What is a Superhero? An Attempt at a Definition

What is a superhero?

It does not seem unreasonable to define the term. Granted, a certain sort of person dismisses such attempts as bound to fail given that exceptions will always exist to any definition--but the existence of ambiguities does not, as such, keep definition from being a useful, in fact essential, tool for making sense of reality. (The map may not be the territory, but that does not make maps useless, no matter how much contrarians addicted to stupid epistemological nihilism natter on.)

A good starting point for such a definition is an examination of those criteria that may seem least dispensable to the conception of the superhero as we know them today--the superhero tradition as established in the comic book medium, especially from the advent of Superman forward.

1. They Must Be Both a Hero--and Super.
A superhero must obviously be a hero--a figure that does something both positive and extraordinary such as is worthy of admiration by others. Where the superhero's sort of heroism is concerned there is an expectation of service to the community of some physical kind, usually entailing courage in the face of physical danger, to save the lives of others because it is the right thing to do rather than a matter of self-interest; with such action a vocation rather than an exceptional incident. Of course, people pursue vocations that have them performing such acts--firefighters are the go-to example--but superheroes are distinguished from them in that they are super, their abilities exceeding the human norm in a way which is quantitative or qualitative or both. (Conventionally the firefighter running into a burning building must make do with "merely" human physical and mental capacities, but a superhero might be able to put out the fire with a blast of icy breath, as Superman can.)

2. They Have a Very Distinct and Very Public Persona, of which Distinct Powers, Codenames and Physical Appearances (Usually but Not Always a Function of Costuming) Tend to be a Part.
The above seems to me mostly self-explanatory. In contrast with, for example, heroes who are secret agents, who are likely to conceal their "heroic" aspect behind cover identities as they set about their work, the superhero's cover identity, their public persona, is itself heroic--and indeed advertised to the world at large, the more in as its elements include the aforementioned matters of a power, or powers, that tend to be very individualized; a similarly unique codename; and a unique appearance, usually but not always derived from a costume. (Barry Allen is a hero made a superhero by his application of "speedster" capabilities such as even other DC superheroes tend not to have to fighting evil; is, appropriately, known as the Flash, after his speed; and wears a red costume with lightning bolt insignia, also evoking that speed. Other figures such as Marvel's The Hulk and the Thing have distinct powers and codenames, and their distinct appearance--albeit less reliant on any costume in their case.)

3. The Superhero's Activity is Highly Individualistic.
As implied by the exceptional character of the hero's capacity, and their conspicuous public persona, the conception of the superhero is individualistic in action. Consider, for example, the firefighter and secret agent both. Both figures are conventionally employees of a public agency, which pays them money to do a job in line with orders--which does not make a sense of duty irrelevant by any means, but still raises the question of the paycheck, career, etc. in ways that unavoidably give their activity a different texture. Both also rely on their organizations for their ability to do their jobs--unlikely to have equipment or other supports necessary to their hero task if they were not so employed. By contrast the superhero is ordinarily alone, answering to no one--taking no orders, and often having a complex and fraught relationship with authority (epitomized by stories in which Batman falls afoul of the law), all as what equipment they need is their own (one reason why superheroes are so often independently wealthy, as Batman or Iron Man is).

Moreover, when we see superheroes "team up," teaming up is exactly what they do--these individuals cooperating in a joint effort rather than relinquishing their identities to be good "organization men" and women. (Iron Man is first and foremost Iron Man, and never "just" an Avenger.)

Of course, much else tends to go with this. The public persona is often a way of concealing a private identity, and at least attempting to protect a private life. And of course there is apt to be the unusual origin story--for superhuman abilities, and the decision to put on a costume and fight a private war against crime or some other such evil are the kinds of things for which most people expect an explanation, which is likely to be extraordinary because of what has to be explained. (Thus is Superman literally from another planet, while Batman has been motivated by childhood trauma and equipped by a lifetime of preparation for his vigilante mission, aided by vast wealth as well as extraordinary talent.) One may add that the superhero almost always faces a supervillain at some point--because any other sort of villain is a less than worthy adversary. (How long would Superman remain interesting just catching small-time purse-snatchers?) However, those three items seem to me to constitute the indispensable minimum--with any character not meeting those three criteria, which I think enable us to distinguish between superheroes and non-superheroes of various kinds, without bounding the category so narrowly as to deprive it of analytical usefulness, and permitting distillation as the following:

A superhero is a figure who, acting on their individual initiative and resources, and through a distinct public persona apt to entail codename and (usually costume-based) appearance, makes a vocation of defending the public from physical dangers such as accident, crime and "supervillainy," usually in a way requiring physical action and courage on their part, and drawing on abilities and/or equipment endowing them with more than ordinary human physical and/or mental capacities.

'90s Nostalgia-Mining and the Scandals of that Era

Amid the exploitation of memories of the '90s by the pop culture industry these past many years some have seized on the scandals of the era for material. Thus did we get a feature film about the Tonya Harding scandal, and FX miniseries' about the Bill Clinton impeachment and the O.J. Simpson trial.

I have no idea how much of a public response they really drew. What I can say is that these scandals absolutely do not make me nostalgic for the '90s. Quite the contrary, unlike, for example, 16-bit-era console gaming, the sci-fi shows of the era, the golden age of The Simpsons, or Baywatch, or any number of other things which really do make me feel nostalgic, what they bring to mind is the horror and disgust I felt when I looked away from the day's more amusing pop cultural products at the state of the real world, and the news media that brought it to us, the vileness of which played its part in the world's going from one catastrophe to the next.

Hiram Lee on O.J. Simpson

In the wake of the media response to O.J. Simpson's arrest back in 2007 Hiram Lee published a piece titled "The Media's Obsession with O.J. Simpson" (emphasis added).

As the title of Lee's item indicates the piece was about how the media, not the public, was obsessed with Simpson, even as with extreme stupidity and sanctimoniousness the media's talking heads relentlessly insisted that it was the public was obsessed, and forced the media against its will to attend to the matter to the neglect of all the rest of what was happening in the world. (As Lee wrote, the "anchors and pundits . . . occasionally pose the question: 'Why are we so interested in O.J. Simpson?' . . . lament the drawn out and salacious" coverage, and "[t]hen, with feigned regret . . . return to the tawdry story at hand.")

As Lee remarked, those in the media who did so "attribute[d] their own shameful behavior to the supposed demands of a coarsened, celebrity-obsessed audience," while totally eliding "their own role in cultivating and directing such attitudes toward celebrity culture."

An obscenity in 1995, their behavior was more obscene still in 2007. If, contrary to the celebration of the era as one of peace and prosperity the actual '90s were very troubled years, and the truth was that anyone of even slight intelligence knew it. (Indeed, as one of Mr. Lee's colleagues put it, "Despite the official triumphalism, America was coming apart at the seams.") However, the situation in 2007 was graver still amid the war in Iraq, and the first signs of a historic financial crisis, in the shadow of both of which we have lived ever since.

Talking about O.J. was a way of diverting public attention away from that, to say nothing of more broadly stultifying the public mind--and if some of the public went along with it that did not change the fact that it was the media, not the public, driving this particular piece of idiocy.

Remember that as the remembrances of the trial in which the media is now awash speak of us all having been "captivated" by the trial.

Harry Turtledove's Ruled Britannia: A Few Thoughts

For quite a number of years I was an avid reader of Harry Turtledove's alternate histories--running out and grabbing the latest installment in his Timeline-191 series when it became available year in, year out. I enjoyed his rigorous working out of his scenarios, which, in contrast with so much alternate history, made the basis of his story a genuinely compelling counterfactual, in contrast with the flimsy "What ifs?" on which so many of his colleagues have relied. I also enjoyed the "big picture" emphasis of his narratives, presented through his large but still manageable and strategically arranged casts of viewpoint characters, and the briskness of his narratives, which seemed to have been worked out mathematically but effectually (Turtledove cutting among twenty viewpoint characters, each of whom got six four-page scenes by the end of the volume).

Turtledove's Ruled Britannia was a very differently structured book, less oriented to the big picture, and more narrowly focused on a mere two characters rather than twenty--in this case, William Shakespeare and Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega, brought face to face by a successful Spanish conquest of Britain in 1588 that had de Vega a soldier of the occupying Spanish army who, because of his predilection for the theater, is tasked with keeping an eye on a Shakespeare who has become drawn into a plot by old Elizabethan loyalists to stage a rebellion which will drive the Spanish out. The comparatively original premise (neither Civil War nor World War II!) intrigued me, as did the promise to depict these actual historical figures in this altered timeline, an approach which has always appealed to me. (Of the Timeline-191 novels my favorite was and remains How Few Remain, precisely because of its stress on actual personages.) Still, I wondered if Turtledove would manage to hold my interest with this approach through the nearly five hundred page narrative.

For my part I thought the book longer than it had to be, and I could have done without a good many bits. (I think we saw more of de Vega the self-satisfied womanizer than we needed to, for instance, and did not care for the usage of Christopher Marlowe either, or for that matter the final confrontation between these two figures, which seemed to me entirely pointless.) Still, in spite of the unnecessary or bothersome patches Turtledove pleasantly surprised me by carrying this more focused narrative. In doing that it helped not only that Turtledove displayed some adroitness in developing the cat and mouse game between Shakespeare and the Spanish occupiers, but that Turtledove presents Shakespeare, and de Vega, as both human beings rather than pedestal-placed literary titans--Shakespeare in particular a man whose talent may have marked him out for greater things but in the here and now a jobbing actor and writer trying to make a living and thrust less than willingly into high intrigue. Particularly commendable was Turtledove's not shying away from the difficult task his own plot presented him--taking seriously Shakespeare's enlistment to produce a propaganda play in aid of the rebellion (about the life of Iceni queen Boudicca), and letting us see just enough of it dramatized at the climax to give the project on which the whole plot rests some solidity. The closing lines of the play ("No epilogue here, unless you make it/If you want freedom go and take it") struck me as a bit more Brecht than Bard, but on the whole the pastiche worked, with that close entirely logical in the circumstances, and all this to the good of a climax, and denouement, that drew all the narrative strands together in very satisfying fashion.

On Cryptohistory, the Paranormal and William Shakespeare

One of the oddities of contemporary culture is how persons who ordinarily find history dull suddenly become attentive when someone mentions "aliens"--in the sense of extraterrestrials having been a part of it.

The explanation of this seems to me to be that those persons' interest is still not in history, but the possibility that the claims for the existence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth has been validated.

But that raises the question of why precisely they should care to prove that such visitations have happened. Why should so many people be invested in this?

About that I am not at all clear, but I have noticed a similar interest in much more down-to-Earth, less world-shaking, subjects, such as the possibility of the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays by someone other than William Shakespeare. It seems that, just as with history, people who are not normally interested in Shakespeare, and not knowledgeable about Shakespeare, get interested when, for example, Edward de Vere or Francis Bacon or Walter Raleigh or somesuch is mentioned as the real author of his works. The result is that if some are quite invested in the controversy and make detailed claims on the basis of Shakespeare's plays (all the evidence is indirect in nature), a significant number of people far from capable of making or appreciating such arguments still find interest in the essential claim--which comes down to people being fascinated by the thought that productions they have not read or seen or cared about that have been attributed to one historical figure of whom they know next to nothing actually being attributable to another figure of whom they likely know even less.

Considering both obsessions it can seem symbolic that Roland Emmerich, who made the aliens-visited-Earth-in-the-past movies Stargate (1994) and Independence Day (1996) later directed a movie dramatizing Edward de Vere's writing the plays and using Shakespeare as a front, Anonymous (2011). Didn't see it? That's okay, pretty much no one did, and it would not seem that you or they or anyone else missed much in not doing so--certainly to go by David Walsh's take on the film some years ago (which, as may be expected of those who have read Walsh at his best, is most certainly attentive toward and insightful into the pseudo-controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare's works, which he went so far as to follow up in a second item on the matter).

"All Art is Propaganda," Somebody Said, Somewhere

Looking back it seems that many an early twentieth century literary great claimed that "All art is propaganda." George Orwell seems the one most associated with the phrase, which he states in his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens. However, Upton Sinclair said exactly the same thing in exactly those words in his epic 1925 history of art, Mammonart, with which Orwell might have been familiar given Orwell's praises for Sinclair's work.

That far more people seem to associate the phrase with Orwell than with Sinclair, I suppose, reflects the greater respectability of the former than the latter these days. Like Orwell Sinclair shifted away from his earlier political stances, but Sinclair's greatest work, fiction and nonfiction, is generally associated with his time as a committed socialist, whereas Orwell is best known for, and celebrated for, producing a work that, in spite of his much more complex attitudes and intentions, came to be regarded as the supreme piece of Cold Warrior literature, overshadowing all the rest of his work--which has been all the better for his memory given the prejudices of the tastemakers.

Jane Austen and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

As I remarked once, for me the most worthwhile passage in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is the satirical dialogue about the idea of the "accomplished young lady."

Such accomplishment--if one goes by Thorstein Veblen's theory of the leisure class--merely the leisured showing off their greater resources, and the supposed greater prowess which affords them that leisure, by having their young ladies display costly and time-consuming training in skills of no practical value in her life in a supposedly masterful fashion, and announcing to the world that "This is why we are here and you are there, churls!"

Just as much as ever we are today bombarded with claims of such upper-class accomplishment (not least by way of pop culture). Still, the precise skills in which today's young lady, and gentleman, are expected to display "accomplishment" are different, with one example the martial arts. I do not in the slightest deny the validity of training in those arts for purposes of exercise, sport, self-defense and much else--but if we are to be honest the reason we are so often (falsely and stupidly) given the impression that "everyone" is a black belt holder of some kind (preferably something fashionable at the moment) is because in the United States such training has acquired an association with upper classness, and this because of the sustained commitment of significant disposable time and money required to complete such a training, which working persons are unlikely to have, with this reinforced by the way that unthinking conformists imitate what better-off people do, and of course, many, many, many more lie about doing so, and about their accomplishments and abilities in the course of that. (If "everyone" is a black belt, then who wears all the other belts?)

Otherwise we would not see thriller writers get away with such nonsense as having their heroes fight off a foe with a "judo kick."

In What Does Middle Classness Consist?

We hear about middle classness all the time, usually from commentators desirous of dissolving the reality of inequality in an image of generalized middleness. One approach to such dissolution is judging the matter not on the basis of material criteria actually having to do with the terms on which people live, but instead favoring educational levels, or the "values" they purport to espouse, and even self-identification (i.e. "If you think you're middle class, then you are!"). When they do acknowledge material criteria they often equate middle classness not with the income requirements permitting life at a middle class standard demarcated in some fashion (never mind the standard most seem to actually identify with middle classness), but the middle of the range of the income distribution, a very different thing that generally constitutes a far lower bar (depending on the context, one can be mid-income while being much less than middle class in any meaningful sense), in yet another shabby evasion of the sharp edges of social reality.

I tried to do better than that in my working papers on the subject. You can find these here.

The Obscurantism of "Genius"

I recall encountering a lengthy discussion of the concept of "genius" in a popular news magazine a long time ago (TIME, perhaps).

The author of the piece chalked up the desire to believe in "genius" to a romantic desire for transcendence.

One may well grant an element of that existing within the contemporary cult of genius, but it seems to me far from being the whole of it. More important, I think, is the contradiction between the complexity and scale of modern life, and the prevailing individualistic intellectual and emotional attitudes.

Consider, for instance, scientific life. The scientific endeavor is old, vast, collective in spirit--sociologist Robert Merton, indeed, seeing the collectivist attitude toward scientific knowledge as in fact one of the key elements of the scientific ethos. Scientists build on the work of predecessors in conjunction with their colleagues, such that the individual efforts all flow into a common stream so much larger than any of them that it can seem foolishness to worry too much about whether this or that drop came from that particular tributary of the great river--with the depth and intricacy of the collective, collaborative, aspect getting only the more conspicuous to go by the sheer number of authors on single scientific papers today (a function of just how painfully specialized the work has become). However, a culture accustomed to individualism, indeed vehement about explaining results in terms of individual achievement, individual choice, individual contribution, is more likely to stress single, towering figures who, because so much more is credited to them than any one person ever actually did, or for that matter probably could have done (especially insofar as all the others who helped lead up to them fall by the wayside), can only seem superhuman, magical, in a word, "geniuses." Thus in a common view physics had that Isaac Newton guy who did it all pretty much by himself--and never mind those giants on whose shoulders he supposedly stood. And then not much happened until that Albert Einstein guy, who singlehandedly vaulted us into the relativistic era with a few papers. And so forth.

The tendency obscures rather than illuminates--which is plausibly just fine with those who prefer to see humanity as consisting of a tiny elite of superhumans who accomplish everything and a vast mass of dross who owe that elite everything and should accordingly be groveling before them in the dirt lest Atlas decide they are not worth the trouble, and shrug. Naturally the word is bandied about much in our time--and never more than in the case of persons who, one way or another, seem to amass a lot of money (in a reminder of what, infinitely more than knowledge, is really valued in this society).

Thus was Ken Lay a genius. And Jeffrey Epstein. And Sam Bankman-Fried. And Elizabeth Holmes. And many, many others just like them. In the haste to acclaim such persons such the real reasons for the desperate attachment of persons of conventional mind to the concept become all too apparent.

Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor and Japanese Work Culture

Like the other major '90s-era American thriller writers who took up the then highly topical theme of Japanese-American relations Tom Clancy presumed to "explain" Japan to his American audience in Debt of Honor, retailing the clichés of the "experts," though perhaps less admiringly than others. In his account Japan's culture "demanded much of its citizens" in a way supposedly alien to even the Japanese-American character (Chet Nomura) through whose eyes Clancy showed his readers the country, with "[t]he boss . . . always right," the "good employee" the one "who did as he was told," and getting ahead requiring one to "kiss a lot of ass" and go the extra mile in regard to the display of loyalty to the employer ("sing the company song," come in "an hour early to show how sincere you were").

As is often the case with those who make much of "difference," all this was really much less "different" than Clancy made it seem--in America, too, the rules of getting ahead not so different. No more in America than anywhere else do bosses take unkindly to being wrong, and employees who do not do what they are told. And no less in America than anywhere else do "ass-kissers" get ahead, and those who refuse to play the game suffer for fighting to retain their dignity in the inherently degrading situation that is the personal subordination seen in the modern workplace.

Indeed, those familiar with what it takes to enter the more rarefied territories within the professions (like completing a prestigious medical residency), or the more prestigious firms of "Greed is good"-singing Wall Street and "Move Fast and Break Things" Silicon Valley--where many an employer is an insufferably smug idiot bully who considers themselves entitled to put anyone desirous of a position through sheer hell for the privilege of making money for them, or simply put having been an intern for their firm on their resume--will be less impressed than Clancy was by what he thought he knew about how different Japan was with regard to its exploitativeness and destructiveness of the minds and bodies of the ambitious "go-getter" that everyone is expected to take for their ideal.

Compounding the irony, this is generally to the approval of those who see things Clancy's way.

Are Bloggers Wasting Their Time Tinkering with Their Blogs in the Hopes of Getting More Readers?

I suspect at this stage of things that most of those who started blogging have been less than thrilled with their results--certainly to go by the vast number of bloggers who quit the endeavor, often after just a little while. They were given the impression that what goes online is necessarily seen by vast numbers of people, that they would not be crazy to expect the things they put up to "go viral," that they could end up web celebrities.

Instead they mostly found themselves ignored--and when not ignored often insulted. Indeed, many may have been disappointed to find that rather than persistence paying off they have got less and less result with time--finding the search engines less likely to index their posts than before, seeing less and less evidence of actual humans reading their blog by leaving a comment or posting a link, as they suspect that what page views they get are spam, bots, and the rest.

There is no great mystery in this. The reality is that online the ratio of people looking for attention is extremely high relative to those ready to pay attention. The reality is that the great majority of Internet usage is passive, with any kind of engagement a rarity (very, very few of those who do find anything likely to share it with others). The reality is that, where the blogger especially is concerned, the Internet has been moving away from full-bodied text toward shorter-form content (like microblogging) and audiovisual experience (the vlogger rather than even the microblogger). And as if all this did not suffice to mean that things were going from bad to worse the game is entirely rigged at every level in favor of big names, big money, those with legacy media connections, and the other advantages.

Alas, these obvious realities are something few are ready to admit--instead what prevails a stupid meritocratic-aspirationalist view that treats every outcome as the result of a tough but fair test of individual talent and effort. And even those who can see through that stupidity often do not simply shrug their shoulders, but strive instead for a better outcome. One way is by trying to get search engines to treat them more favorably (indexing more of their items, ranking them more highly in search results, etc.), the more in as many a would-be advice-giver claims to know what will do the trick.

Should they post more frequently, or less frequently? Should they go for longer posts, or shorter ones? Are there too many links in their posts, or not enough? Is it a mistake to have so many internal links--for instance, posts that provide handy collections of links to past posts? Should they be weeding out old posts that perhaps did not get looked at as much as others? And so on and so forth. They will hear a lot of advice (typically vague yet completely contradictory advice, supported by no evidence whatsoever)--and if acting on it, spend a lot of time on things that have nothing to do with actual blogging.

My experience is that all that hassle will not accomplish much for most of them, for many reasons. My personal suspicion is that the infrequency with which search engines "crawl" your blog means that it will be a long time before you get any positive result, even if you really do achieve one, which seems to me doubtful. I suspect that the search engines are simply overwhelmed by the amount of content out there, and the efforts to manipulate it--to the extent that they are not catering to the sponsors, demands for censorship, etc. that doubtless tie up much in knots even beyond the direct effect of such corruption of search results (and that half-baked experiments with artificial intelligence are likely lousing things up further). The result is that they probably ought to spare themselves the trouble--and, if they really think their blogging has any meaning at all, get on with that instead.

Never Underestimate the Suckerdom of Bosses

A while back Cory Doctorow rather nicely summed up what I suspect is (contrary to the past decade's Frey-Benedikt study-kickstarted hype, and the post-Open AI GPT-3.5 hype too) the real state of progress in applying artificial intelligence to the vast majority of tasks workers actually perform: "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job," but "we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job."

For the worker who gets fired, alas, that the bot they were replaced with fails to do their job is cold comfort. They remain fired, after all--and the odds of their getting a phone call asking them to come back (never mind come back and get compensated for what they were put through) seem to me very slim indeed.

Such is the reality of the relationship between power and responsibility, above all in the Market.

The Unusability of the Internet and the Taming of the Cyber-Space frontier

Back in the 1990s there was a good deal of cyber-utopianism. I think of most of it as having been hype for the web and the tech sector, and for Silicon Valley, as well as broader "market populist" justifications for the neoliberal age by way of their fantasies about the information age--but all the same the idea was there that those who had been shut out, marginalized, denied a chance to speak might have a chance to make themselves heard here.

I suspect that most of those who acted on such premises eventually discovered the cruel lie for themselves, that the Internet was less radical in these ways than advertised, and became less and less so as time went on. That it is a medium whose usership is essentially passive, and carefully gatekept, so that Big Money, legacy media help and well-resourced supporters make all the difference between whether one's message is noticed or not, all to the advantage of the rich and powerful, and disadvantage of the poor and weak. Now with the Internet the mess that it is one may imagine that ever more than before the only way to get a message out through it is to put ever more resources behind it--as those who cannot, whatever they have to say, are seen and heard by virtually no one but themselves.

The End of the Cyber-Frontier

Back in the 1990s the cyber-utopians, reflecting their ideological background, seemed inclined to portray the Internet as a new frontier for the taking. (Indeed, Thomas Friedman, in the midst of lionizing Enron for its business model that he was sure was a perfect symbol of how the twenty-first century would belong to America, exalted its activity as part of a great "cyberspace land grab.")

Today there is no sense of anything like that online, the cyber-frontier long since closed--and, just as with the frontier in American history rather than the version of it the mythmakers continue to promulgate to this day, the result has been less a mass enfranchisement of the many than the further enrichment of an already rich few, as we are reminded by how much, regardless of how Jim Cramer rearranges the letters in his acronyms, a handful of giant firms, the same ones for rather a long time now, have turned what (falsely) seemed an unclaimed continent ripe for the taking into their private domains, and that ever more fully as such of the small freeholders who had made a place for themselves find their situation less and less tenable.

Nostalgia as Protest--and its Limitations

I suppose that where nostalgia is concerned we can speak of "pull" and "push." We may be pulled toward some aspect of the past by its apparent intrinsic fascination--but we may also be pushed away from the present by its repulsions, and this exactly why some frown upon nostalgia as they do.

Preferring the past to the present has historically been the preserve of the conservative and especially the reactionary, who really do want to bring back something of the past. But in a reactionary era the liberal might find comfort in looking backward. So have many liberals, faced with the '80s and all that came after, been nostalgic for the '60s.

It is a more awkward fit in their case. Those who believe in progress, if sincere about their belief, should expect that the best days lie ahead rather than behind them. Thinking otherwise is a reflection of the profound demoralization on their part that has played a far from inconsiderable part in moving the world further and further away from what they said they wanted it to be--while this nostalgia for the past, alas, has been far from the only expression of that sad state.