Recently I came across an issue of a slick mischievous New York magazine, Spy, which featured a satire entitled "Post-Postmodern." In it appeared various checklists to help you tell what is PoMo, as it is now called, and what is not. If a painting contains naked figures and broken china arranged in a mysterious and arbitrary manner, it is PoMo. If a building has pilasters and the same color scheme as the 1984 Summer Olympics, it is PoMo. If a novel or short story contains shopping lists, menus, and reminds one of Céline if Céline had watched a lot of television, it is PoMo. There is even a "Do-It-Yourself Postmodern Retrofit Kit" in the article which provides you with little pastel cubes, cones, and pyramids you may cut out, fold, and attach to your toaster, tackle box, or whatnot to make it PoMo. My stapler is now comme il faut.

In 1980 21 articles appeared in major American newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times that used the word "postmodern." In 1984 there were 116. In 1987 there were 247. The frequency of the term increases each year, but the intelligence of its use does not. "Postmodern" is now applied to parkas, Senator Paul Simon's political style, and baseball. Elle's November, 1986, issue carried this approximation of a sentence: "Fad hatting for fall by the Postmodern milliner [Sherry] Vigdot." In a word, "postmodern" is now applied willy-nilly to objects, ideas, and situations by people who do not know what it means to make those people, who are not smart, sound smart. "It's evolved," concludes the piece in Spy, "into the sort of buzzword that people tack onto sentences when