| Tuesday, March 23, 2004 |
13:23 - 90s Post-Mortem
http://www.mdcbowen.org/cobb/archives/001755.html
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Michael Bowen has a long, crunchy analysis of what The Nineties were all about. Very well worth reading.
Missing from the things he lists: fascination with any particular foreign entity (none of the 80s' obsessions with Japan or Australia); religion (the 90s were the time when religion officially became something you didn't discuss in polite company); war (the 90s were our vacation from worrying about global politics, and even things like Kosovo we couldn't get excited about). It was a very introverted decade, one where we spent time streamlining our lives, discovering new things to do with our free time and new ways to attain more of it (which usually ended up in our having less of it, but more money). It was the decade when politics became personal, when the President became just One of the Guys, in a ballcap, eating pork rinds on the couch, who just happened to run a country in his spare time-- and whose personal life thus became the whole country's business. America emerged from the 90s on September 10, 2001 a totally different nation from when it left the Reagan era under the auspices of Alternative Rock and Wayne's World. In some ways we'd grown up; in others, we'd grown down.
Hopefully we're done with that phase. Nowadays it's time to get down to business.
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Brian Tiemann
