"That phrase, “loss of innocence,” has become stale with overuse and diminishing returns; no other culture is so addicted to this narcissistic impression of itself as having any innocence to lose in the first place. I have seen Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” described as the literary “declaration of independence” (though Mr. Twain never wrote about sexual obsession). And I have seen the famous “loss” attributed to Watergate, to Vietnam, to Hiroshima, to the Spanish-American War of 1898, and to the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers. Robert Redford dates it to the moment in the respectable 1950s when Americans discovered that the egghead games on TV were fixed. That’s a more plausible suggestion than the one made in the New York Times’s front-page obituary for Frank Sinatra, which solemnly argued that Frank’s croons were the “loss of innocence” for a generation."