According to different cultural analysts, nostalgia has become aprominent taste trend in the first years of our new century. Musicfrom the 1960s now sells everything from drugs to airline tickets.Clothes from the 1970s adorn hipsters, a subculture now consideredamong the coolest and whose very name is a throwback to the1950s.

Now, thanks to Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and the law ofunintended consequences, consumers are also about to revisit thepast, returning to a time when they had to make sure they visited abank branch before they went shopping or to a restaurant or reallyto do anything that they didn't want to put on a creditcard.

Why? Because in one single-minded, single-handed and misguidedeffort, the senator has managed to move payments away from thefaster, safer and more manageable world of cards we have in 2011and back to the slower, more dangerous, more expensive and lessefficient world of cash and checks that we had in, say, 1951.