Hope, or naiveteacute;?

For the first time in the memory of most of us a major political party was moving in the direction of nominating a demonstrably superior candidate 8212; a genuinely literate man in a culture that does not prize literacy, an actually cosmopolitan man in an arena that deems tolerance of the world suspect by definition. A civil man. A politically adroit man. Enthusiasm was high. Participation was up.

Yet something troubled. What troubled had nothing to do with the candidate himself. It had to do instead with the reaction he evoked. Close to the heart of the problem was the way in which only the very young were decreed capable of truly appreciating the candidate. Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching arguments made on the candidate8217;s behalf by their children. Again and again we were told that this was a generational thing, we couldn8217;t understand. In a flash, we were back in high school, and we couldn8217;t sit with the popular kids, we didn8217;t get it. The Style section of The New York Times, on the Sunday after the election, mentioned the Obama T-shirt that 8220;makes irony look old.8221;

Irony was now out. Naiveteacute;, translated into 8220;hope,8221; was now in.

Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized8230;

I couldn8217;t count the number of times I heard the words 8220;transformational8221; or 8220;inspirational,8221; or heard the 8217;60s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 8217;60s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade8217;s war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see.

From a piece by Joan Didion in 8216;The New York Review of Books8217;