What’s Gotten Into Grown-Ups These Days? Unlike Adults Of Teryear, They’re Acting Like Kids

Fathers of three wear tank tops and mesh shorts on plane trips. Forty-ish women strap on helmets and pads to go Rollerblading. A New York teacher motel-hops across the country with a ninth-grade girl and wonders why everyone’s mad at him. Whatever happened to grown-ups? You know, those sensible folks over 30 who knew what to wear and how to behave who acted their age, by God. They not only knew what to do, they knew what not to do. Nobody had to tell them, “No shoes, no shirt, no service.”

Grown-ups were folks like our parents - well, unless your parents are under 45. Grown-ups were sensible. Grown-ups were discreet. Grown-ups were responsible. They didn’t use recreational drugs, put their lives on Visa, or get in touch with their inner child. Atticus Finch, the lawyer in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is a grown-up. Harry Truman was a grown-up. So were Golda Meir, John Houseman, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lou Gehrig.

We have lots of adults these days, but not many grown-ups. Michael Jackson is 37, but he is not a grownup. Neither is Roseanne, David Letterman, Demi Moore, Mick Jagger or Joan Rivers, who is always telling people to “grow up.” America is turning into a Doonesbury cartoon, with millions of adults behaving as if they’re still one year out of college, working in a semi-flexi-job, eating happy-hour food, and hoping that Mom and Dad don’t rent out their bedroom. Our national anthem has become “I Won’t Grow Up.” ‘Cause growing up is awfuller than all the awful things that ever were.

Americans, who live in the global epicenter of the youth culture, are stuck in a state of permanent adolescence. They wear Starter jackets and Reeboks to church. They microwave Chinese leftovers for breakfast. They watch Real Sex 13 on cable. They use the Fword in front of the kids. And not just the average American. Even the president and the first lady refuse to act their age, for goodness’ sake.

Bill Clinton jogs in shorts and a baseball cap. He scarfs down junk food. He puts on shades and plays the saxophone on “Saturday Night Live,” the postgrads’ “Playhouse 90.” He neither says what he means nor means what he says. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who doesn’t want to be known as the first lady, changes her hair every 20 minutes. They aren’t grown-ups. Not like the Eisenhowers were.

Ike ate a proper dinner. He went fishing and played golf. He also had a heart attack, which is a very grown-up thing. Mamie played canasta and watched the soaps. She had the same hairdo for two terms. Nobody remembered her maiden name. The Eisenhowers were the ideal White House couple for the ‘50s, when America was fairly bursting with grown-ups.

You could always tell grown-ups back then, because they dressed like grown-ups. They wore overcoats and hats, real hats, like homburgs, when they went out in public. They wore suits and dresses (with girdles, if necessary) to the office. They got married in their early 20s, bought a starter house with a romper room, and began raising families.

Grown-ups were patient and prudent. They either paid cash or bought on the layaway plan. They supported their local police, joined the PTA and the country club. They had a cocktail before dinner, ate vegetable soup, tossed salad with bottled Italian dressing, porterhouse steaks with A-1 sauce, baked potatoes with sour cream, butter and plenty of salt, and Mom’s apple pie. They had grown-up ailments, like gout and emphysema.

Grown-ups, naturally, were terribly boring, and they drove their kids crazy. That was James Dean’s lament in “Rebel Without a Cause”: too many grown-ups yammering at him about being a juvenile delinquent. The problem with juvenile delinquents, of course, was that they wanted to be grown-ups. They wanted to smoke, drink, have sex, quit school, get a job and buy a car. They just didn’t want to wear hats. John Kennedy, who was the first non-grown-up elected to the White House, took off his topper as soon as he took the oath and went off to play touch football. Mamie Eisenhower thought Jackie Kennedy was “brazen and frivolous.”

Grown-ups are neither brazen nor frivolous, which is why they went out of style in the ‘60s. Whenever they watched TV, the baby boomers were confronted with grown-ups like Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, acting their age and giving their kids sound advice. Wallace and Theodore Cleaver called their father “sir” and asked to be excused after meals. Their mother baked cakes in pearls and heels and never raised her voice. They were, of course, training their boys to be grown-ups.

But after being bombarded with sound advice and lifelong caveats from “Leave It to Beaver,” “Father Knows Best” and “My Three Sons,” the baby boomers rebelled and stopped trusting anyone over 30. They wore their hair long and quit going to church. They gave up neckties for tie-dyes, listened to the Fugs, called policemen “pigs,” smoked dope, ate macrobiotic, slept around, lived in communes and dodged the draft. So their parents fixed them by putting a grown-up in the White House. Richard Nixon wore wingtips to the beach.

Grown-ups made a comeback during the ‘70s, which is usually what happens when a Republican becomes president. Americans form Moral Majorities, eat mashed potatoes, apply to business school and watch “I Love Lucy” reruns. Republican presidents make great role models. Ronald Reagan called his wife “Mommy.” George Bush wrote thank-you notes to everyone he met. Problem is, Republican presidents are grandpas who take long naps and forget whether they’re in or out of the loop. Big things happen while they’re not looking - like the ‘80s.

The ‘80s were a terrible decade for grown-ups, particularly since it was the grown-ups who were misbehaving and not acting their age. They performed hostile takeovers. They leveraged their debt. They rode around in stretch limos, snorting cocaine. They divorced Mom and married Lemon Tarts. “These were women in their twenties or early thirties, mostly blondes, who were the second, third and fourth wives or live-in girlfriends of men over forty or fifty or sixty (or seventy),” Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” “The sort of women men refer to … as girls.”

Even Mom refused to act her age. She had cosmetic surgery, crammed herself into a Spandex top and Jordache jeans, got a lifetime membership to Light ‘n Lovely, and had an affair with her 20-something jazz aerobics instructor. Then she went on Jenny Jones and screeched at her dysfunctional daughter. Jenny Jones wouldn’t exist in a country of grown-ups, because they would tell Jones to MYOB.

Grown-ups keep their shades drawn and their dirty laundry in the closet. If Mrs. Robinson was sleeping with her daughter’s boyfriend, she wasn’t admitting it on daytime TV. She actually felt ashamed of it. That’s how you used to be able to identify grown-ups. They felt shame and guilt and obligation. They knew the difference between right and wrong. Now, senators who molest their secretaries or spend campaign funds on Aspen ski junkets issue sullen semi-apologies. “If what I did was wrong,” they mumble, “I am sorry.”

A grown-up would know what to do without having to ask a monsignor or bone up on the criminal codes. That’s why Atticus Finch never thought twice about defending a black man in small-town Alabama. “If I didn’t,” he tells his children, “I couldn’t hold up my head in town.”

If Atticus Finch weren’t a grown-up, he’d have wangled himself a spot on the Simpson defense team. Then he would have sold his story to the National Enquirer (“O.J. Was Guilty as Cain”), hyped it on “Larry King Live,” then dumped the kids in day care and jetted off with a Lemon Tart to Antigua, wearing a shark-skin jumpsuit.

MEMO: John Powers is a staff writer for the Globe Magazine.