The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Fox News launched as a network alternative to “regular” news, though it positioned itself as not altogether different from the news it was competing against. Its similarities to CNN far outweighed its divergence. The same can be said for MSNBC, which went on the air a few months before Fox News in the summer of 1996.

What Fox realized on election night in 2000 (when its ratings spiked upward) and what MSNBC came to accept a few years later was something increasingly visible throughout the nineties, but too journalistically depressing to openly embrace: People watch cable news as a form of entertainment, and they don’t want to learn anything that contradicts what they already believe.

Unless cataclysmic events are actively breaking, the purpose of cable news is emotional reassurance.

The assault took place on April 20, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth and a date that can be numerically abbreviated as 4/20, a slang term for smoking marijuana. These factoids were often mentioned in connection to Columbine, the only problem being that neither had any relationship to anything that happened.

The most enduring narrative is that Harris and Klebold were part of an antisocial school clique called “the Trench Coat Mafia.” This was entirely untrue. It was constantly stated that Harris and Klebold were unpopular, a categorization that remains imperfect (Klebold had recently gone to prom, and both teens had other friends, some of whom they allowed to escape).

The persistence of these fabrications can be mainly attributed to a communal unwillingness to admit that there was no rational explanation behind this attack. Harris was a full-on psychopath who aspired to replicate the work of Timothy McVeigh. Klebold was (at a minimum) depressed and suicidal.

The artist most directly blamed for the shooting was Marilyn Manson, a knowingly controversial shock rocker surging in popularity (his most recent album, Mechanical Animals, had debuted at number 1 on the Billboard charts). The fact that Harris and Klebold were not fans of Marilyn Manson did not seem to matter (they preferred the German industrial group Rammstein).

Over and over, Clinton acted like the man he was: a brilliant, craven, self-interested pragmatist born in 1946. It made him the defining figure of the nineties and a charismatic personality who will never be classified as truly good.

To partisan thinkers of this sect, neoliberalism is the root of all the world’s problems, thus framing Bill Clinton as the catalyst for pretty much every dilemma of the twenty-first century (including the eventual election of Donald Trump).

He was still such a presidential long shot that having an enormous TV audience for any reason—including his own infidelity—was a net positive. It was even possible that admitting their marriage was imperfect may have positioned Clinton as a normal adult with relatable weaknesses.

A 1991 study by sexological feminist Shere Hite claimed that 70 percent of married women had cheated on their spouses. A similar 1993 study said the same thing about 72 percent of married men. The nineties were not a puritanical era.

The knee-jerk memory of the Y2K problem tends to place it somewhere between a media hoax and a technological boondoggle, and the conventional wisdom is that the estimated $300 billion spent fixing the glitch was the economic equivalent of throwing cash into a fireplace. All of those thoughts are wrong. But how wrong?

As far as the internet is concerned, the first public reference to the crisis came from a person at Reed College in Oregon named Spencer Bolles, who posted the following query on a digital tech bulletin board on January 18, 1985: I have a friend that raised an interesting question that I immediately tried to prove wrong. He is a programmer and has this notion that when we reach the year 2000, computers will not accept the new date. Will the computers assume that it is 1900, or will it even cause a problem?

When computers and microchips were engineered in the mid-twentieth century, the amount of computing space was limited. One solution to the space shortage was to code four-digit dates as two-digit numbers—instead of writing “1953,” the coders would use “53.”[*]

1999 suggested 56 percent of Americans were doing absolutely nothing to prepare for Y2K. Around 36 percent of responders believed the event would cause no problems for anyone, anywhere, in any way. The wall-to-wall media coverage did not ramp up concern: A Gallup poll conducted in December of ’99 found that Y2K fears were paradoxically decreasing as the doomsday date grew closer.

But as that distance decreased to nil, the year 2000 began to resemble what it actually was—just another year, negligibly different from the year preceding it.

For thirty-six days, no one knew who would become the forty-third president. When that question was finally answered, half the country viewed the results as an institutional scam, and the two men who had once appeared identical were now diametrically different.

Again and again, Bush was described as the candidate voters “would rather have a beer with.” It was a very nineties way to think about a problem. The logic here is weak and arguably nonexistent: Bush had quit drinking in 1986.

Florida, where the margin of victory was a minuscule 537 votes. Almost 6 million Floridians voted in 2000. Nader, representing the Green Party, received 97,488 of those votes. So if just 1 percent of Florida-based Nader voters had made the practical decision of voting for Gore, Gore would have become president (and all of the post-election chaos would never have happened). There is just no way around this.

Gore was a former Tennessee senator, yet he could not carry Tennessee, even though Clinton had won there in 1992 and 1996. Those 11 electoral votes[*] would have put him over the top, even without Florida.

A more plausible explanation is that Nader’s single-minded motive was to garner 5 percent of the popular vote on behalf of the Green Party. If he’d received a 5 percent voter share, the federal government would have been required to match whatever money was raised by the Green Party for the next election in 2004.[*]

The 2.9 million people who voted for Nader from a “heart and conscience” perspective not only wasted their vote but actively crushed their own desires: During his eight years as president, Bush moved the country to the right and didn’t confront (or even recognize) most of Nader’s central concerns (campaign finance reform, the minimum wage, or the environment).

On December 9, a recount was started. But the U.S. Supreme Court interceded and stopped the recount, reasoning (or at least claiming) that a recount was unconstitutional and would illegitimatize the Bush presidency, since Katherine Harris, the Florida[*] secretary of state, had already certified Bush as the victor on November 26.

What much of the public had considered a milquetoast competition between uncharismatic clones was understood by the court as a straightforward war for control of the future. Every other aspect of political thought became irrelevant—the conservatives had a one-judge majority, and that was enough to decide who ran the world. Why pretend like this was even a question to interrogate? They made the call, everyone knew why the call was made, and there was no going back.

My undefined, uncommitted Gen X worldview was instantaneously worthless. That was over. Now there were only two sides to everything.

The physical newspapers arrived to subscribers around the same time nineteen men with box cutters passed through low-security checkpoints in four different airports and boarded four cross-country domestic flights. The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.