My plan this month—to return to the subject I touched on last June,
of history in the eyes of the journalist—suffered a blow when I
tuned in to The Fifties, a series based on David Halberstam’s book
of the same name, which ran on the History Channel in late November
and early December. I found that I could not watch more than the
first hour and a half of its eight hours. The surfeit of clichés
proved overpowering. Of course, one expected the clichés of bad
writing (“To paraphrase Dickens,” intoned the narrator with comic
solemnity, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”),
which are a hazard of all TV watching; also, the clichés of political
content (Senator Joseph McCarthy does his inevitable star turn as
the principal manifestation of “anti-Communist hysteria,” which was
created by the American-led “arms race”) hardly came as a surprise.
But when the show began closing in on the epoch-making significance
of the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll, I had to tune out.
Infantile leftism I can abide, but baby-boomer narcissism has
become too much for me.

The point of The Fifties is the same as the point of the
“Newseum” and virtually every other journalistic foray into history,
which is further to establish and solidify as orthodoxy the latest,
baby-boomer version of the Whig interpretation of history. But this
version, instead of identifying the culmination toward which all
history has tended as the modern liberal state,