The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

What makes it so evocative of the nineties is how devoid of drama it actually was.

This was a nexus of serious things that had never happened before, unified by a wavering consensus that the stakes were still low and that this was still (mostly) entertainment.

the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.

People watch cable news as a form of entertainment, and they don’t want to learn anything that contradicts what they already believe.

Moreover, the bias expressed cannot be subtle or unpredictable; partisan audiences want to know what they’re getting before they actually get it.

Columbine High represents the baseline for a different level of school shooting—the full incarnation of a nightmare that had previously seemed like a theoretical possibility too extreme to actually occur.

What happened next was a tutorial in how the first draft of history is not just incorrect but usually more tenacious than all the improved drafts that come later.

The persistence of these fabrications can be mainly attributed to a communal unwillingness to admit that there was no rational explanation behind this attack.

Most teen culture from the previous twenty-five years had worked from the premise that popular kids were inherently shallow and unpopular kids were inherently good:

Because it was (incorrectly) believed that Harris and Klebold had targeted popular kids, it was (incorrectly) assumed that this must have been a response to merciless bullying.

Television had become the way to understand everything, ruling from a position of one-way control that future generations would never consent to or understand.

Two individuals with opposing viewpoints can seem almost identical if both have measured, understated personalities; two individuals in fundamental agreement become adversaries if the emotional intensity of their mind-sets doesn’t match up.

Greenspan was something that had never existed before and will likely never exist again: a rock star Federal Reserve chairman.

In the future, this opinion would be reversed and Greenspan would become a public piñata, pointedly hammered for the financial collapse that happened within a year of his leaving his post in 2006.

The trust people instilled in Greenspan derived from the belief that emotion played no role in his data-driven decision-making.

Oprah Winfrey was the antithesis of Greenspan. Oprah told you to feel more.

More than any other celebrity, Winfrey normalized the belief that how a person felt mattered just as much as the circumstances that propelled that feeling into being.

When anything in the zeitgeist was cited as an example of “Oprahfication,” it was a way to signal the primacy of emotion and the feminization of society.

The passage of time makes it difficult to accurately recall outsized personalities, mostly by demanding that we always accept the tyranny of the present.

In the undeclared war between feeling and unfeeling, there’s no question about which side won. That war is over. But there was a time when those battles were still being waged,

Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself.

It did not feel outrageous, for example, that Pauly Shore spent much of the nineties as a bankable movie star, regardless of how baffling that notion strikes anyone who missed it entirely.

The prospect of multiple studios building feature-length comedies around a non-actor with a niche MTV following does not translate as a workable strategy. Yet . . . at the time . . . it did not seem strange.

A president is the only celebrity remembered out of civic obligation. And that, usually, works to a president’s advantage.

Bad policies and political betrayals stay tethered to the past while the man who made them continues to live, humanized by the rudimentary act of staying alive.

Clinton was the last transcendent political figure of an era no one realized was ending.

If, like so many people, Clinton is remembered for only one thing, it will be for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year-old White House intern.

Every component of the scandal is so averse to the post-#MeToo worldview that any neutral attempt at contextualizing or rationalizing the action is viewed as a crime unto itself.

Clinton, more than any other national political force, adopted neoliberalism as his central governing principle.

Clinton was a realist who could always find the necessary compromise. He saw the subjective world through economic metrics.

What Clinton could not (and did not) anticipate was a future where leftists would see ideological prejudice as sacred.

So often, the formative experiences of historically notable people seem to glancingly intersect with the lives of other notable people, almost like there’s a magnetic attraction among all individuals destined for greatness. Yet the more likely explanation is that these haphazard collisions spur both parties to pursue goals that eventually make their early interactions quasi-meaningful.

The off-year election of 1994 hit the Democrats like a jackhammer to the jowls. The Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in what was feverishly labeled the Republican Revolution,

The stature of Clinton in ’94 adopted the doomed, ineffectual posture of Jimmy Carter in ’78. He seemed destined to be a one-term president.

The innovation was to look at voters as pure consumers and to exclusively focus on voters who didn’t have a defined political ideology.

The intent was to create a psychological profile based not on a respondent’s ideology, but on their metaphysical desires.

The only voters who mattered were undecided swing voters.

Instead of structural transformations, Clinton promoted a string of specific measures appealing to secular, middle-class, values-oriented parents who were perched on the partisan fence:

The key was keeping Clinton near the political center, where he could comfortably drift either left or right, depending on what was required in the moment.

This, in many ways, was the crux of the Generation X conundrum—how (for example) was it possible for a person to reject the illusion of advertising if their only concept of authenticity had been constructed by advertising?

In the same way twenty-first-century adults would grow comfortable with classifying their own personalities as “brands,” late-twentieth-century adults nonchalantly accepted the possibility that their principal social function was to serve as consumers.

Bill Clinton was the president who recognized that television was a medium intimately understood by everyone who had never experienced life without it.

Throughout the summer of 1992, MTV made the institutional decision to become heavily involved with the presidential campaign, allegedly to increase voter turnout (the campaign was called “Choose or Lose”) but really as an unabashed advocate for Clinton’s candidacy.

Unlike most politicians of his era, he did not appear to be fighting popular culture. He appeared to simply view it as the culture that was popular, and he’d engage with it on its own terms.

Clinton was a paragon of empathy not necessarily because of what he felt, but because he understood how empathy was supposed to look on television.

a reasonable person is forced to conclude Bill Clinton must have needed the excitement that came with the risk of what he was doing. He did not, in any way, have full control over his character.

The essay starts from the position that Clinton’s presidential failure is now a given, and that the only real debate is the degree to which that failure was inevitable or avoidable. But you know, it didn’t seem that way at the time.

The process of revisionism is constant. It happens so regularly that it often seems like the only reason to appraise any present-tense cultural artifact is to help future critics explain why the original appraisers were wrong.

Those accolades are startling for two reasons. The first is that 1999 was one of the most competitive years in the history of cinema. The second is that American Beauty is now regularly cited as a despicable, embarrassing, problematic movie.

The issue is that the movie sympathizes with the problems of a horny, self-interested, middle-aged predator who has come to be seen as having no problems whatsoever.