OK, I'm done with kid stuff.

Here’s the article I’ve been waiting for. I’m hiding behind A. O. Scott, linking to his recent article in the NYTimes: The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.

I do this a lot (find someone smart, with creds, to hide behind), whenever I want to speak about an unpopular topic, or rather, a topic that will make me unpopular.

In case you’re pressed for time, here’s one of my favorite passages from Scott’s rather long article:

In my main line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studios committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the cultivation of franchises (some of them based on those same Y.A. novels) that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of 21st-century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.

Why do I think this is a topic that will make me unpopular? Because it has. Any time I’ve tried to express something related (such as my blatant reduction to: Why do kids rule?), I’ve had backlash, often from people close to me.

They rule, as Scott points out, by governing what passes for entertainment in books, movies, and on television. Adults insist that books and movies that are written for children have “so much to offer adults,” as if I’m missing something by not spending time with young boys who fly and lions that talk.

When did that happen? Do I want to go back to when children were “seen and not heard?” No, but isn’t there something between that and “children are the center of the world,” so that of 68 movie screens within a few miles of me there might be one adult movie?

Oops, I’m ranting. I’m beginning to regret writing this. I’ll stop before I delete it all. I want to be liked, after all.

Pretend I simply gave you a link to A. O. Scott and respond to him.