Postmodernism raises questions about the appetite for architecture which it then virtually at once redirects. Along with food, architecture may be thought to be a relatively late taste among North Americans, who know all about music and story telling, have been less interested in eloquence, and have sometimes painted small, dark, secret pictures for suspicious purposes, redolent of superstition or the occult. But until very recently they have not wanted -- for good reason! -- to think much about what they were eating; and as for built space, there too a protective narcosis has long reigned, a don'twant-to-see-it, don't-want-to-know-about-it attitude that may, on the whole, have been the most sensible relationship to develop with the older American city. (Postmodernism would then be the date on which all that changed.) The immediate postwar heritage of this virtually natural or biological species protection has been the diversion of such aesthetic instincts (a very doubtful thing to call them) into instant commodification -- fast foods, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the kitch interior decoration and furniture for which the United States is famous and which has been explained as a kind of security blanket -- chintz of the first postwar domestic production -- designed to ward off memories of the depression and its stark physical deprivations. But you can't start again from scratch; and everything after that -- in the so-called Postmodernism, long after the depression has been forgotten save as the pretext for Reagan's comparison of himself with FDR -- has had to build on those unpromising commercial beginnings. As though it had studied under Hegel, therefore, the postmodern lifts up, and cancels, all that junk (Aufhebung), including the hamburger within the diremption of its gourmet meals and Las Vegas within the rainbow-flavor landscape of its psychedelic corporate monuments.