generation, the Age of Aquarius (or was it merely the Pepsi generation?), the me generation, the generation of the yuppies. Once history comes under the dominion of fashion, the past can be revived only in a "soft, golden haze." Thus outdated styles in popular music or dress periodically reappear as part of carefully contrived shifts in public taste. We know that earlier styles were taken seriously in their time, but we have lost the connecting thread between earlier times and our own. "When this older, more distant world is invoked," writes George Trow in an essay on mass communications fittingly entitled "The Context of No Context," it has no substance or meaning.

It is made obvious [by the media] that this world is mystifying and too difficult to be comfortable with. One game-show host asked a question about the First World War and then described the First World War as "certainly a military event of considerable importance." He was assuring his audience that the First World War was popular in its own day.

Our collective understanding of the past has faltered at the very moment when our technical ability to re-create the past has reached an unprecedented level of development. Photographs and motion pictures and recordings, new techniques of historical research, the computer's total recall assault us with more information about history—and everything else—than we can assimilate. But this useless documentation no longer has any power to illuminate the present age or even to provide a standard of comparison. The only feeling these mummified images of the past evoke is that the things they refer to must have been interesting or useful once but that we no longer understand the source of their forgotten appeal.

Once nostalgia became conscious of itself, the term rapidly entered the vocabulary of political abuse. In societies that clung to the dogma of progress, no other term was more effective in deflating ideological oppo

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