No Great Loss

In his roman-a-clef about Jean Seberg, Carlos Fuentes writes with some puzzlement about America's perpetual loss of innocence. Every time there's a war or some big change, the country loses its innocence. I wonder if the US is the only country that writes its history that way.

By contrast, in writing about Europe, Mak only writes of what happened next and where. In the 1920s Berlin had a huge drug scene. The decadence was a major break with the past, but nobody was losing their innocence.