The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

“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.

That September, the Dallas Cowboys opened their NFL season by beating the Washington Redskins 23–10 on Monday Night Football, the start of a 13-3 campaign that would culminate with the first of three Super Bowl victories they’d amass in a dynastic four-year window. These events seem completely unrelated. They are not. The Cowboys’ success in the nineties was built on a trio of superstar skill players,[*] a dominating offensive line, and a defense that emphasized team speed.

Unimaginable

This connection is not revealing or gobsmacking. It’s arguably not even a coincidence, and perhaps not a significant one if it is. But it shows something about the imposed interconnectivity of living a public life: 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.

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.

On a campaign stop in California, Dole fell off the stage.

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,”

Citizens in other countries do not view the American people as particularly bright, and Americans themselves sometimes use words like sophisticated and elite as pejoratives.

The show was moderated by Tabitha Soren, a wonkish twenty-four-year-old journalist who’d also appeared in a 1987 Beastie Boys video.

Though the series would run for decades, season three was its sociocultural high point, punctuated by a gay Cuban-American house member, Pedro Zamora, suffering from HIV. Zamora dramatically died just a few hours after the airing of the season’s finale.

Clinton was raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a resort community already calling itself “Sin City” when Las Vegas was still an outpost for Mormon pioneers migrating to California.

A vivid regurgitation of the Lewinsky affair is both tawdry and unnecessary.

While working on a Saturday (as he often did), Clinton began a flirtation with intern Lewinsky that became more serious after Lewinsky playfully showed Clinton the strap of her thong underwear.

WHAT!

The concept of anonymous people being killed as a method of political cover was rarely bemoaned as a horrific, unimaginable act. Instead, it was seen as disenchanting evidence that this was how the world worked, and that nothing was too outrageous to be implausible, and that such dark motives couldn’t be proven even if they were true, and that the theory of life imitating art was now so entrenched in American psychology that it was banal to express surprise.

“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.”

Woof

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.

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.

Near the end of the Clinton administration, seven months after he’d been found not guilty by the U.S. Senate, a movie titled American Beauty was released to tremendous acclaim. It was, by most measurable standards, the premier film of 1999: It won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. It dominated the Golden Globes and the British Academy Film Awards. It made $350 million at the box office and was praised by every kind of critic, including Bill Clinton (who found it slightly “disturbing” but mostly “amazing”). 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.

ITS SO BAD

His personality was ideal, because it did not exist. He never said anything unexpected or salacious or outrageously arrogant—pumping his fist after a clutch putt was the comprehensive portrait of his emotional output.

CERTAIN events are impossible to understand the first time they are explained. Sometimes this is because the information is too complex to comprehend. But just as often, they’re impossible to understand because the information, despite being basic and unambiguous, does not cohere into a circumstance that’s rational enough to accept. The cognitive tendency is to reject the information and ask for clarification, even if the original anecdote was as straightforward as any anecdote can be. That tendency is why every person informed about what happened in the 1997 boxing rematch between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield inevitably responded with some version of the same question: “But what exactly do you mean when you say he bit him?”

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?

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.

Hello?

When Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968—and even when Prince recorded the song “1999” in 1982—the twenty-first century felt farther away than it actually was. Viewed from a distance, it promised a future in which everything would be different, and probably better. 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.

But the road at our heels was already gone. Forward was the only way out.

For the next ten months, the 2000 election represented the least stable political moment ever experienced by most American adults. It seemed like nothing crazier could ever possibly happen. But then something did, and a night that had once felt unforgettable became something acceptable to forget. The events of 9/11/2001 now dwarf the events of 11/7/2000. The memory of September 11 is deeper and the emotional toll was greater, and it temporarily made much of the previous ten years feel superficial (including the squabble over that electoral outcome).

But the lowbrow consensus was that the debates played to Bush’s advantage, mostly because Gore sighed too much.

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.

“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).

(at the time, the fact that Bush waited twenty-six days before invading Afghanistan was viewed as an exhibition of remarkable restraint).

The surgery was successful, but the patient died.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote,

I remember this guy

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).

A presidential election so close that the winner would never be known felt like the postmodern endcap to an era of postmodern psychosis.

There were protests during Bush’s inauguration, although fewer than if such an electoral event had occurred twenty years earlier or twenty years later.

Many of the protesters expressed continuing support for Nader, which meant they were protesting the election of a president they’d helped to elect.

George Bush had been president, and now another George Bush was president. There was another Bush in the lineage, Jeb, who was the governor of Florida. He’d probably run for president, too. Perhaps he’d face Hillary Clinton, now a New York senator unabashedly preparing for her own run at the White House. Maybe the president would just always be a Bush or a Clinton.

There’s no such thing as an average American, outside of an assembly of median statistics that apply to nobody in particular. No one is explicitly everyone.

In 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).

Hello?

Did much of the world hate America’s outsized influence on every other country? Absolutely. In October of 2000, two suicide bombers attacked the Navy destroyer USS Cole, killing seventeen soldiers while the ship refueled in Yemen. A terrorist organization called al-Qaeda was credited for the attack, punctuated by a recruitment videotape that surfaced the following summer. The tape showed al-Qaeda members celebrating the bombing of the Cole, including footage of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden reading a poem that appeared to praise the suicide mission. But this, it seemed, was the price of being the last remaining superpower: a random attack on military personnel, financed by a third-world country and occurring seven thousand miles east of Washington, DC.

The other story was another intern sexcapade, this time with a darker twist: 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. Certain qualities were reminiscent of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, though this was more of a classic true-crime scenario. Two days before her disappearance, Levy had called her aunt, a woman who served as her private confidante about Condit and knew all the details of their affair. Levy left a phone message that said she had “big news” to tell the aunt when she next saw her. What was the news? What did it imply?

There’s a propensity to paint the entire summer of 2001 as “the Before Time,” a naive period of easy innocence and lazy stupidity.

These were the final months of “normal journalism,” before the transformation.

The front of the Chicago Tribune addressed Mexican border control.

Why?

the 1975 disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa,

?

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.

Daniel Greenberg has now been my literary agent for twenty years. He will remain my agent for the next twenty years, unless one of us (or both of us) dies.