Politics & Power Quote by Gore Vidal

A clean Vidal blade: he takes something we treat as natural - the teenager as a separate species locked in generational warfare - and pins it to a date stamp. Not adolescence, which is biological, but "the teenager", a market category with an attitude preloaded. The provocation is in "until": as if the feeling of being trapped among adults is less a timeless rite of passage than a manufactured storyline, rolled out when Madison Avenue realized it could sell products by selling alienation.

"Captive" does double duty. Teenagers are literally constrained by law, school, parents; but Vidal is really describing the psychological capture of identity. If you can persuade young people that adults are "hostile", you hand them an enemy, and enemies are clarifying. They make you buy the uniform. Advertising doesn't just respond to youth culture; it scripts it, giving kids a ready-made rebellion that can be expressed safely through consumption.

The line also smuggles a broader indictment of postwar America: an economy so productive it has to invent new desires, and a culture so confident it can turn dissent into a demographic. Vidal, who spent his career puncturing American self-mythology, is warning that even our most intimate feelings about growing up can be colonized. It's not that adults aren't oppressive; it's that the story of oppression becomes profitable - and once it's profitable, it's everywhere, flattering the young while quietly training them to speak the language of brands.