Soft and hard pomerons: Is there a distinction?

One of the big unsolved problems of QCD remains the problem of the Pomeron: what is the relation of high energy elastic and diffractive phenomena to the underlying theory? This is not a subject in which I have actively worked. But my interest in it has in this year increased greatly. The reason has to do with ideas for experimentation at SSC/LHC which either directly address the problem or which require the understanding of strong-interaction diffractive phenomena as backgrounds for discovery-physics processes involving electroweak boson exchanges. I will in this talk omit these motivations, which can be found elsewhere, and instead concentrate on some personal veiwpoints regarding the Pomeron which may or may not be conventional. The main question has to do with the distinction between the original, old-fashioned ''soft'' Pomeron of the 1960s, built out of multiperipheral hadron-exchanges, and the more modern perturbative-QCD ''hard'' Pomeron, built out of multiperipheral gluon exchanges. The perspective I offer comes mainly from two sources: one is heavy-flavor physics, and the other is the Manohar-Georgi view of constituent quark physics. 27 refs., 5 figs