When Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein launched their new sketch show in January of 2011, they teased it with a music video on YouTube with the clever hook of “The dream of the ’90s is alive in Portland.” Which was an apt tagline for a town that I once described as “what if my (gifted alternative magnet) high school was its own city”. And when you think about it – grunge and flannel and alternative music back when that label meant anything and the first Dr Martens company store in America – you could almost sort of make a case that it was true.
I’ve actually been vulnerable lately to a certain measure of my own 90s nostalgia, although it’s important to distinguish between the late 1990s go-go technology-boom era and the early half of the decade. And that early part of the decade really felt different from what had come before. The Berlin Wall was down, the Cold War was done, the Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas Day 1991- the principal motive force in our politics and foreign affairs was not part of the picture anymore. We won the war, more or less, and there was a very real sense that the “peace dividend” – in budget terms, sure, but also in terms of mindshare and human effort – could be turned toward bigger and better things. And then, to get a couple of mid-forty-something New South Democrats as a Presidential ticket – it felt like a generational shift, because it was. Things were going to change, we could reinvent government, we could preserve the environment, we could reduce the budget deficit, we could get health care for everyone, we could build the Information Superhighway. Basically, the new Jerusalem.
And of course, all that took exactly two years to fall apart. Just like the Millenials a couple of decades later, Gen X got its Messiah and watched him run smack into a stone wall of unrelenting opposition. At least Obama only saw one house of Congress lost – although you could argue that the Democrats lost control of the Senate once they dropped below 60 seats, given the Republican filibuster-everything approach. More to the point, the “Contract With America” GOP is today’s GOP, which took a bow for the first time with Newt Gingrich as its forward sergeant and Rush Limbaugh as its philosophical lodestar. Fast forward eighteen years, and Newt is running for President while Rush is still the guiding light of conservatism.
That’s really when it happened, if you think about it. That’s when people started to try to turn back the clock. Bill Clinton won Georgia and Louisiana, for crying out loud – can you imagine any Deep South state voting for ANY Democrat now, let alone one of the wrong color? Can you fathom Bush the Elder or Bob Dole running on the notion that paying for birth control was an undue religious burden on employers?
The notion of dreams is something that comes up in William Gibson’s books quite frequently. He thinks that certain subcultures – bohemians, for instance, or the cosplayers of Akhibara and Harajuku – are how our society dreams. I suppose you could point at the breakthroughs of alternative culture in the US – the early 90s or the late 60s or even the Beat age of the Fifties – as a species of dreaming, an expression of the collective subconscious. And we all know what happens when that sort of thing runs up against the kind of people who experience pant-shitting terror at the thought that someone might be different.
What’s amazing, though, is that the changes get more incremental every time. The boomers talk up the 1960s, but let’s face it, the notion of overturning Jim Crow and ending segregation and mounting a mass popular protest against an ongoing foreign conflict – that’s a pretty heavy lift, even before taking into account Medicare and the War On Poverty and the race to the moon and ending pollution and the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion and birth control. Then in the 1990s, the dream was – health care for all and open the Internet and stop the hole in the ozone layer. Now, the dream is get more people able to buy insurance and maybe do something to slow down carbon emissions – one side keeps scaling down its ambitions and running to stand still while the other hauls the boundary of plausibility ever further to the right, to the point that John Birch Society talking points from the 1960s are now part of regular Republican discourse.
I guess, politically speaking, that’s what I keep hoping we’ll wind up with – something technocratic, wonk-friendly, something less tribal and not rooted in whipping up redneckery. I suppose in twenty years or so, if the country survives that long, everyone who has segregation as living memory will be dead and the rest of us might be able to shift a bit, especially if “white” is a plurality rather than a majority. We just have to be able to hold out until then and avoid completely reverting to the United States of Alabama in the meantime.
Thing is, though, I’d love another crack at 1993. Young, smart, charismatic leadership, and the idea that brains and creativity and fresh thinking might do some good at breaking through the calcified nonsense that plagues our existing politics. And ideally, something that might shut down the fucking punditocracy and the cable-news blowhards and put an end to government-by-the-conventional-wisdom-of-the-green-room-at-Meet-the-Press.
I’d probably have better luck waiting for a switch to parliamentary government. After all, we’ve got the parliamentary politics – sort of.