Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 22

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Popular Culture Review

writes of “postmodern money” (April 1999); Entertainment Weekly notes Jon
Stewart’s “postmodern...studio” (Nov. 1994) ( Entertainment Weekly could be a
category entirely unto itself: the word postmodern appears in virtually every is
sue); Gear writes of “post-modern-friendly art direction” (May/June 1999). The
litany could be endless, these magazines postmodemizing virtually every aspect
o f our day-to-day lives.
Even the higher-browed snob-zines (those slicks usually devoted exclu
sively to haute couture, the zany world of politics, the moral decline of the world
as we think it) have boarded the postmodern bandwagon. New York Magazine runs
an article on business dining etiquette entitled “Postmodern Emily” (April 2000);
Harpers proclaims, “A kiss is still a kiss (even if the sex is postmodern and the
romance problematic)” (Feb. 1996); The Oxford American makes reference to
“postmodern, monster-bellum houses” (Dec. 1995); New Statesman examines why
postmodern society will no longer accept crying in public (June 1999). Even (the
horror! the horror!), that most prim and crotchety of maidens has succumbed; yes,
indeed, even The New Yorker found herself powerless to resist. “But we inhabit the
postmodern age, an age of mass suggestibility, in which image and reality strangely
interact,” the slickest of the slicks states (May 1994) — though this may not count
since the article is by Martin Amis. Don’t worry; there are plenty of other inci
dences: there is the piece on “postmodern dancemakers” (Mar. 1992), the labeling
o f actress Karen Sillas as a “postmodern babe” (Mar. 1992), and, in the magazine’s
most awkward attempt to be hip, the reference to the Washington Monument as a
“postmodern pillar” (Oct. 1999).
Just as pop media has latched onto the term, so, too, has an array of other,
more specialized fields. For example, science is now rife with the term. JAMA
speaks of the effects of “postmodern society” on medical institutions (May 2000);
Discover refers to the concept of “postmodern science” (Mar. 1998); Health pre
sents the “Postmodern Guide to Cold R elief’ (Jan./Feb. 1997); even the venerable
Lancet runs an article called “Postmodern Medicine” (Oct. 1999). Relatedly, but
perhaps more disturbingly, is the over-appearance of the term in contemporary
theology. Suddenly ever-present are holy tomes with titles like Ancient-Future
Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World. In addition, Christian
ity Today refers to Christian author Leonard Sweet as a “postmodern Ezekiel”
(Aug. 1999), Theological Studies writes of theological ethics in a “postmodern
age” (June 2000), and Christian Century calls the Jesus Seminar “postmodern
revisioning” (Nov. 1997). (It is interesting to note that all of these uses appear after
the producers o f the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club denounced
postmodernism as an “amoral pseudo-religion” in January 1996.) Apparently, in
the postmodern epidemic, nothing is safe.