What has been, what might have been, what should be or might be. Can we describe the present in terms of its becoming what it isn't yet”- a term so frightening, so ominous, so cataclysmic, that it is sometimes easier to see the present already darkened by the shadow of a thermonuclear apocalypse than either envisage further declensions from that which our nostalgia absents us, or to see a redemptive dialectic immanent in the vortex of accelerating change.