Barack Obama arrived at his inauguration not by plane, car, coach or boat but by train. He took the most old-fashioned conveyance, the iron horse, re-enacting Lincoln's journey and the politics of human contact over territory. The only Americans he disappointed were those expecting him to arrive walking on water.
Obama appears to have intuited a truth of the disaster psyche, that old is not just reassuring, comforting and "values rich", but appears to work. Old is efficient. The new president owes much of his success to the use of the internet for fundraising and communicating with supporters. But after decades in which public success was thought to lie in exploiting television to the virtual exclusion of presence on the ground, his most potent weapon lay in mass rallies and public oratory, in the archaic political form of rhetoric. Electronics was the means but not the message. The message was live.
The hustings have moved back to centre stage. That the defining moments of Obama's ascent to office should have been set-piece speeches, meticulously prepared and analysed, was remarkable. Here was a man eschewing Roosevelt's fireside broadcasts, Reagan's offhand asides and Clinton's sofa chattiness. He turned instead to the classical techniques as taught by Aristotle and Theophrastus.
Obama's speeches may be the product of a factory of phrasemakers, spin doctors and quotation dictionaries, but that is mere medium. The persuasive content is true to Aristotle's maxims, a crafted blend of ethos, logos and pathos. Obama has revived a talent virtually unknown to modern public speaking, more is the pity, rather as David Cameron did when he abandoned notes - the ability to move live audiences.
The cult of antiquity goes beyond that. On Tuesday 2 million Americans decided not to watch their hero on the screen, though they could have done so at home, in close-up and in the warm. They braved a freezing night and a freezing day to be in Washington, despite there being no hope of actually seeing the inauguration ceremony. They wanted just to be in the same city as the great man. They longed to repeat the Selma march and the Martin Luther King rally. The huddled masses were back.
I am more convinced than ever that old is new. Neophilia was the raging obsession of the boom years. It threw out the good (such as responsible banking) with the bad, and ignored any emotional attachment to the familiar. It was for wimps.
Now the storm clouds of recession gather and there is a rush for the security of the past, for custom and practice. The results are often bizarre. Open any newspaper, turn on any broadcast, and you will be inundated with throwbacks. In vogue are Karl Marx, Nazi movies, Afghan wars, the class struggle, James Bond, nationalisation, Pooh Bear, ballroom dancing and Kenneth Clarke. Vests, Woodbines and Ovaltine cannot be far behind. An increasingly deranged Gordon Brown may even wake up one morning and declare war on Germany.
History is the fashion. Pundits pore over the entrails of past recessions. The years 1929, 1976, 1980 and 1991, their lessons ignored for so long, are suddenly pregnant with significance. Forgotten are Cool Britannia, Tony Blair and joined-up government. Politics pines for "big beasts" returning from the tar pits of extinction as a consoling presence on the frontbenches.
Real ministers these days are in the House of Lords, as in the 18th century, not the Commons. Nobody complains. Old soldiers such as Lord Mandelson return to the colours in the nation's hour of need. Once they would have been laughed to scorn as wrinklies. Now they are welcomed as the voice of experience. They can remember three-day weeks and winters of discontent. They can tell a Black Monday from a Black Wednesday and still shudder at the mention of IMF 76.
Round at the Treasury public spending is antediluvian. Alistair Darling is like a drunken Wooster, leaning on the Drones club bar with bombs falling round him. He blows his final billions on nuclear submarines, Olympic Games and retail banks. He buys mainframe computers that will never work for ID cards and NHS records that no one wants. He has lost all sense of money. Millions, billions, trillions are the same to him.
Old is new in the arts. Films, plays and novels look back to former ages of agony and redemption. Literature has a war fixation. If Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker or Sebastian Faulks want movie rights or Booker prizes, they must send their heroes to the front. Half the biography or history books on my table are tales of wartime atrocity or derring-do.
To win an Oscar this year it is essential to don a German uniform and appear in a concentration camp - unless you can imitate Richard Nixon.
As for the theatre, there is not a spare seat for Shakespeare or Chekhov, Harold Pinter or Alan Ayckbourn. Last month it cost a thousand pounds to see Hamlet. The hottest ticket in the West End is for a tear-jerking story of a puppet horse that is sent to fight in the trenches.
Whether this is good or bad, I have no idea. I know only that it is true. I know that any 60s rock star worth his salt can make a million pounds by standing on a London stage and waving grey locks back and forth. Debating societies and lecture series play to packed audiences, where a decade ago the halls were empty.
Recession teaches us that public congregation and live communication offer something a silver screen can never supply. The screen itself has become a guide and supplement to that congregation. It aids but cannot replace human contact. It is a dating agency, not a date. Technology's constant attempts to re-invent the "ebook" prove only the vigour of the real thing.
The early media guru Marshall McLuhan thought that electronics would usher in an age of global villages and virtual friendships. It would render true community obsolete. He was wrong. He understood technology, but not humanity. Live is real. Old is new.
As for the Jeremiahs who tell me that I and my medium are doomed to litter the fish-shop gutter, I have news. In San Francisco, capital of Silicon Valley and boom town of the internet, innovators have devised the latest in computerised technodazzle. They claim to be able to gather the best writing from the internet, download it and reproduce it in a new-fangled form.
They are using "paper". Delirious with glee, they have found a way of putting paper inside a machine on which they have smeared "ink". This has yielded thousands of sheets which they can collate and distribute to humans in streets.
Each version of this "paper" is, by another discovery called editing, designed to match the interests of different American cities. It is hoped that businesses may purchase "advertisements" in the paper, enabling it to "cover its costs". This sensation from the cradle of the electronic revolution is called The Printed Blog. (I kid you not: Google it.)
The ghost of Gutenberg has returned to live in San Francisco, only to die laughing. I repeat, old is new. Prepare to meet thy past.
simon.jenkins@theguardian.com