If, as Tom Wolfe does, you believe that it takes a decade about five years to get started, you must be expecting the �80s to begin any day now. There are those, though, who�ll tell you that the �80s began in earnest the day Ronald Reagan was first elected president, by a positively terrifyingly huge margin, and that, with American college kids lusting unashamedly after wealth and power, nationalism and piety being rampant, and You Know Who�s running the country, the smart money�s on the �80s eventually coming to be recognized as the �50s, Jr.

Let�s say, just for the sake of filling part of a column inch and giving the ad salespeople something they can show manufacturers of beauty supplies, that 1986 really will be 1956 all over again, but with mousse in its hair this time, rather than lard. Is the appropriate response to thjs to begin suffering the symptoms of irritable colon syndrome, or to* furrow one�s brow and mutter obscenely? It is not, for just as three decades ago, there�ll be lots of wonderful popular art perpetrated in 1986, along with the expected infinity of worthless crap that aspires to nothing more than to turn a handsome profit. It�ll just be a case of knowing where to look for it.