• by Jack Feuer , October 3, 2007

Boys used to become men by going out naked into the woods with a spear and killing something. Later, manhood arrived courtesy of the back seat of your father's car. Or by learning how to say "thanks for the envelope" with sincerity at the bar mitzvah reception.

Not anymore. We have a whole new ritual now, a whole new journey into manhood. Fittingly, it was my own son who helped me to this revelation.

Twice a year, the two of us make a pilgrimage to the local Verizon store to replace the cell phone my son semiannually drops in the Jacuzzi. Last year, I suggested he might as well upgrade to a phone with more functions.

He declined. He was just a high-school kid, he said, and all he wanted was the ability to talk and text--incessantly--and during peak hours.

A year later, he's in college. He's got a job, a car and his first credit card. He went to Europe and visited six countries and 11 cities. He went to San Diego with the skinny girlfriend and three of their crew, crossed the border into Mexico at midnight, got drunk, and lost their friend Kyle in a Tijuana dive. (Kyle reappeared a day later outside of a gas station in La Jolla, unharmed but shoeless and sans wallet.)

It was, to be sure, an eventful year for young Feuer. And from his point of view, he is now an adult. So this year, after the semiannual cell phone drowning (apparently, some traditions are too precious to give up), the son disdained yet another trip to the Verizon store with his dad.

Now he wants an iPhone.

As the son himself would say, WTF? Sure, he's logo-conscious, but like all his peers, he didn't get that from advertising. He got his must-haves from the other kids, and they got theirs from him. That's why they call it viral. It's an infection, only it causes sales of Vans to spike instead of nasal congestion.

I wondered, how did this scruffy little stinker, for whom reading is an arcane and useless skill, who never watches anything but Comedy Central on television or Pride Fighting Championships on YouTube and couldn't remember a commercial if you waterboarded him, suddenly develop brand preferences? And then--the revelation.

During the year just past, my son expanded beyond the small band of pierced savages he used to chill with and went out into the world. Once there, of course, he was assimilated by the massive marketing Borg that overwhelms all of us, like a pack of piranhas on a pudgy swimmer. Young Feuer didn't need a sharp stick, Dad's wheels or an ill-fitting suit his mother bought at Loehmann's to become a man. All he needed was to stay awake. And a credit card--which he maxed out in a week.

My son has become a consumer.

My work is done.