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December 19, 2013

'Pajama Boy' and perpetual adolescence

By Rick Moran

He's young, he's hip, he's wearing perhaps the ugliest pair of pajamas available in America - and he wants you to talk about insurance.

He's "Pajama Boy" and is the latest example of failure in the promotion of Obamacare.

Twitchy chronicled the Twitter rollout of this incredibly stupid meme, as tweeters take pot shots at the inane figure.

Check out the "Pajama Boy Selfie" photoshop:

Rich Lowry reveals some more fundamental problems with Pajama Boy:

But it’s hard not to see Pajama Boy as an expression of the Obama vision, just like his forbear Julia, the Internet cartoon from the 2012 campaign. Pajama Boy is Julia’s little brother. She progressed through life without any significant family or community connections. He is the picture of perpetual adolescence. Neither is a symbol of self-reliant, responsible adulthood.

And so both are ideal consumers of government. Julia needed the help of Obama-supported programs at every juncture of her life, and Pajama Boy is going to get his health insurance through Obamacare (another image shows him looking very pleased in a Christmas sweater, together with the words “And a happy New Year with health insurance”).

The breakdown of marriage and its drift into the 30s mean there are more Julias and Pajama Boys than ever. The growth of government feeds off this trend, and at the margins, augments it. The vision of the Obama Democrats, distilled to its essence, is of a direct relationship between the state and the individual without the mediating institutions of family, church and community that are an inherent check on government power.

Tocqueville wrote long ago of the infantilizing tendency of such all-encompassing government. "It would be like the authority of a parent," he wrote in a famous passage, "if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood." If you wanted to depict what Tocqueville was getting at in one meme, Pajama Boy wouldn't be such a bad way to do it.

Never has the difference between what Chris Matthews memorably dubbed the Mommy party and the Daddy party been so stark. Pajama Boy's mom probably still tucks him in at night, and when she isn't there for him, Obamacare will be. A less nurturing reaction is, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie put it in a counter tweet, "Get out of your pajamas." There's a reason President Obama is underwater by a 2-1 margin among men in the latest Quinnipiac poll.

As we all know, children are much easier to control than independent minded, liberty loving adults. The drive to create a "perpetual adolescent" class is to make it easier to further the statist cause. I'm sure Obama and his friends believe it's for our own good. They say as much when they point out that paying more for insurance and accepting coverage for things we don't want benefits everyone.


But take a good, long, hard, look at Pajama Boy. He is the future of America unless the radical left can be stopped.