According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom".
But such blissed-out mellowness brings with it the impression of inconsequentiality, an airy torpor the tunes on Within and Without struggle to overcome.
That's one way to engage an audience, but in the absence of strong writing or really distinctive performances, it can also be a route to inconsequentiality.
To focus on the sixties is fine, but, in arguing for that decade's centrality, the author ends up condemning both Mailer and Buckley to a kind of premature inconsequentiality, claiming that by the early seventies they were "calcified"; staying busy as "personalities" and writers, they "removed themselves from the pitch of battle, patron saints already".
But the show is also slow to declare its purpose (even at the interval, it isn't clear what is at stake), an uncertainty that gives some of its multiple storylines an air of soap-opera inconsequentiality.
Certainly, the 90s "greed is good" years, when the north in general became the Tory party's Petri dish, were such a caustic reminder of our inconsequentiality that the SNP began to look like a serious alternative.
It has a lot to do with weakness, with inconsequentiality, but also, as a result, with the way people circumvent authority.
In an age when it's possible to conjure spectacular action from digital effects, many modern movies have developed a sense of weightlessness – the inconsequentiality of artifice.
One indication of the essential lightness — a harsher critic might say inconsequentiality — of the show is how it focuses on the inner skullduggery of politics without showing the larger moments that result, which, you suspect, might have been too expensive to stage.
And yet for all its cheery air of inconsequentiality, "Bring It On" is an intriguing collaboration among artists with serious Broadway cred.
Yet it is precisely reaction to this very last feeling - the sheer force of an impulsive response to this sense of inconsequentiality - that drives forward these otherwise useless words of desperation.
