Twentieth century, go to sleep / You’re Pleistocene
Отличная статья в Vanity Fair, в которой Дэвид Кэмп доказывает, что прошедшее "Лето смерти" добило 20-й век больше, чем миллениум, когда еще были живы старые институции и ценности. Вот, например:
20th century is over. It is passing from living memory into history-book history. This is not news to the children born in this decade, or to the tweens and teens born in the 90s; for them, the previous century is something they have either never known or consigned to the ancient history of early childhood, that far-off time when they watched that stupid purple dinosaur on public television. The Depression-era circuit on which Les Paul first made a living as a musician; the World War II battles in which Cronkite cut his reportorial teeth; the Red Scare in which Schulberg was critiqued for naming names; the Kennedys’ fairy tale of Camelot; the folkie dawn of Peter, Paul, and Mary; McNamara’s ill-judged prosecution of the Vietnam War; Farrah’s fantabulous feather-cut summer of ’76-all these things are as unrelatably distant to the under-20s as Prohibition and Pola Negri movies are to their parents.
20th century is over. It is passing from living memory into history-book history. This is not news to the children born in this decade, or to the tweens and teens born in the 90s; for them, the previous century is something they have either never known or consigned to the ancient history of early childhood, that far-off time when they watched that stupid purple dinosaur on public television. The Depression-era circuit on which Les Paul first made a living as a musician; the World War II battles in which Cronkite cut his reportorial teeth; the Red Scare in which Schulberg was critiqued for naming names; the Kennedys’ fairy tale of Camelot; the folkie dawn of Peter, Paul, and Mary; McNamara’s ill-judged prosecution of the Vietnam War; Farrah’s fantabulous feather-cut summer of ’76-all these things are as unrelatably distant to the under-20s as Prohibition and Pola Negri movies are to their parents.