supply side? Because it doesn't take much to implement the "automatically heal shortly after being hurt" feature -- more than one health state (i.e., not just dead or alive, but degrees of alive), a means of hurting you (like enemy contact), a means of increasing health (like power-ups, as they used to be called), and an in-game timer (not necessarily shown on the screen).

Super Mario Bros., the first game that anyone played for the Nintendo way back in 1986, had all of these things. When you're big Mario or fire Mario, a hit from an enemy shrinks you back to little Mario, and there's a timer that could count 5 or 10 seconds after you got hit, and then the game could restore your status to big or fire Mario. Why didn't they? Because that wouldn't be a game anymore -- no more than if, five minutes after being scored on in football, the refs automatically took back those 6 or 7 points and "healed" the scored-on team to healthy status. This point generalizes to all older games with the necessary features (Legend of Zelda, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, etc. etc.), so clearly it was something that customers just did not want. They wanted a challenge.

When the world is getting more violent, you feel more of an impulse to better yourself, whereas during safer times you don't feel like the wimpier enemies out there are worth training so hard for. (See also the change in movies about dorks or outcasts -- before they struggled to improve themselves, like in Weird Science or The Karate Kid, whereas now they are content to stay dorks, like in American Pie and Harold and Kumar.)

Second, playing games was much more social -- well, it was social at all, as opposed to not at all. Again this is not due to technical differences, like the availability of games that you can play with someone else online. The key here is the mid and late '90s, after the culture became much safer and everyone secluded, but before online video games were at all common. Those were the dark ages for playing games with another person: arcades were just about dead by then, and you rarely went over to a friend's house just to play video games, at least compared to the early '90s and earlier. Since there was virtually no online game-playing at the time, it could not have caused a die-off in social interaction among game players. Rather, this was just one piece of the larger trend toward everyone locking themselves inside and hardly traveling to less familiar spaces, especially public ones like an arcade.

Third, playing games was a lot more cooperative, not merely social. A social interaction could be competitive, after all. Although there were a handful of player-vs.-player games during the Atari and Nintendo days, these were mostly sports rip-offs (Tecmo Bowl, Bases Loaded, Blades of Steel, etc.) that did not occupy a very large share of our hours playing games. And no games in the arcade were like that, aside from the despised Karate Champ. Instead, games where two or more people could play were cooperative -- all of you would team up in order to take on a common enemy, usually some criminal organization or race of aliens who threatened to take over your city or the world.

These are by far the ones that got the most attention, generated the most enthusiasm, and are most fondly remembered today -- Contra, Double Dragon (and its sequel), Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, X-Men, Simpsons, T2, and on and on. Granted, the feeling of togetherness lasted only as long as your common enemy did, so after the game was done, you went your separate ways and didn't care what happened to them. But that's still far more than can be said for today's social interactions among game players -- basically a bunch of 13 year-olds cursing each other out over the internet.

Things started going downhill in '91-'92 when Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat became smash hits and nearly single-handedly destroyed the cooperative mode of game-playing. These games pit one player against the other in a fighting match, a genre that was to become dominant during the rest of the '90s. By 1997, GoldenEye turned the first-person shooter genre into one primarily based on player-vs.-player gameplay, rather than teaming up to fight a common enemy, as it could have easily gone if these games had been introduced in the 1980s. (I'm sure a video game version of Red Dawn would've been better than the movie.) I know that these games do allow for teaming up of players, but overwhelmingly they are played in me-against-you form.

Tellingly, there's an arcade game that looks superficially like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, but that came out in 1990 before the violence level hit its peak -- Pit-Fighter. It digitized live actors for its visuals, just like Mortal Kombat, and it involves nothing more complicated than beating the shit out of others, while a crowd cheers you on. However, unlike the direction that developed during the '90s, here if there are two or more people playing, it's them vs. a set of common enemies. (And since 1990 was still part of the '80s, there are no butt-kicking babes as there would be in later fighting games, just a couple of psycho metal chicks.)

Rising-crime times cause people to band together to take on the common threat that looks more and more like it won't go away on its own, and that is too strong for an individual to scare away. So there's a stronger feeling of community. Falling-crime times cause people to loosen those ties, since there's no longer a need for them. So there's a stronger culture of one-upsmanship, like Stuff White People Like.

Fourth, and related to the previous two, video game players were more altruistic toward each other, especially strangers. When violence is soaring, you not only have to band together to take it on, but be prepared to give things up in order to better your team-mates, not as though you were just a bunch of mercenaries. The real test of altruism is giving up something to benefit strangers, and of course that mostly took place in arcades, which died off when people stopped trusting strangers. I'm not an online game player, but from what I've observed of my brother, online game players aren't sending each other money through PayPal or something so that all involved can keep playing together. I know that YouTube celebrities get sent random gifts from their fans, but that's not what I mean -- first, because hardly anyone is that famous, and second because that's a hierarchical form of the groupies giving to the stars, not equals on a team giving up something to benefit the others.

During those cooperative games, sometimes you would have brought more quarters with you than your partner. So, even if they were as good or better than you skill-wise, they still might be kept from playing further just because of lower wealth at the outset. Well, that's not right, you thought, so you gave them a quarter and maybe another and maybe another still, just to keep them in the game with you. Sure, you got some small benefit to yourself from that -- namely, someone to help you get through the rest of the game -- but it was a net cost to you and net benefit to them.

In fact, I remember at least two times in elementary school when I purposefully brought five dollars or more in quarters to an arcade so that I could recruit someone to help me finally beat a game that I (or anyone else) could never beat alone. "Hey man, I got ten bucks in quarters -- five for me, five for you -- you wanna try to beat Final Fight?" That was a total stranger, a boy about my age. Another time I recruited some friends and acquaintances during recess to go beat Ninja Turtles at the bowling alley after school got out, and that would've been impossible if you tried by yourself. That time it was more like $20 split four ways, since that game allowed four people to play simultaneously.

It was very costly for a kid to do, and I didn't get a huge benefit from doing it, which is why I only did this twice (that I remember). But in those days you were more willing to take a hit so that others could join in and have fun, especially if you wound up kicking ass on some game that had forever thwarted your isolated attempts to beat it. I didn't make a big show about it or lord it over them, played down their thanks, and never expected anything in return, let alone ask for it. It was one of those rank-leveling things you have to do if you want a small team to help you out like that; it has to be egalitarian.

Most histories of video games are narrowly focused either on the technological changes or the rise and fall of various businesses. I haven't seen many social histories -- or even one, that I can think of anyway. Probably because the typical video game addict is the doesn't-relate-to-people systematizer, making the technology and market share data more appealing to them. Still, anyone born between about 1975 and 1984 lived through most of these major changes in the social aspects of video games, and could likely write a good history just off the top of their head. Something more extensive and in-depth than what I've done here, where I've only stuck to the aspects that relate to my larger interest in how social life and culture changes when the violence level is rising or falling.

They had better hedonistic music too

The post below on spiritual music rising during times of increasing violence serves to correct the lame spiel we always hear about how materialistic and bla bla bla the culture became sometime during the 1970s and really soaring during the 1980s.

At the same time, as hinted at with the "1999" reference, they did do celebration-of-the-flesh music a lot better too -- hell, in all media. When you perceive the order of the universe crumbling all around, you've got those two options.

Here's a #1 hit from 1978 that unfortunately has been eclipsed by a lot of the cornier-sounding disco music that topped the charts (although disco overall is fun, especially Chic). Even among a broad audience of people who weren't even alive then, or were children, it seems like Blondie and The Ramones have gotten their due, while The Bee Gees have fallen more by the wayside. So maybe some of the lesser known '70s classic rock hits will find a new following too.



Nothing wrong with the artier rock of Talking Heads from that era, but music plays so many more roles than tickling the brain. Sometimes you just want to silence the self-conscious part of your mind and take in a sky-opening let's-go-do-it song. You won't find that among the spotlight-soaking skanks of the past 15 to 20 years.

Red Dawn

Saw it for movie night, and it was almost unwatchable. The fact that, at worst, it gets a pass from conservative "critics," and at best draws praise -- including a spot on the National Review Online's top 25 conservative movies -- is a good reminder of why you should ignore most politically oriented culture reviewers.

Since it's not really worth an in-depth response, here are some quick thoughts on why it's such a dud:

- There's no character development before the Communists land, which happens almost right away, so we find it almost impossible to feel the tension that the students must be feeling. They've given us no one to identify with. Same when the two brothers see their father behind a concentration camp fence, who then screams at them to "Avenge me," which ends up ringing flat since we have no connection to him (or them) at that point. They needed to include at least 30 minutes of background, maybe 45 given how many characters there are. Any of the great It's-Us-or-Them action movies let us get to know the characters first, so that when the shit hits the fan, we feel like the enemy is attacking one of our own. Predator, Aliens, The Terminator, RoboCop, really any decent movie.

- They don't set up key plot points beforehand, so that they come not as a surprise but as something unbelievable and forced, such as the two girly girls being able to mow down crowds of trained killers with heavy artillery. Establish that first by, for example, showing them kicking ass on a bully who didn't know how tough they were, or fighting off a group of guys who are forcefully making unwanted passes at them. Showing Marian Ravenwood taking care of business at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Ripley in Aliens blasting the suited bureaucrats and then operating heavy machinery with no problem, makes their later feats of strength more believable.

- A big part of the movie is supposed to be the coming of age for these high schoolers. They did get some of it right by showing their physical removal from the ordinary world, living in the mountains, during their transformation. But they failed to show any of the necessary breaking-down in order to be built back up that you see in, e.g., the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket, Luke Skywalker's ordeals while training with Yoda, or Bill Murray's repeated failures-along-the-way in Groundhog Day.

- Related to that, they don't emphasize the leveling of distinctions and ranks that existed in the normal world but that will cease to continue within their separate sphere where they undergo the transformation. They do take the wind out of the sails of the class president, but that's about it. More shots of their bonding rituals would have made us believe that they were a unified group, such as the boys from Stand By Me pinky swearing, taking turns at the night watch, removing leeches from one another, flipping coins instead of using force or peer pressure to pick someone for grunt work, etc. Or even something as simple as showing the Ghostbusters putting on the same uniforms, sliding down the same firehouse pole, and switching on each other's proton packs right before battle.

- It doesn't make for a good Us or Them movie when the only character who's fleshed out in a human way is supposed to be one of the bad guys, namely the Latin American leader who becomes disillusioned over the course of the siege and ultimately decides to leave the revolution to return to his wife, even refraining from firing on two of the Wolverines when they're sitting ducks.

There's probably a lot more to mention, but those are just the first thoughts that come to mind. Other movies from the mind of John Milius, like Dirty Harry and Conan the Barbarian, are great to watch because they don't make any of these mistakes. The only people who'll really enjoy Red Dawn are those who approach movies at a meta level, like "Oh yeah, they finally made an unapologetic picture about kicking the Commies' asses!" -- ignoring the fact that it's a poorly thought-out and executed movie. If you're looking for a pound-the-Soviets flick whose makers had decent storytelling skills, stick with Rocky IV.

Spiritual pop music

No, I'm not talking about Christian rock or undiluted gospel. Something about searching for the meaning of life, and in particular wanting to connect with the supernatural -- not "finding yourself" by landing the right study-abroad program or scoring the perfect unpaid summer internship.

My hunch is that this kind of music will soar in production and popularity when the violence level is shooting up, because that's when people get more curious about the spiritual, the supernatural, the mythological, the religious... whatever you want to call it. Especially during the second half of the climb in the crime rate, since that's when things start to look apocalyptic -- there's already been half a generation or more of steadily worsening security, and the experts have thrown every social engineering program at it, yet come up with nothing powerful. For similar reasons, it will not tend to adhere to orthodox religion but be less clearly defined, since the failure of the old ways means they must try to figure it out as they go along.

Probably the best example is a #1 hit from 1986, "Higher Love" by Steve Winwood. It couldn't have been made in 1966 because society had only gone somewhat outta whack by that point -- the decay of order got a lot worse in the next 20 years. Typical of an end-times yearning for community, he levels distinctions that exist in the ordinary, falling-apart world by giving it a heavily African sound for white pop music, and I'll bet a lot of people listening to it thought he was black.

Real Life made "Send Me an Angel" in 1983, which is Pagan in tone, and whose video has a pre-Christian but still Indo-European religious feel. Toward the tail-end of wild times (1990) they released "God Tonight", which sounds like the thoughts of a cult leader mixed in with a good dance track.

Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth" from 1987 is a bit more focused on the profane than the others, but its power still depends on the desire to bring the supernatural realm down onto our own. Again shades of cult / commune-like concepts of ushering in paradise in this world, although more of the naive free love type than the apocalyptic type.

Of course there was Madonna's last great hit, 1989's "Like a Prayer". The phrases "I want to take you there" and "in the midnight hour" hint at going to some other plane of existence.

"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2 in 1987 has a nice line that highlights the leveling of distinctions when the end comes: "I believe in the Kingdom Come / Then all the colors will bleed into one."

Camper Van Beethoven's "She Divines Water" from 1988 shows that even college rock, typically not religious at all, could put out a catchy song with an other-worldly feel. Probably the most imaginative and original one of the bunch here.

The 1986 soundtrack for Labyrinth features David Bowie calling all the misfits of the world into joining his utopian cult in "Underground," which has a gospel section later in the song.

"Personal Jesus" from 1990 by Depeche Mode is about a lost soul seeking communion with the divine, although told not from their point-of-view. "Reach out and touch faith" means that the supernatural has become tangible.

There are other songs that are quasi-religious but that do not stress the meeting of the natural and the supernatural. "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson from 1987 is a straightforward conversion-of-the-rich-miser story. Although more difficult to interpret religiously, Madonna's 1984 hit "Like a Virgin" has that "I was lost but now am found" theme, and her conversion sounds like it sprang from some magical rather than mundane cause. In 1981 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark made not one but two hagiographic songs about the same saint -- "Joan of Arc" and "Maid of Orleans". The song and album "1999" by Prince from 1982 is apocalyptic, but his response is to retreat into a not very sacred kind of hedonism.

Nothing else in the yearning-for-the-supernatural genre comes to mind, although I could be missing some stuff from the later part of the '70s, when cults and evangelism were ramping up in popularity compared to the '60s. I'm pretty sure there's little or none from the '60s and earlier '70s, nor from the early '90s through today. And during the previous period of falling crime, the mid-'30s through the late '50s, the hit songs featured more trivial subject matter and a secular frame-of-mind, however catchy it may or may not sound (Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby Darin, etc.).

Classic car culture in red states and blue states

Before I yakked on about how the frontier spirit still persists in the mountain west and plains states, and perhaps Tennessee too, not just for the overall level of solidarity but how much people preserve and treasure the great accomplishments of white pop / folk culture.

Andrew Gelman and co-authors showed in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State that the recent war between liberals and conservatives is absent among the working class, present among the middle class, but most pronounced in the upper-middle and upper classes. One example he gives is that rich Texans might drive a Hummer, whereas rich Californians might drive a Prius. Working-class people in either state don't drive either type of car that "tells the world something about your personality and lifestyle." Whatever gets them to work is OK. The battle over which kinds of cars are best is mostly a middle and upper-class affair.

You also see this for cars that are very far from new. I was near the Wheeling, West Virginia metro area for a family reunion of sorts over the weekend, and we drove through lots of the smaller towns around there, as well as the more urban parts. Not once did I see anything that you'd call a classic car. Not being driven around, not resting parked in a garage, not waiting to be scooped up from a used car lot. People did own older cars, and dealers were selling them used, but they were all fat, shapeless '90s cars, along with a handful of bloated space pod cars from the 2000s.

Driving around town out here in the mountain west, it's hard not to catch sight of the classics just going about your daily business, not even trying to seek them out. A muffler shop has only a half-dozen used cars sitting out front, but they're all 300ZX's, plus a 280ZX right next to the curb to draw in the passersby. At a nearby small market, there's usually a silver Mark II Supra that gives your eyes something sweet to taste while you're stopped at the light. Then walking to campus, I see a '68 Chevelle parked on the street only three spaces away from an '85 Fiero. Later in the day, a banana yellow 2nd-generation Firebird cruises across in front of me while I'm stopped at a light. And on any warm, sunny day all you have to do is find a 6-lane road to see all of the Impalas (mostly 4th and 5th-gen) being let out of the garage. Just a couple weeks ago in front of a low-rent apartment building with nary an organic boutique in sight, there was parked a glistening white Corvette with a little blue trim, one of the last of the stingray-shaped ones (looked like late '70s).

And that's not even to mention all of the lesser but still pleasant filler cars strewn around -- Volkswagen Rabbits and Beetles, Saab 900s, etc.

Obviously working-class people are not keeping and maintaining these cars; it's middle-class or above, as they're something of a luxury now. Yet people with enough money in the blue-state areas of eastern Ohio, West Virginia, and the DC suburbs in Maryland couldn't care less about keeping alive the age when cars still looked and felt like cars. (During an admittedly brief visit to my brother in Los Angeles, I hardly saw any classics either, other than a Mexican dude in a beat-up RX-7. Everything was a nearly brand-new Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, bla bla bla, just like they say.)

Using Google Trends to see which states top the list of searches for things related to classic cars, the same pattern emerges as I mentioned in the frontier post -- mountain west, plains, the red-state parts of Appalachia, somewhat of the Ozarks. It has nothing to do with climate, since California doesn't dominate the lists as it should if that were the case, while snowy Utah and Colorado (but not snowy Vermont or West Virginia) show up pretty reliably.

It's just part of the larger cultural differences between middle and upper-class people in red states, where they're more about preserving the best of tradition, and blue states, where they are spurred by a reflex to always be "moving beyond" whatever dopey stuff a bunch of dead people once invented.

Violent times breed cuter girls

Last year I looked at how many heartthrob girls there are during rising-crime times vs. the near total lack of them during falling-crime times. I didn't mention it then, but the same applies to the earlier wave of violence up and down -- lots of babes during the Jazz Age vs. the mostly frigid and mercenary women of film noir's heyday.

That post focused just on the demand side -- what proved popular with guys. But there seems to be a supply-side story as well. If it were only due to changes in demand, then I'd be surrounded by boy-crazy and emotionally powerless Mallory Keaton types, who were for whatever reason just not getting any attention at the local or national level. And I obviously do not live in that world, but instead in one filled with pushy and emotionally in-control gals, plus the femme fatale wannabes like Fergie, the Pussycat Dolls, etc.

So aside from whatever's driving the change in male demand for this or that type of girl, what's behind the shift in production of one or the other type of female?

When violence levels begin to soar, females start to solicit friendship and more from a wider variety of males -- not just relying on her brothers and other kin for protection, who have a genetic interest in helping her out. How do you convince a more-or-less genetic stranger to attach themselves close enough to you that they'll take on the role of protector and/or provider? Well, by being cute. Guys are more likely to take care of her if she seems youthfully innocent of the real world, while also being bouncy and carefree enough that she might accidentally wander into trouble. Otherwise, why would she need a protector at all? I think it's mostly the latter that gets dialed up in chick physiology during violent times -- the main contrast with girls during safe times isn't projecting an air of innocence vs. experience but more like fun-loving vs. playing-it-safe.

I don't know if I've discussed it or not before, but the whole "only marry a foreign woman" thing boils down to women who grew up in and probably still live in rising-crime environments and those who aren't. American men were head-over-heels for American girls right up through the 1980s; the only-marry-foreign movement is new. And it's not just any old foreign country -- it's specifically the countries of Eastern Europe and parts of Latin America that have always been super-violent and even more so in recent decades when ongoing internal war ripped the region apart, not some place that's safe and stable by second or third-world standards, such as Native Americans, Eskimos, Bushmen, Egyptians, etc.

True, guys who are serious about the only-marry-foreign strategy warn about mercenary women in Eastern Europe and Latin America, but the stronger and more basic selling point for them is how feminine the women are.

The argument here is an extension of primatologist / sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy's idea about why human infants are so cute compared to those of most other primate species, and even of adult humans too. Human infants are reared partly by people who are not as closely related as a mother or her kin, whereas most primate infants are reared by the mother. Because human babies have to stay on the good side of people who don't have a genetic interest in their well-being, they have evolved the weapon of cuteness to pierce through the tough skin of the genetic stranger. Chimp or gorilla infants don't rely on unrelated individuals, so they pay no cost for being so ugly. And of course that dependency on unrelated people lasts through adulthood for humans, perhaps explaining why we're so neotenous, or resembling babies, in our appearance. *

In a post below I pointed out that the falling-crime phenomenon of helicopter parenting is a move away from human beings' natural state, at the center of which is a deep sociability, and toward the pattern of most other primates, where there's a lot more selfishness. Let's now add to that -- and more of a boner-killing demeanor among females, not unlike the ruthless she-chimps. (The falling-crime surge in popularity of MILFs and cougars is another example of a reversion to chimp-like norms.)

* The other exception to the primate rule are the callitrichids, who are cooperative breeders. Also unlike most primates, they're pretty cute-looking, and their name means "beautiful-haired" in Greek.

Rock musicians don't lose their hair

An earlier post on all you need to know about hair proposed that the evolutionary function of male baldness is to honestly signal his future commitment to his would-be first wife, rather than continue playing the field into middle and old age. I'm not talking about the receding hairline around the temples, but a steady march backwards, usually leaving just the lowest part of the back and sides with hair.

Via Ray Sawhill / Michael Blowhard, here's a look at 53 rock stars then and now to get a feel for what males look like who stay on the mating market for most of their lives. Some guys are wearing hats, but that doesn't mean they're covering up baldness -- Bob Dylan and Bret Michaels aren't balding, for example. Of the 40 males, I see 4 that are sort-of / sort-of-not -- Bruce Springsteen, Meat Loaf, David Lee Roth, and Iggy Pop. Only 4 look truly balding -- Tom Petty, Sting, David Crosby, and Neil Young.

Most of these guys are in their 50s or 60s, a good reminder that baldness is not an effect of aging. As I said in the hair post, loss of pigmentation is what signals age, whereas balding signals how monogamous your mating strategy will be in the future. Only 1/10 of rock musicians have male pattern baldness, and even they don't go against my overall point that those who stay on the mating market for a long time keep most of their hair. Those 4 are the not-so-womanizing ones out of the bunch, while the ones who've slept with thousands of groupies over their lives aren't balding.

When did babies start screaming like maniacs in public?

Parents during the past 15 to 20 have sought to protect their darling children from even the slightest sting of the real world, which precludes shouting at them or hitting them or otherwise muzzling them when they start wailing in public. The parents just sit there trying to reassure the kid that everything's going to be OK, like all we have here is a failure to communicate, rather than a battle of wills. And of course everyone else is just supposed to sit there instead of walking over and pinching the little brat's ear.

I normally don't fly so often, but I've had several family get-togethers in the past couple weeks, so my memories are concentrated and vivid. Before I thought there might have been a problem with babies crying in the plane, but I'm convinced -- every single flight, there's at least one, usually two within earshot who periodically interrupt whatever everyone else was doing to howl away.

So to get a better handle on when this started, i.e. is it related to helicopter parenting, I searched the NYT for "crying baby plane." The earliest relevant article was from 2004, then there are regularly a handful of articles every year. What we really want to know about is babies crying in any public space where a certain level of peace is expected. There was an episode of Family Guy from 2001 that has a scene with a baby screaming its guts out at a fast-food restaurant, where everyone else is pretending to tune it out, but where the dog Brian finally snaps and gives the little squirt a good dose of his own medicine by howling back at him.

Any earlier examples? The phenomenon must have started a few years earlier than the first time it had become a standard situation for a sit-com.

By the way, this highlights another social disease that stems from helicopter parenting. When you keep your child insulated from all social contact that isn't strictly regulated by you (a la "play dates"), your kid is only going to grow up around genetically closely related people -- the other family members in his jail-house. Just based on Hamilton's Rule, they're going to put up with a lot of your kid's crap.

Thrusting him out into the real world where most of the people aren't close genetic relatives forces him to grow up and stop acting like such a selfish brat -- he'll figure out real quick that they don't give a shit about him, at least not like family does, so bawling his eyes out will not get him what he wants. In fact, it will have the opposite effect -- their patience will run out fast and they'll either beat him up or mercilessly brand him as a crybaby and a momma's boy.

Humans are a lot more altruistic than other primates, and one reason known about for a long time is that we spend lots of time around others who are far less genetically related to us than the nuclear-ish family members that most primates hang out with. So they can be incredibly selfish and not get called out on it so harshly. Just let a human being try that, though, and watch how quickly he's set upon or driven out.

How odd that the same parents who would have a stroke unless their kids eat the organic brand of Pop-Tarts, have robbed them of the most basic element of human nature -- sociability with genetic strangers. Only slightly more disturbing is the kids' decision to go right along with that perversion of nature, rather than disobey their parents when the grown-up world has grown out of touch.