>what produces those smugly
>insensitive Americans and those 'serial losses of innocence' (copyright
>that one, Carl, it's beautiful - didn't Lewis Lapham write something about
>the 'culture of innocence' in Harper's?)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20n04/hitc2004.htm "One day, I am going to drop everything and think exclusively about America and its celebrated 'loss of innocence'. I have read that the country lost said innocence in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the First World War, during Prohibition, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is fairly easily regained - only to be (damn!) mislaid once more."