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It was perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional.
Nothing can ever be everything to everyone.
was a version of nothing so close to something it accidentally became everything.
The dominance of Nirvana’s paradoxical aesthetic ended the dominance of rock as an ideology. But it would take fifteen years for most people to detect this.
The Gulf War was a triumph of public relations. But it was forgotten almost instantly.
People change, and they tend to view past actions through the prism of their current self.
An egoless presidential candidate cannot exist.
AltaVista was like a reference librarian who’d dreamily point at a heap of books and say, “I know there is some stuff over there about bears.”
The media not only supplies us with memories of all significant events (political, sporting, catastrophic), but edits these memories, too.”
What he’s describing is a process familiar to most modern people: the sensation that the mediated version of an event will overwrite one’s own personal memory of the same experience, forcing the individual to reinterpret the way that memory sits within their own mind.
While it was easy to be crazy in the early nineties, it was difficult for like-minded crazy people to organize.
There was an ever-growing consensus that Earth was changing, and that this was somehow both the fault of humans and beyond human control.
The problem of commercialism is the motive, and that can be recognized in how the thing is packaged. This differs from a hatred of capitalism, where the problem is the thing.
Friends became the model for how to pinpoint generational concerns without directly recognizing that generations exist.
Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself.
He was his own worst-case scenario, so the only logical move was to put him in movies.
A president is the only celebrity remembered out of civic obligation.
John Kennedy was the first television president, and Ronald Reagan’s background in Hollywood allowed him to understand the power of TV in a way his predecessors had not. But Bill Clinton was the president who recognized that television was a medium intimately understood by everyone who had never experienced life without it.
