@hingehead,
Sadly, that is true.
You know what is also out of date? Any reference to Jean-Paul Sartre.
Several years ago, my then boyfriend and I took my sons and their friends to a Renaissance Fair. I was reading lots of Simone de Beavoir at the time and learned that Sartre had gone though a period of mental illness during which he imagined he was pursued by a giant lobster.* At the fair, a young couple were selling what is best described as charms, tiny clay objects with loops built into them, designed to wear. One was a red lobster, probably a lobstah, symbolic of Boston. I picked it up, waggled it at my boyfriend and, in a menacing contralto, said, "Sartre."
My bf, who had been told the Sartre story, laughed. I bought the charm and immediately named the tiny lobster Jean-Paul. The young vendor looked blankly at us, so my bf began to explain about Sartre's delusion. The young man then asked, "Who is Sartre?" My bf and I were floored.
*Of course, that reminded me of the giant hedgehog that pursued Arthur Dimsdale.
But, it also reminded me of how the Catholic Church ran scared from Sartre and Existentialism during the late 60s. My college required a four course sequence in philosophy. The school of philosophy was theistic realism or Thomism or philosophy filtered through Catholic theology. My first text was called A Metaphysics of Authentic Existentialism. It was by Leo Sweeney although in my memory it was either by Jacques Maritain or Etienne Gilson. Just imagine: the Catholic Church thought the bogeyman of the 20th C was Sartre who, in the end, has had so little impact that the second generation hippie kid, selling ceramic charms at a Ren Fair has no idea who he was.
Going off on tangents also date you, especially if they are tangents about the Catholic Church!