Not a moment too soon for end of 1990s

Post tenebras, lux.

--- Anon

By ROSS MACKENZIE

In all the noise about the closing millennium, century and year, let's not forget the '90s --- the grenade in the skivvies that is (or was) the departing decade.

In America it ended the dread Decade of Greed and segued into the Decade of Conspicuous Consumption --- ending with just about everyone getting high on free-market stress.

It quickly became a decade of megamergers and downsizings and financial fandangos. Of the pity ethic, compassion --- and compassion fatigue. Of the frenetic immediacy of the world, and the search for the eternal buzz.

The remembering mind recalls these people and events from the 1990s' national and international stages.

THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM --- an astounding bloodless revolution against the planet's bloodiest system of terror and power. America -- - and liberty --- won the war for the modern world, and established a new order of the ages.

Hubble trouble, and persisting trouble with Mars probes. AIDS. Milli Vanilli and first dog Millie --- and first dog Buddy neutered. Desert Storm. The Frankensteining of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Caller ID. Ethnic cleansing. Tailhook. Funky license plates. John Glenn on latrine duty aloft.

The Pacific Rim, the Middle East (ever the Middle East), and the Balkans (ever the Balkans). Lawrence Douglas Wilder the first, and only, elected black governor. William Jefferson Clinton the first elected president ever impeached.

HOOTER GUYS. The tobacco settlement. NAFTA. HMOs and no MSAs. War and taxes (man's constant companions), and no flat tax. The Wonderbra. Fire in Windsor Castle, and the House of Windsor aflame. All those Kennedys. Dolly, Polly, Molly and Gene. Excrement as art.

Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, Iraq. Sudan and Afghanistan. Northern Ireland. The Canal. Yellow ribbons. "No controlling legal authority" and global warming --- maybe. Barney, Nintendo, and Teletubbies. "Braveheart," "Schindler's List," "The Lion King," "Saving Private Ryan," and "Shakespeare in Love." The flight from serious reading and serious books.

Guns. Date rape. The Chunnel and the Pentium chip. Day care and home-ed. Ebonics. The Internet and the World Wide Web. RU-486. Hillary seancing with Eleanor's ghost, and seeing things (not least "a vast right-wing conspiracy"). Viagra and Vigraines. The Unabomber. The Macarena.

NINETIES' EVENTS AND PEOPLE, the tangible and the in-. Trends and themes ...

"The vision thing" --- and vision's lamentable lack.

The decade's singular (abiding?) achievement was the denial of Orwell's observation that "if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face --- forever."

Lesser, and less encouraging, developments were many. "I want what I want and I want it now." Demonstrating and remonstrating, the politics of recrimination and the descent into political falsification. The continuing seduction that government would spend less by collecting more, yet perhaps the glimmer of understanding that central planning can lead down the road to serfdom.

Uzis, floozies, Jacuzzis. Garbage in, garbage out. In citadels of safespeak, writing but barely a blunt instrument; in academia and bohemia, reality rarely entering in. Bumperplate knowledge of the issues. Double-standardism, selective diversity, God an immanent hum.

But in the darkness shown, here and there, glimmers of the dawn.

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Copyright 1999
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