The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The night of the explosion, CNN reported that the bombing had all the signifiers of an attack from the Middle East. Network anchorwoman Connie Chung said, “A U.S. government source has told CBS News that it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.” The Wall Street Journal compared the event to the kind of car bombs normally seen in Beirut. There was, for roughly forty-eight hours, a shared incorrect assumption about why the Murrah building had been destroyed. Once McVeigh was apprehended, the explanation was reversed and the complexity evaporated. This wasn’t someone from Syria. This was someone from upstate New York. It wasn’t an international network of terrorists. It was one guy, helped by two other guys (Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, and Fortier’s involvement was so minor he spent less than nine years in prison). There was also no confusion over McVeigh’s purpose: When arrested, he was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Sic semper tyrannis,” the Latin phrase supposedly exclaimed by John Wilkes Booth after he’d assassinated Abraham Lincoln. McVeigh was candid about his reasons for blowing up the federal building, directly pointing to the 1992 government standoff at Ruby Ridge and the 1993 siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Because the media had been so wrong in their preliminary analysis, this wholesale correction somehow seemed extra reliable. McVeigh is the worst domestic terrorist in U.S. history, self-motivated by personal animosity toward t...

The incident at Ruby Ridge had involved a separatist family living in a cabin in rural Idaho. The family exchanged gunfire with federal marshals for 11 days, leading to the killing of three people and resulting in a wrongful death suit against the U.S. government that eventually paid over $3 million to the family. The situation in Waco was even more intense: A cult (or cultlike) organization was surrounded by federal authorities for 51 days in the spring of 1993, ending when the compound’s buildings caught fire and 76 people died inside.

The patriarch of the family at Ruby Ridge, Randy Weaver, was possibly a racist and definitely involved with illegal gun sales, yet most concede his wife and fourteen-year-old son should not have been killed. The entire siege was confusing and probably unnecessary. The leader of the Branch Davidians, David Koresh, claimed to be the messiah and was accused of pedophilia. The Davidians were stockpiling automatic weapons and believed the world was ending. But they weren’t endangering the local community, skeptics insist the blaze was intentionally started by the government,[*] and some of the survivors still support and defend Koresh (who shot himself during the incineration).

There was evidence that Koresh was a raving madman and there was evidence that he was merely eccentric. There was strong evidence that the compound was a dystopia, but some weak evidence that it was a utopia. There was justification for believing what the federal agents said and justification for questioning their account. By constantly providing people with more and more conflicting data within an essentially static situation, it was possible for the audience to invent whatever narrative they desired. For someone like McVeigh, a radicalized loner naturally sympathetic to the Branch Davidians’ outlook, the ATF’s April 19 attack on the compound was video proof of a political actuality he’d already internalized: He watched tanks being driven through the walls of compound residences while a loudspeaker repeatedly broadcast the phrase “This is not an assault. This is not an assault.” Even in 1993, that level of ironic cognitive dissonance was too much. McVeigh watched the buildings in Waco burn, live on his television, operating from the position that the people inside were innocent. It perpetuated his belief that the loss of innocent lives was acceptable collateral damage in a war he was fighting alone, inside his own mind. It was possible for him to believe this, because it had become possible for anyone to believe anything. It had been this way for a while.

Thomas, then forty-three, was nominated by George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the court. The nomination wasn’t thrilling to progressives (who saw Thomas as an anti–affirmative action reactionary) or hard-right conservatives (who viewed his nomination as a kind of tokenism, since the only Black justice in history was being replaced by a candidate whose lone similarity was the color of his skin). Things got wild when the FBI interviewed University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, a woman who had worked for Thomas during the early 1980s. Hill said Thomas had sexually harassed her. The anecdotes she provided were impossible to verify but highly detailed and too atypical to be total fabrications. When eventually described and broadcast on live television, those details morphed into a kind of prurient litmus test that was less about Thomas’s qualifications and more about how people wanted the world of work to be.

Hill and Thomas both testified before fourteen senators to express and deny the accusations of harassment. The committee chairman was Delaware senator Joe Biden. Thomas spoke first, Hill spoke second, and then Thomas spoke again. The content of these testimonials—and especially Thomas’s repudiation of what Hill had said—now seems outrageous. But in 1991, the most outrageous aspect was that these things were being talked about at all. Thomas was more emotional than Hill. He denied everything and referred to himself as “a victim of this process,” explaining how his life and reputation had been destroyed by Hill’s accusations (which he said were especially hurtful because Hill “was a person I considered a friend” who had “never raised any hint that she was uncomfortable with me”). Throughout his testimony, he used the awkward phrase “sex harassment” instead of “sexual harassment,” which (either intentionally or accidentally) reiterated the fact that the relationship between Hill and Thomas was never physical. He also proposed a clever and persuasive gambit: Thomas said he would no longer put up with the humiliation of having his life dissected in public, and that the Senate should just confirm him or not confirm him, almost as if he no longer cared about the job itself. “I never asked to be nominated,” he said. “It was an honor. Little did I know the price, but it was too high.”

“This is a circus,” Thomas said. “This is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a Black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and is a message that, unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”

The contemporary explanation for why this happened is always simple: Society is a sexist patriarchy. But that response works from a modern mind-set, where it’s unthinkable to imagine a professional man making unwanted jokes about pubic hair without being seen as a sexual harasser. Such thinking was not always universal. The very first sexual harassment case in U.S. history (under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) had happened just fifteen years before this hearing. For many Americans, the Anita Hill allegations were the first time they had considered the possibility that sexual harassment could exist without a direct demand for sexual activity (which is why Thomas’s use of the specific phrase “sex harassment” was so willfully misleading).

Simpson had no alibi as to where he was on the night of the slayings, which wouldn’t seem so troubling had he not later published a book titled If I Did It, where Simpson painstakingly described his obsession with Brown and inexplicably detailed how he would have “hypothetically” murdered Brown and Goldman, if that had been his desire. His hypothetical was remarkably similar to how the murders actually occurred. O. J. Simpson is perhaps the only person who has ever written a memoir about how he would have killed people he incessantly claimed not to have killed. There are almost no scenarios that could make Simpson appear guiltier than he actually does, outside of O.J. wearing a body camera while performing the decapitation.

Within the nonfictional fiction of this narrative, Simpson was the antihero in an extended metaphor about the meaning of justice. It was a math equation: The fact that he stabbed two people to death had to be weighed against the history of racism in America. O.J. often appeared to be a very guilty man who had nonetheless been framed by the Los Angeles Police Department. He was a Black superstar who’d spent most of his career marketing himself as a man who transcended race, only to have race become the foundation of his defense.

Like a Russian novel where the subtext dwarfed the plot, one could extrapolate highbrow concepts that were only tangentially connected to the case: the economics of justice, the deep-rooted prejudice against interracial relationships, an assertion that the high-profile exoneration of a guilty Black celebrity could serve as symbolic reparation for three hundred years of oppression. Yet there were also embarrassing moments of manufactured theatrics: When the prosecution (stupidly) forced Simpson to try on a glove found at the scene of the murder, Simpson histrionically behaved as if the glove were several sizes too small. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” argued his attorney. The fate of a man accused of two homicides was salvaged by a catchphrase. The world had become RoboCop.

Five days after the murders, on the Friday morning of June 17, 1994, Simpson was asked to surrender to authorities. Instead, he disappeared. That afternoon, his attorney, Robert Kardashian, read a letter the still-missing Simpson had left behind. Written in the past tense, it had all the signifiers of a suicide note (“I’ve had a great life,” Simpson wrote. “Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person”). For almost an hour, people wondered whether it was only a matter of time before his corpse would be found. But then he reappeared, very much alive, holding a gun to his head in the backseat of a white Ford Bronco on I-405, chauffeured by a former teammate named Al Cowlings (later identified as O.J.’s closest friend). The freeway was cleared of westbound traffic as a fleet of police cruisers and multiple news helicopters followed the Bronco in a low-speed chase (Cowlings rarely pushed beyond forty miles per hour). After ninety minutes on the road, the vehicle finally returned to Simpson’s residence just before eight p.m. Pacific Time. Less than an hour after that, Simpson gave himself up to the police. Items found inside the Bronco included $9,000 in cash and a fake mustache and goatee.

Two people had been brutally killed by a familiar celebrity. The celebrity killer was fleeing law enforcement in the most public way possible. There was a real chance he might kill himself in front of 95 million people. None of this, however, was terrifying. It was merely “disturbing,” and mostly because the most interested parties did not seem disturbed at all. The detail always noted in remembrances of the Bronco chase is the throngs of bystanders cheering for Simpson as the car rolled down the freeway, congregating on overpasses and holding makeshift cardboard signs proclaiming, “The Juice Is Loose.”

In that most critical scene from The Matrix, Morpheus and Neo are having their revelatory conversation inside a computer network. They are inside the network so that Morpheus can show Neo the difference between the false reality he once believed and the hard reality he must now accept. But to demonstrate that difference, Morpheus does not use a computer monitor or a hologram or an astral projection. He uses a television. And it’s not some futuristic flat-screen television—it’s a Radiola console model from the 1950s, produced in Australia. This is a small detail with no importance to the plot, but it’s telling. Neo is a cybercriminal who lives on the internet. Computers are his life. Yet his knee-jerk mental conception of human existence is still an analog box connected to nothing, broadcasting two-dimensional images he cannot manipulate. The esoteric philosophy of The Matrix made sense to people not because audiences were starting to understand the newness of the internet. It made sense to people because it was an exaggerated depiction of a televised hyperreality that had been building upon itself for the previous fifty years.

The trust people instilled in Greenspan derived from the belief that emotion played no role in his data-driven decision-making. The foundation of his ideology was initially grounded in two philosophies: (a) the notion that only verifiable facts are worthy of consideration, and (b) Ayn Rand’s Objectivist theory, promoting the idea that society would be better served if everyone always acted in their own self-interest.

Winfrey’s rise to prominence was rapid and astonishing. It starts in 1984, when Winfrey becomes a local news host in Chicago. By 1986, she has her own show, originally seen as an alternative to The Phil Donahue Show (the long-running chat program that essentially created the format). Oprah overtakes Donahue’s ratings in a matter of months. By 1993, she’s the genre’s powerbroker, asking Michael Jackson if he’s a virgin in front of a television audience of 90 million (his response: “I’m a gentleman”). By 1995, her net worth is $340 million and she’s surrounded by imitators, none of whom can compete. In 1996, she does an episode about mad cow disease and single-handedly craters the price of beef. That same year, Winfrey starts a book club, and her selections shape the literary landscape for a decade (novelist Jonathan Franzen is thrown into controversy simply by declining to go on her TV show, a decision his detractors view as ungrateful and condescending). In 2000, she creates her own monthly magazine and appears on every cover for twenty consecutive years.

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. A 1997 story about Oprah in U.S. News & World Report was literally headlined “A Woman’s Woman.” “With America’s general prosperity, with relative calm in the rest of the world, has come the option of self-concern,” wrote Debra Dickerson. “Women love Oprah because she provides the outlet. Mean people hurt her feelings, as they do others’. Like other women, she hates being fat. The difference between Oprah and many others is that she says so—and validates ordinary women who are quietly angry and unhappy for the same reasons. She validates them, scolds them, worries about them, and shares her love with them, and they don’t begrudge her the millions she makes off them.”

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. In 1990, Shore was a strange-looking, five-foot-seven, twenty-two-year-old Jewish jokester. He was the son of Mitzi Shore, the owner of a popular and influential club on the Sunset Strip called the Comedy Store.[*] That upbringing jump-started his career, as did his close relationship with established stand-up star Sam Kinison. But the core of Shore’s success was a product of his own creativity. He was committed to a character of his own design: “the Weasel,” which he pronounced as “the WEEEEZ-allll.” The Weasel persona was a lowbrow combination of traits that did not naturally intersect: A non-surfing surfer who was also a lecherous nerd. A rich kid who was always broke. A charming loser who partied with rock stars but wasn’t dangerous or messianic. He presented himself as much younger than he actually was and invented his own lexicon, a halting synthesis of 1980s Valley Girl slang and sexist West Coast stoner speak (women were “nugs,” breasts were “cones,” food was “grindage”). His national breakthrough was as an MTV on-air personality, first as a spring break correspondent and then as the host of his own MTV show, Totally Pauly. Shore’s 1991 comedy album was called The Future of America, and the title was the hook—this overconfident high school dropout, with his indecipherable vocabul...

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. Holding on to anger toward a former president is like remaining angry with someone who wronged you in high school. It seems a little pathetic and a little deranged. Which is why the legacy of Bill Clinton is so difficult to elucidate to those who missed his tenure: He’s the rare example of a polarizing ex-president who saw the anger against him fade, only to have it resurface and spike upward within his own lifetime, often for the same reasons that made people like him originally.

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. If, like so many other people, Clinton is remembered for a collection of choices that aggregate into one overall portrait, it will be for his relationship with Lewinsky and the numerous other women who accused him of pursuing unwanted (or consensual-but-extramarital) sexual encounters, a number stretching into the double digits. Either prospect makes him an irreconcilable villain among young people (and particularly young women) who have little or no memory of Clinton’s time in office. It’s an impossible thing to explain, way beyond the cinematic stardom of Pauly Shore: How could a married forty-nine-year-old “liberal” president (a) chronically seduce an unpaid subordinate less than half his age, (b) receive nonreciprocal oral sex inside the Oval Office, (c) get caught, (d) lie about it, (e) never directly apologize to the involved woman, and (f) still experience his highest presidential approval rating immediately after being impeached for lying under oath about the nature of that sexual relationship? 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. This, without question, is the reason Clinton will never be embraced by those who barely remember his presence.

Clinton, more than any other national political force, adopted neoliberalism as his central governing principle. His version of neoliberalism—the application of market-driven solutions to traditional Democratic concerns, like poverty and job creation—can be traced to Charles Peters, author of a 1982 essay titled “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto.” The essay’s opening sentence is a concise description of Clinton’s worldview: “If neoconservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices.”

“What began as a new form of intellectual authority, rooted in a devoutly apolitical worldview,” critic (and former Hillary Clinton speechwriter) Stephen Metcalf wrote in 2017, “nudged easily into an ultra-reactionary politics.” 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). For this, Clinton is disparaged, and the fact that he embraced centrism by design pushes that dislike toward hatred.

It’s always framed as surprising, for example, that Hillary Clinton (then Hillary Rodham) was a staff attorney during the Watergate impeachment hearings in 1974, and then married a man the following year who himself would be impeached roughly twenty-five years later. “You can’t make my life up,” Hillary would later joke. The connection seems like amazing trivia. But perhaps it explains the attraction between a woman academically intrigued by high-stakes political chess and a man who intuitively understood the dangerous contradiction between his growing political ambition and his own human weakness. Here is Bill Clinton writing about himself: I am a living paradox—deeply religious yet not as convinced of my exact beliefs as I ought to be; wanting responsibility yet shirking it; loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity. . . . I detest selfishness, but see it in the mirror every day. . . . I view those, some of whom are very dear to me, who have never learned how to live. I desire and struggle to be different from them, but often am almost an exact likeness. . . . I, in my attempts to be honest, will not be the hypocrite I hate, and will own up to their ominous presence in this boy, endeavoring in such earnest to be a man. This passage can be found in Clinton’s 2004 autobiography My Life, but that’s not when he wrote it. He wrote it as a high school junior as an assignment for English class, later admitting he did not fully understand what he was writing or what...

What Morris spearheaded was a kind of political polling that did not have an overt relationship to politics. The polling firm PSB Insights[*] was enlisted to conduct what they called a “neuropersonality poll” on potential voters. The intent was to create a psychological profile based not on a respondent’s ideology, but on their metaphysical desires. What TV shows did they watch? What did they worry about? Did they like to dance? What day-to-day problems felt beyond their control? The whole idea was to isolate exactly what an individual wanted, regardless of the magnitude or societal import. That was step one. The second step was to disregard the wants and desires of any poll respondent who exhibited a preexisting opinion on who they would vote for. There was no value in considering the thoughts of anyone who was already for them or already against them. The only voters who mattered were undecided swing voters. The result was a new kind of “small ball” platform that confounded Clinton’s cabinet. 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: support for school uniform policies, restrictions on tobacco, and the insertion of V-chip technology into televisions to stop kids from accessing pornography. Nothing was left to chance. The phrase “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century” became the new campaign motto when it polled at 61 percent, out...

The 1980s had been the penultimate step in an evolution happening throughout the twentieth century, increasing in speed after the Second World War. There was now complete integration between the notion of living a normal life and the ubiquity of how the larger culture was packaged and presented by the media. 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? How was it possible to see politics as separate from entertainment if the defining president of their adolescence had started his career as an actor? 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. Dick Morris helped Clinton realize this intellectually. But Clinton’s natural inclination needed no instruction. He understood what people wanted, and not just in a material sense. His enemies labeled him Slick Willy, as if Clinton were constantly trying to unload a used Buick. What he was really selling was a less tangible commodity: the signifiers of empathy. Yes, he was a kind of salesman, because that’s what postmodernity required.

When impressionists (and especially lazy impressionists) delivered their comedic interpretation of Clinton, the phrase they always used was “I feel your pain,” expressed with a sympathetic Southern drawl. It became the Clintonian trademark, even though the origin of the phrase is unrelated to how it came to define him. It appears that Clinton literally said “I feel your pain” only once, at a fundraiser in the spring of 1992, angrily responding to an AIDS activist named Bob Rafsky[*] who accused Clinton of not caring enough about the AIDS crisis. Clinton says these four words loudly and emphatically, a little mad at the guy for questioning the sincerity of his sentiments. It’s strange that people would later see this phrase as Clinton feigning sympathy he never feigned, but that’s the nature of memory.

It was four days after the OKC tragedy when Clinton unleashed the best nine minutes of his presidency. The word-for-word content of the address he gave at the memorial prayer service is pretty good, but that’s not the important part; on the page, the speech he delivered was not that different from the speech that was expected. The 914 words were a collaboration composed by multiple writers, much of which was drafted and fine-tuned on the helicopter ride from DC to Oklahoma City. A phrase like “One thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil” does not scan as unscripted material. But the brilliance was in the way the words were said. Here was a guy reading carefully crafted sentences off a piece of paper, yet pausing and changing tempo and behaving as though the speech were being invented as he went along. And he was not doing this to trick anyone—it’s not like he was trying to create the false impression of someone speaking extemporaneously. He was not. He was in no way hiding the fact that the speech was directly in front of him or that this was a public performance. The audience knew exactly what was happening.

“This is our first black president,” it was written of Bill Clinton. “Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food loving boy from Arkansas.” It now seems unfathomable that such sentiments were ever expressed nonsarcastically about any white person, Clinton or otherwise. But they were indeed expressed, in 1998, only one decade before an actual Black president was elected in a landslide. And they were expressed by Black Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and they were published in The New Yorker, and they were not perceived as controversial or particularly contrarian. Things of this nature were often written about Clinton, and they cannot be unwritten. The only way to escape this, it seems, is to write over these things and hope no once notices.

Clinton made mistakes. As years have passed and society has shifted, those mistakes seem worse and worse. There’s growing evidence that his overall legacy will be closer to the portrait painted by Gingrich, radio host Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative critics widely viewed as obsessive and unfair for most of the nineties. One can imagine a not-so-distant future when an indoctrinated young progressive will learn about Clinton and wonder how and why this man was twice elected president. Yet when Clinton was the president, the country seemed good, economically and otherwise. He was clever and competent. He loved the job and the responsibilities that came with it. Clinton instinctually reflected the ambivalence of the era in an optimistic way. Relative to the rest of the twentieth century, the nineties were a good time to be president, and he was a good president for good times.

American Beauty is hated for what it is now assumed to symbolize and justify, which only matters because it was well-made and well-acted. Had it simply been boring, no one would care. Its technical achievements make it worse, and it’s now exceedingly rare to find new considerations of the film that aren’t mostly (or exclusively) negative. American Beauty centers on the life of Lester Burnham, a man who hates that life. Burnham is portrayed by Kevin Spacey, whose performance won the Oscar for Best Actor. Spacey was considered the finest “serious” actor among mainstream male stars, having already won an Academy Award for his supporting role in 1995’s The Usual Suspects. Two decades later, Spacey would be accused of sexual assault by multiple parties. Those accusations would further denigrate the status of American Beauty, particularly since the Burnham character was sexually obsessed with a sixteen-year-old girl and one of Spacey’s real-life accusers, actor Anthony Rapp, alleged that the assault took place when Rapp was fourteen. But by the time that scandal surfaced, the critical damage to American Beauty had already occurred. The issue is not with Spacey’s ability or performance. 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. Lester Burnham lives in a beautiful suburban home and holds a high-paying magazine job he doesn’t enjoy, so he gets fired on purpose...

The retroactive rejection of American Beauty has nothing to do with art. It’s a rejection of what could reasonably be classified as a problem in 1999. This, somewhat hilariously, is also why it was so acclaimed. When it was new, American Beauty seemed to address uncomfortable domestic conflicts other movies were unwilling to confront. Lester’s midlife crisis was viewed as a multifaceted existential concern. There was a sense his character pursued a dream many men silently desired. The modern reading is that Burnham’s behavior is the juvenile manifestation of unearned privilege. Bening’s career-driven character has an extramarital affair and is portrayed as shrewish and cold. The modern reading is that this depiction is sexist and that her character is heroic. Lester’s infatuation with the teenager is presented in the film as uncomfortable and tragically comic. It now seems criminal, disgusting, and ineligible for use as a comedic plot point. The fact that Burnham quits a lucrative white-collar job to happily work the drive-through window at a fast-food restaurant seems oblivious and insulting to the realities of class struggle. Almost every key point in American Beauty—dissatisfaction with a traditional livelihood, the invisible loneliness of a sexless marriage, the shame of homosexuality, the longing for one’s past, even the difficulty of buying pot—have come to represent pathetic dilemmas younger audiences consider opulent micro-concerns. Modern people hate American Beau...

In the third round of the decade’s most anticipated heavyweight fight, Mike Tyson—desperate, infuriated, and realizing he was going to lose—leaned into Evander Holyfield during a clinch and bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s right ear. Holyfield hopped around in anguish as blood poured down his neck, the remnants of his detached cartilage still lying on the canvas. The action was not clouded in mystery: Millions of people, including fight referee Mills Lane, had plainly seen Holyfield’s ear mutilated by Tyson’s teeth. But the attempt to gnaw an opponent’s flesh was so outside what could reasonably be expected from a professional boxing match that there was a temporary attempt to treat the attack like an accidental infraction. Tyson was penalized two points and the fight resumed. Almost immediately, Tyson tried to chomp Holyfield again, and this time the referee did not intercede at all. At the end of the round, it was concluded that Tyson was now (quite obviously) trying to bite Holyfield on purpose, and Tyson was disqualified. Chaos erupted as the disqualified Tyson tried to rush across the ring and attack Holyfield and/or anyone who happened to be standing in the general vicinity of his corner. Police stormed the ring, and the disqualification was not officially announced to the audience for almost half an hour.

The nineties were a terrible time for Mike Tyson, which is an odd thing to say about someone whose hobby was purchasing Bengal tigers.

Y2K was a catastrophe that never happened, prompting many to conclude it was a catastrophe that had never been possible to begin with. It does, in hindsight, seem like the manifestation of a perpetual hysteria machine—a digital doomsday with a specific date and time, perfectly designed for those who longed for an apocalypse they could mark on the calendar. 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? That question is harder. Throughout 1999, the understanding of Y2K was a little like the understanding of where babies come from: Everyone knew the basic principle, but almost no one seemed to grasp how that principle translated into process. 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?

The mechanical explanation for how this would obliterate the grid was too complicated to explain, so journalists focused instead on the theoretical consequences: Power outrages would be rampant, terminating the lives of hospital patients on life support. Gas pumps and ATM cards wouldn’t work, eliciting panic. Airline navigation systems might go haywire. Nuclear missiles could accidentally launch. A 1997 Newsweek story, “The Day the World Shuts Down,” quoted a data expert who feared “on Jan. 1, 2000, a lot of elevators could be dropping to the bottom of buildings.” A Vanity Fair article from January of 1999 was headlined “The Y2K Nightmare” and described “a looming disaster with an immovable deadline that will touch the entire world.” President Clinton signed an executive order to create the Council on Year 2000 Conversion, a group tasked with updating the federal government’s bank of 7,336 computers at a cost of $8.5 billion. The Fed had to print more money because people started hoarding cash. The essence of the problem had the qualities of 1950s science fiction: The smallest possible detail, overlooked by technologists unaware of their godlike power, would instantaneously return a futuristic society to the Stone Age.

A Gallup poll conducted in December of ’99 found that Y2K fears were paradoxically decreasing as the doomsday date grew closer. Bill Gates declared the glitch would only be an inconvenience, and that became the prevalent forecast. Most Y2K journalism, however, emphasized the handful of people who really, really believed the consequences would be devastating. An Associated Press story out of Detroit indicated that gun sales were surging. A company called Crown Point, which sold premade military-style meals for survivalists, claimed a 500 percent uptick in business. There was supposedly a spike in the sale of honey, a food that doesn’t require refrigeration and can be consumed in creative ways.[*] A Canadian named Bruce Beach, who’d built a nuclear fallout shelter north of Toronto by burying forty-two school buses underground in the early 1980s, announced that fifty people could join him in subterranean safety if everything collapsed into chaos. A common profile in countless regional newspapers would tell the story of some local citizen who’d built a backyard bunker, purchased a generator, and awaited the day when Earth would stand still. These alarmists were the fringe exceptions, but they were not exaggerations: In Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir Educated, the author describes her separatist father’s rapturous preparations for the impending secular apocalypse.

In The Nation, a late September essay by columnist Eric Alterman was titled “Bush or Gore: Does It Matter?” Alterman’s answer was yes, based on the core argument that “the Republican Party, at this moment in history, is politically and ideologically dedicated to the destruction of the very foundations of social solidarity in this country.” But even in this emphatically pro-Gore essay, published in a shrilly liberal publication, every attempt at casting the candidates as different was littered with reminders that most people thought they were alike. “Gore . . . is first and foremost a pragmatic politician who will betray progressive hopes whenever it suits his larger purposes. The corporate-friendly Vice President has been nowhere near as strong as he claims on environmental issues. . . . Like Clinton, Gore will continue to back wasteful increases in military spending and the expansion of the failed bipartisan drug war in Colombia. On civil liberties, he will most likely prove just as insensitive, sacrificing important privacy rights to fight exaggerated threats from terrorism and drug trafficking. On trade and globalization issues, a Democratic President can turn out to be even worse than a Republican one.” In 2000, this qualified as an endorsement.

Bush was bad in all three debates, rarely able to express cogent thoughts on policy. But the lowbrow consensus was that the debates played to Bush’s advantage, mostly because Gore sighed too much. His ostentatious sighing and histrionic grimaces, intended to puncture Bush’s inanity, mostly made Gore seem like a prick. His demeanor was condescending, his body language was inelegant, and it was (apparently) better to be uninformed than annoying. This conclusion invented a political perspective that’s become omnipresent in any two-person race but still felt original in 2000: Again and again, Bush was described as the candidate voters “would rather have a beer with.”

The logic here is weak and arguably nonexistent: Bush had quit drinking in 1986. He’d actually been charged with driving under the influence as a thirty-year-old—he was stopped by police after a hard night of boozing with an Australian tennis pro in a Kennebunkport bar. But that happened in 1976, so the penalty was a paltry $150 fine. The story of his old arrest did not leak until the election was one week away, and some thought the timing of the story might damage his reputation and hurt his chances. It did not.[*] It may, in fact, have validated the assessment that getting drunk with George Bush would be more fun than getting drunk with Al Gore. The beer company Sam Adams even commissioned the Roper Starch research firm to conduct a national poll to see which candidate Americans preferred to drink with. The results were actually closer than the general assumption—Bush won 40 to 37 (with 23 percent undecided[*]). But the raw numbers were not what mattered. What mattered was the validation of the question itself. Why not vote on the basis of low-impact likability? What would be the consequences of accidentally picking the wrong guy? There were problems in America, but they were the regular problems. They were the problems that would always be problems, regardless of who lived in the White House. Some people were unemployed, but overall unemployment was at a thirty-year low. People complained about crime, but violent crime and property crime were down from the year before. ...

Prior to 1999, Nader’s reputation was about as positive as any left-leaning national figure could hope for. Defining his worldview as “moral empiricism,” he spent most of his public life as the nation’s highest-profile consumer activist, particularly focused on government transparency, the environment, and automobile safety. His 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, was the catalyst for the widespread adoption of seat belt laws. Nader’s expressed view on almost everything was heartfelt, intransigent, and nonsymbolic. “Every time I see something terrible,” he said as a forty-nine-year-old in 1983, “I see it at age nineteen.” He seemingly never had a romantic relationship,[*] and he claimed to live off $25,000 a year. For Nader, and especially for the people who loved him, self-righteousness was an admirable quality.

In 1998, former pro wrestler Jesse “the Body” Ventura ran for governor of Minnesota, representing the Reform Party. For much of the campaign, he polled at around 10 percent. But Ventura won that election and became the hieroglyph of political unpredictability. He supported Nader and assaulted the concept of not voting for someone based on a low likelihood of success. “To me,” said Ventura, “a wasted vote is not voting your heart and conscience.” In theory, this is true. In practice, Ventura was wrong. 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).

Prior to election night, the race between Bush and Gore was a cosplay of how people thought about political culture in general: The candidates are different (but not really), the outcome matters (but not that much), and the winner will be either the affable guy we want to have a beer with or the uptight guy who seems to know what he’s talking about (and it will work either way, probably). At the time, polling suggested 40 percent of Democrats and Republicans had a “favorable and warm” opinion about members of the opposing party. It was easy to think about politics as something that could be argued over without much risk, because the final outcome would always be some version of a compromise. Government was contentious, but also secure; it was unpredictable, but the volatility always drifted toward equilibrium. If it was impossible to know who won the presidential election (which was the case), and if there was no national panic over the dispute (which there was not), and if a recount was possible (which it always is), it seemed senseless that the judicial branch would stop that recount from happening. And if the Supreme Court did stop a recount from happening, it was assumed the court’s explanations would be academic and contradictory and certainly not based on partisanship. Knowing who’s the president is a core component of American democracy. Had the Supreme Court’s reasoning emerged from some kind of shared constitutional interpretation, the vote would have been 9–0 or ...

1997, 60 Minutes interviewed former Russian Security Council secretary Aleksandr Lebed’, who admitted that Russia could not account for eighty of its Cold War “suitcase bombs” (small nuclear weapons that could be deployed by one person, potentially acting alone). But the Russian government had dismissed his claims, and that report was now more than three years old, and every day that a suitcase bomb didn’t detonate made the possibility of such a crisis a little less plausible.

On May 1, a twenty-four-year-old Washington, DC, woman named Chandra Levy inexplicably vanished (she’d been interning with the Federal Bureau of Prisons). Her neighbors claimed to have heard a scream coming from her apartment building at four thirty a.m. Levy’s father told police he believed Chandra had been having an affair with Gary Condit, a fifty-three-year-old married congressman who happened to represent the region of California where Levy’s parents lived. Condit unconvincingly denied the affair and was never officially connected to the disappearance, but their secret relationship was the center of the story.

The New York Times was chucked on doorsteps the following morning. There were disparate stories on page A1—the supply of stem cells, a controversy over school dress codes, the competitive morning TV market, and five others. 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.