men's pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodies if they pleased. They 
painted, and decked themselves out in gold and silver, even to walk to the grocery store. 
Or they went fresh scrubbed and without ornament -- it didn't matter. They curled their 
hair like Marie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free.
  
  For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.
  
  And these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who've always achieved a 
certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the middle-class revolutionaries called 
decadence in the past.
  
  The old aristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to the promises 
of the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right to love and to luxury and to 
graceful things.
  
  Department stores had become palaces of near Oriental loveliness -- merchandise 
displayed amid soft tinted carpeting, eerie music, amber light. In the all-night 
drugstores, bottles of violet and green shampoo gleamed like gems on the sparkling glass 
shelves. Waitresses drove sleek leather-lined automobiles to work. Dock laborers went 
home at night to swim in their heated backyard pools. Charwomen and plumbers changed at 
the end of the day into exquisitely cut manufactured clothes.
  
  In fact the poverty and filth that had been common in the big cities of the earth since 
time immemorial were almost completely washed away.
  
  You just didn't see immigrants dropping dead of starvation in the alleyways. There 
weren't slums where people slept eight and ten to a room. Nobody threw the slops in the 
gutters. The beggars, the cripples, the orphans, the hopelessly diseased were so 
diminished as to constitute no presence in the immaculate streets at all.
  
  Even the drunkards and lunatics who slept on the park benches, and in the bus stations 
had meat to eat regularly, and even radios to listen to, and clothes that were washed.
  
  But this was just the surface. I found myself astounded by the more profound changes 
that moved this awesome current along.
  
  For example, something altogether magical had happened to time.
  
  The old was not being routinely replaced by the new anymore. On the contrary, the 
English spoken around me was the same as it had been in the 1800s. Even the old slang 
("the coast is clear" or "bad luck" or "that's the thing") was still "current." Yet 
fascinating new phrases like "they brainwashed you" and "it's so Freudian" and "I can't 
relate to it" were on everyone's lips.
  
  In the art and entertainment worlds all prior centuries were being "recycled." 
Musicians performed Mozart as well as jazz and rock music; people went to see Shakespeare 
one night and a new French film the next.
  
  In giant fluorescent-lighted emporiums you could buy tapes of medieval madrigals and 
play them on your car stereo as you drove ninety miles an hour down the freeway. In the 
bookstores Renaissance poetry sold side by side with the novels of Dickens or Ernest 
Hemingway. Sex manuals lay on the same tables with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
  
  Sometimes the wealth and the cleanliness everywhere around me became like an 
hallucination. I thought I was going out of my head.
  
  Through shop windows I gazed stupefied at computers and telephones as pure in form and 
color as nature's most exotic shells. Gargantuan silver limousines navigated the narrow 
French Quarter streets like indestructible sea beasts. Glittering office towers pierced 
the night sky like Egyptian obelisks above the sagging brick buildings of old Canal 
Street. Countless television programs poured their ceaseless flow of images into every 
air-cooled hotel room.
  
  But it was no series of hallucinations. This century had inherited the earth in every 
sense.
  
  And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people 
in the very midst of their freedom and their wealth. The Christian god was as dead as he 
had been in the 1700s. And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place of 
the old.
  
  On the contrary, the simplest people of this age were driven by a vigorous secular 
morality as strong as any religious morality I had ever known. The intellectuals carried 
the standards. But quite ordinary individuals all over America cared passionately about 
"peace" and "the poor" and "the planet" as if driven by a mystical zeal.
  
  Famine they intended to wipe out in this century. Disease they would destroy no matter 
what the cost. They argued ferociously about the execution of condemned criminals, the 
abortion of unborn babies. And the threats of "environmental pollution" and "holocaustal 
war" they battled as fiercely as men have battled witchcraft and heresy in the ages past.
  
  As for sexuality, it was no longer a matter of superstition and fear. The last 
religious overtones were being stripped from it. That was why the people went around half 
naked. That was why they kissed and hugged each other in the streets. They talked ethics 
now and responsibility and the beauty of the body. Procreation and venereal disease they 
had under control.
  
  AH, THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. AH, THE TURN OF THE GREAT WHEEL.
  
  It had outdistanced my wildest dreams of it, this future. It had made fools of grim 
prophets of ages past.
  
  I did a lot of thinking about this sinless secular morality, this optimism. This 
brilliantly lighted world where the value of human life was greater than it had ever been 
before.
  
  IN THE AMBER ELECTRIC TWILIGHT OF A VAST HOTEL ROOM I watched on the screen before me 
the stunningly crafted film of war called Apocalypse Now. Such a symphony of sound and 
color it was, and it sang of the age-old battle of the Western world against evil. "You 
must make a friend of horror and moral terror," says the mad commander in the savage