He's been depressed of late. When I get stuck on something I'm working on, I'll stop by his apartment with a bottle of the cheap merlot he's become fond of. The few canvases he has have been painted over numerous times. He's been sketching on newspapers. I pour wine into a mustard jar and he grabs it, takes a long slug before sitting down on a naked mattress. "Have you been writing?" he asks with a severe frown.

I'm drinking out of a coffee cup one of us has stolen from Denny's. "Some. How about you? Any luck?" He swings his hand in an ambivalent gesture that nearly sends wine over the threads of the jar. The sports section at my feet is covered with ball-point studies of centurians, the comics page is a mass of classical architecture in precise perspective. Only the front section is untouched, spread open across a milkcrate next to a short stack of library books. He's been sketching M-1 rifles on the back of a supermarket flyer.

"You were in World War II, weren't you?" he asks suddenly.

"No, that was before my time."

"Yes, of course." Pinned to a wall is a CTA map swimming with charcoal renderings of Normandy grunts, some of which I recognize from recent film stills. I give him the few magazines I've stolen for him from a barber shop. He's deeply interested in the situation in Kosovo now and tears right into an issue of Newsweek with a video still of three captured servicemen on the cover. He's thrashing the pages, racing through the letters and newsbites at the front. He stops at a fold-out of photos: a line of refugees loaded with luggage, a jet in take-off, Primakov and Milosevic arm in arm, mugging for the camera like movie stars at a premiere. He speeds past the Elie Wiesel article I though he'd be interested in, but stops again at the Jonathan Alter column I'd planned to point out to him.

He's doing another allegorical painting. He has a real knack for them. Before I'd ever met him, I'd learned about his Oath of the Horatii in art history classes, been told how this painting of the three Horatii brothers swearing on a triad of swords to defend Rome in 669 B.C. is an allegory of French heroism in the time of the Revolution. Later, when I was a museum guard, I spent eight hours a day standing around another Revolutionary allegory: his depiction of a scene from the Iliad, the one that shows the body of Hector, broken and bloodied after his joyride around the city with Achilles, now presented by Achilles to Patroclus, who lies in a large lavish bed in the middle of the battlefield, dying from an earlier ass-whooping courtesy of Hector. I spent every miserable minute of that tedious job staring at this painting, and then one day, when I was sure no one was looking, I licked it.

I tell this to David, who is immersed in the magazine. "This is an American custom?"

"Not really. I just wanted to say I'd done it. I mean, how many people can say they've licked a David?"

"I have," he says without looking up. "Wiped my ass with one, too." He is well into the Alter column and looks more frustrated than before. He lifts his eyes finally. "Well?" he barks at me, "is it like World War II or World War I? Is it a Holocaust or a Vietnam?"

I tell him about the press release I found for him on the Internet, the one issued by a southern musician, boasting that "the media has picked up on the observations of country music star Billy Ray Cyrus, who is correlating the plight of the refugees of the Kosovo conflict to the United States' own shameful drive of the original Native Americans from their homeland--the so-called Trail of Tears." Even though "the media" here seems limited to daytime talk show host Leeza Gibbons and nonagenarian AM radio staple Paul Harvey, I hope that it might give him another option.

I try to help him as much I can because I know how confused he's been recently. Just explaining the Internet took half of an afternoon and left him in a deep funk. He's used to being ultra-topical, to being extremely knowledgeable, but if there was a time he could safely relate two events separated by 2,500 years, today he'd be branded an intellectual if he tried to link an event from his time to one in ours. Events are bigger than before--they have to be to fill the space made for them by our ever-expanding information structures--and there's less room for them in the collective memory that provides the basis for allegory. A recent article in Reason reports that there are now upwards of 37,000 libraries and 25,000 video stores in this country, but what's more dizzying are the sources of immediate information: over one billion internet sites, at conservative estimate, and countless hours of television programming--and these competing with information warhorses like newspapers, magazines, and radio.

Starting perhaps with Don Quixote, and certainly by the time of Ulysses and the modernists, art became fair game for allegorical reference. The printing press, the widening of shipping routes, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the cities--all these increased awareness of artwork to the point where they could complete with legend as material for allegory, entering them, effectively, in to the realm of myth. Yet this shift seems positively glacial compared to the speed at which the twentieth-century information explosion expanded the popular awareness of art and entertainment, and in doing so enabled post-modernists and pop artists to reference television, movies, music, and brand names as easily as their distant forbears had referenced Homer and the Bible, thus spawning what we now know as pop culture. Back in the Eighties, David can admit, he consigned to the dumpster out back not a few paintings of Sylvester Stallone in full Rambo attire.

The function of allegory is, quite simply, the equating of an unknown or misunderstood quality to a known and accepted quality in order to inform, maybe to provoke. What is X like? Well, it's like Y. If you want to persuade, you choose a Y with some degree of emotional payload for the audience. This I don't have to explain to David. His Death of Marat, I learn from my old art history textbook, linked the Revolutionary bigwig to Christ and threw in added gravitas by invoking the somber religious style of Caravaggio. Boom, messiah. Christ is a useful device in the allegory tool box, and not only because he provides us with such a handy iconography. (Watch how easily, and unnecessarily, he's dragged into Paul Schrader's recent Affliction.) Everybody knows who Christ his, even those of us in industrialized society who haven't chanced to meet him personally, but that didn't happen overnight. It took him longer to become a symbol than it took for him to become a god, longer than it took Ahab to become a symbol of relentlessness, and considerably longer than it took Charlie Brown to become our consummate good-hearted loser.

He's near the end of the article, I can tell. "In a truly postmodern twist," Alter writes and David will read, "the victims are now playing themselves in the movies; one ailing Albanian refugee in Macedonia told TV cameras that her train trip was 'just exactly like 'Schindler's List'.'" I will tell him that in that same issue of Newsweek, a movie is coded as "Tarantino for teens", an animated television show is rated on a scale from The Simpsons and South Park, and Atlanta and Los Angeles are "bywords for sprawl". In the issue of Time in his lap, the same issue in which Timothy Garton Ash frets over Hitler-Milosevic analogies, a review of The Matrix will declare, "There are references to everything from the Alien movies to The Terminator to Soylent Green, but that's what we have for a living mythology these days."

And the review is wrong, for our living mythology these days is, strangely, still living. The glut of information we now enjoy would no more have us look back ten years for parallels than it would require us to return to the Rome of the Horatii. And who would remember if we did? What need is there to look that far back when the recent past has been so well documented as to provide models for virtually incident that could arise? Nor is there any reason to look to art or entertainment for allegory anymore. Why focus unnecessarily on objects of imagination when our information structures are now subsisting mainly on "real life"? Why look to legend when flesh and blood symbols are still among us? When Nightline sought to illuminate the recent shootings in Littleton, they needed only to visit Jonesburo. "The echoes are haunting, horrific and all too familiar," Chris Bury stated during the broadcast. "A chain of school savagery linking Littleton, Colorado, and Jonesboro, Arkansas, with West Paducah, Kentucky, and Pearl, Mississippi, and so many other towns." By stepping just a link down that chain, ABC News was able to cover the Littleton story in Jonesboro without all the fuss of stepping into a situation still steeped in shock--yet still, in a way, get the story. Such tactics may appear to muddle the function of allegory, but in truth they strength its power by reinforcing our notions of the repetitious nature of history. The inference made by the Nightline program was not subtle: by talking to these people, we are talking to those people, The Testimony of the Jonesborii.

Allegory eliminates specificity, reduces the things of experience to archetypes, a system as useful as that by which a librarian reduces texts to subjects, categorized and subcategorized, in an attempt to classify, and with our current flood of information growing more and more overwhelming, classification has become not only useful but necessary. As such, the information becomes superfluous and the allegory all that matters. What we have today is nothing more than a collection of analogy, a cultural shorthand by which we can communicate. Further, as global politics has learned to survive in the flood of information, it has adapted its strategies and shorthand, requiring President Clinton only to invoke solemnly the specter of the Holocaust in order to justify United States participation in NATO action in Kosovo. History will repeat itself, even if we must force it to. As Annie Appelbaum writes in Slate, "I just wonder whether we haven't skewed our perspective on the world by forgetting everything else: I'm not too certain, for example, that Milosevic and Kosovo are quite the same thing as Hitler and Europe, or that Clinton is Churchill. But it seems as if we are able to remember only one event at a time, to concentrate on just one thing at a time." Just as George Bush, awash in Oliver Stone's Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, was forced to declare that the Gulf War would not be "another Vietnam," Clinton is able summon the apple-pie righteousness of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. In both instances, the movies themselves were not so much referenced as the synthetic zeitgeist they'd created as focuses of attention by the media; Clinton's World War II is not understood to be the World War II, but a concept: that proud Paradise Lost of global warfare which is really a recent creation. "Conveniently skipping the last, 'bad' war," Applebaum writes, "we dwell upon the more distant 'good' war, the war for justice and democracy." Our cultural shorthand is not based on fact, but on consensus, on the history we can agree is useful. In this respect, maybe we do have a real mythology today, even if it is only yesterday's news.

David finishes the article and tosses the magazine across the room in a fury. I down the last of my wine and stand, saying, "Come on, let's grab some lunch. You need to get away from this thing for a while."

"Yeah," he nods. "Maybe so."

"And then, after that, we can watch VH1: Behind the Music. The Moltey Crue one was on last night. I taped it."

"It's a good one?"

"Oh yeah. Tragedy, pathos, a real cautionary tale."

I had the burger and fries. He had the fish.