At the turn of the decade, someone said the '90s would be like the '60s, only turned upside down, but now, more than halfway through the decade, it seems more like the '50s skewed. Neo-conservatives and the Christian Right hold sway, back-pedaling to those Fabulous Fifties. And, indeed they are fabulous, since nothing remains of them but fables, like the fallacy of the white heartland (Oklahoma has seen where that way leads), the fiction of morality (whose?), the fondness for innocence (when we didn't know it was politically incorrect to make blacks sit at the back of the bus), and the foolishness of gender policing (when men were men and women knew their place). The whole flood of contradictions that made up the fifties rushes over the hard-won individual freedoms of the intervening years in a rising tide of rhetoric about the good old days. Inaccurate and irresponsible nostalgia for the so-called simplicity of this complex and contradictory era provides the fodder--cud for the complacent to chew--for this feeding frenzy on a repast undigested. What results is a regurgitation of history so bilious with self-righteousness that our future goes hungry. What happened to the fifties' faith in a great future? Why hasn't that been revived instead of racism, sexism, homophobia, and paranoia?

By way of answering these questions, many contributors to vol. 9 look back to the forms and functions of those inventions of the fifties which today have become institutions, such as the nuclear (age) family and television. Of great concern among these authors is how images were and are manipulated to revive flagging power structures, as well as possibilities of a Resistance to this pre-Occupation with a past supposedly more pristine than our present postmodern predicament. Sentimental excursions, like all vacations from thinking, require we time-travel with our hands over our ears, blocking out the many voices--the multivalency so difficult and dissonant--in the symphony of self-determination blocked in by our country's constitution.