Come on – in 1999, did you really think it would end up like this?
I’m not even going to put it down to the corrosive effects of the Bush years, because I think that’s another symptom, not a cause. Things like “Mission Accomplished” and “Deficits don’t matter” and “Heck of a job Brownie” and “welcomed as liberators” didn’t give us American Idol, or an endless parade of missing white girls, or the onslaught of reality shows – think about this, ten years ago NBC prime time meant ER or The West Wing. Now it’s The Biggest Loser and Jay Leno at 10 PM five nights a week. Just look at the state of college football, for crying out loud – where crying out loud has in fact become the principal means of getting ahead in the world of the BCS.
I don’t know if it was just the shock of September 11, or some millennial sense of “we’re through with history and now we can sit back and coast” or what it was, but somewhere back there, we were transformed into a nation of pants-wetting fraidycats, with no more curiosity than it takes to sit on the couch sucking down straight high-fructose corn syrup and watching the latest episode of THE REAL OOOH SHINY!!! And what’s worse…somewhere along the line, a large chunk of American decided that was just fine, and wanting anything more was somehow weird, or dangerous, or wrong. And another chunk of people decided that those folks were somehow more real, more authentic, more to be valued, and went on validating them.
If you want an epitaph for the 00’s, here it is: this was the decade we let stupidity become a valid lifestyle choice.
Fuck. Is it midnight yet?