I suppose I should have seen it coming; each decade of my life became a little less distinct. The fifties were, of course, suburban conformity, though I didn’t spend them in a suburb and my parents were not the most pliant conformists. The sixties quickly got filed under ‘peace and love’ with a dollop of political activism—though some spoilsport was always ready to point out that more than half of those sixties took place in the seventies. As for the seventies, things got a bit hazier, but they seemed to be sort of like the sixties except that nobody thought that stuff was so great any more, and some of the activism was elbowed out by political scandal. Then the eighties, the ‘Greed is Good” decade, and it seemed like the pigeonholed decade was back to stay.
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