A Renaissance of Liberalism
Atlantic, The, January, 2002 by Michael Kelly
I haven't checked, but I would bet that the release of the first Harry Potter movie, last November, was declared by someone to be epochal. Epochal stuff has been happening like crazy for years. We live in an epochal epoch, we are frequently reminded. It is hard to say exactly when the monumentalization of the trivial became a way of life in America.
It may have been when the National Football League started according contests between large men in skintight pants the sort of solemn designations formerly reserved for armed global conflicts. This year it's Super Bowl XXXVI; that's a lot of epics, a lot of epochs. Maybe the blame belongs, as it often does, with the Boomers—everything they did, or thought, or merely lived through was epochal. The Summer of Love was epochal, Woodstock was epochal, the Pill was epochal, long hair was epochal. Once you start getting epochal ...