Everything Is Important Because Nothing Is

“The Let’s Pretend We’re Living In A Golden Age game was not a new one. For decades the entire cultural establishment had been putting itself to sleep at night by telling itself over and over again that it was a truly stupendous little cultural establishment, probably the most important little cultural establishment that had ever existed. It had been an age of cut-rate Homers and dime-a-dozen Dantes, of daily Cultural Events and weekly Artistic Epochs, an age bracketed by congratulatory self-delusion and defined by the proximity of its own horizons, an age when everything was Great precisely because nothing was very good. It had been the age of Capote and Warhol and Updike and Pollock masquerading as the age of Pericles, and even in its death throes it shamed itself and its parent countries with the shabbiness of its bravado.” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the Philistines (Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983), p. 46.]