Dreams of the Nineties

2nd September 2018

Post reblogged from Exalting Artifice Above Reality with 175 notes

Dreams of the Nineties

I feel most of our discourse is resurrecting what we interred in the late 1990s.
It’s tempting to think of the 1990s as the era of The End of History, after Francis Fukuyama’s essay of the same name. It was the decade when nothing happened and everything was ephemeral. It was just another bubble that popped.
ESPN and FX recently resurrected the OJ Simpson trial as high drama about race and justice in America, but back then it was just trash. That’s all everything was. Gennifer Flowers had sex with Clinton and had the tapes. Clinton’s spokesman called the story “trash for cash.” The New York Observer gave Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly the annual white trash award. The New Yorker was more precise: “Trailer trash is what they call people out here,” the locals told their reporter. In August 1994, New York ran a cover story on the defining figure of the decade: White Trash. “They’re everywhere. Lock up your Twinkies.”
It’s tempting to reduce Fukuyama to that moment, when the Berlin Wall came down and there was nothing worth watching on television. After socialism, there was nothing. There would be no struggle. All contradictions would be resolved. All needs would be satisfied. “There would be neither art nor philosophy,” he wrote, “just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.” In a footnote, Fukuyama wrote that the End of History might look like the postwar American way of life. And if liberal democracy is the natural end of human history, then Fukuyama might be the philosopher of fully-realized human: Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, or Roseanne. Everything was personal, and everything else could be set aside.
Although there was neither art nor philosophy, it was not clear that there was much time for the caretaking of the museum of human history. The most pressing public questions involved the president’s private affairs. “It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind,” Philip Roth wrote of 1998. That August, Brett Kavanaugh thought the most important questions for the president were ones like these: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she be lying?” When the president bombed Iraq in December, Congress accused him of using a bombing campaign to distract the country from his impeachment proceedings. They wouldn’t be so easily distracted.
It’s easy to mock, but making the 1990s about the End of History is a mistake. There’s some reality to it: By the end of the decade, most Americans thought that politics was inconsequential. Congress really did impeach the president for lying about whether he had had an affair.
But if the End of History did capture a mood, it was only one characteristic of the late 1990s, not the early 1990s. If the second half of the decade represents the End of History and the temporary triumph of a certain American way of life, the first half of the decade represents the persistence of History, and a mood much like our own.
There was little optimism in early 1990s. There was endless hand-wringing about race and inequality. The 1992 New York Times Notable Books list doesn’t include Fukuyama’s book, but includes many books that might as well have been published yesterday:
AMERICA: WHAT WENT WRONG? By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. (Andrews & McMeel, paper, $6.95.) This expanded newspaper series by two Pulitzer Prize winners finds that the economy has been altered to favor the already favored.
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA. By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Norton, $14.95.) A sane and temperate discussion of how ethnic historians are creating intellectual ghettos, fragmenting society and undermining the ideal of political unity.
THE END OF EQUALITY. By Mickey Kaus. (Basic Books, $25.) Mr. Kaus, an editor of The New Republic, argues boldly and radically that the present welfare system, corrupt and corrupting, should be eliminated and replaced by a guaranteed jobs program.
FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL: The Permanence of Racism. By Derrick Bell. (Basic Books, $20.) A prominent scholar of race and the law argues, with allegory, fables and dialogues, that our progress against racism so far has been illusory.
TWO NATIONS: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. By Andrew Hacker. (Scribners, $24.95.) The thesis of this challenging book by a distinguished political scientist is that unto this day black people have not received a fair shake as American citizens – and that most white Americans don’t believe this.
WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE: The Betrayal of American Democracy. By William Greider. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Mr. Greider, a former assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, presents a comprehensive guide to the American political system, which, he argues, is now a “grand bazaar” of moneyed interest groups and a grand attempt to obscure this fact.
From the vantage point of the early 1990s, the White Trash wave was not a sign of peace. It was there in the epitaphs of their bestsellers, that irrepressible cliche: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” That was Yeats by way of Robert Bork. It could have been anyone.
Everything was a sign of how things were coming apart. The recession, the urban crime wave, the Los Angeles riots, and Ross Perot’s populist independent campaign were all signs of American decline. And that was just 1992.
In April, Los Angeles burned. Within twenty-four hours of the first assaults, there more than one thousand structural fires reported across the county. Rioters snaked north and east, along Wilshire, through Koreatown, up to Hollywood. There were enough looters getting in and out of store parking lots to cause gridlock across the city.
They could not even control the streets. On the first day, the police tried and failed to retake Normandy and Florence. “We were simply overwhelmed,” the police chief said. Firemen were assaulted as the fires raged. “They tried to kill them with axes,” the fire chief said. The leader of the most powerful country in the world had to send in the Marines to take control of his country’s second-largest city.
Three thousand soldiers and fifteen hundred Marines arrived in Los Angeles to meet the two thousand National Guard soldiers already deployed and the three thousand more recently activated. They moved to riot hotspots in armored personnel carriers, armed and in combat dress. For days, caravans of Humvees overran downtown and south Los Angeles. After the riots, the Army and the Marines withdrew from the city, but remained on alert at the air stations in Orange County.
“This is a lot different from attacking an Iraqi bunker,” one soldier told the Los Angeles Times. “There you know who the enemy is.”
It took more than twenty-thousand police and soldiers and a dusk-to-dawn curfew to restore order to the burning city. There were fifty-three dead, many killed in confrontations with the police. The deadliest riot in modern American history was over. It was not nearly enough: a fraction of the 2,589 homicides the Los Angeles County coroner would count that year.
It was an anxious era, and not just in Los Angeles. In 1993, one hundred and eleven American cities were more dangerous than Afghanistan. The greatest cities were some of the worst: Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago were three times as dangerous as Afghanistan is today, and Washington was eight times as dangerous.
New York City was experiencing its own unfathomable crime wave. Mayor David Dinkins called New York a “city under siege” and promised to be “the toughest mayor on crime this city has ever seen.” In September 1990, New York ran a crime feature that asked “How safe is your neighborhood?” and listed the city’s most dangerous subway stations, Time ran a cover story on “The Rotting of the Big Apple,” and even the Trotskyist Workers Vanguard was telling readers that “the fear is real.”
Ghettos and barrios have become “free fire” zones as drug gangs shoot it out with each other and the cops. The victims are primarily blacks and Hispanics, often children like nine-month-old Rayvon Jamieson, slain by stray gunfire in his grandmother’s Bronx kitchen, or Veronica Corrales, the nine-year-old struck by a bullet while sleeping in her family’s car on a Brooklyn street. Twenty-three “gypsy” cab and livery service drivers have been murdered this year. But the bourgeoisie doesn’t care about them.
It has become easy to think of Donald Trump as a creature of the 1970s, out of place in the modern world, but our anxieties about race, crime, and immigration did not peak until the early 1990s. And they were not the anxieties of the Heartland alone.
She was a twenty-eight-year-old investment banker at Salomon Brothers, a vegetarian, and a graduate of Wellesley and Yale. She lived alone on East 83rd Street. The Upper East Side was one of the safest neighborhoods in the city, but when she returned home, at eight-thirty or nine-thirty in the evening, she would run six or seven miles through Central Park.
Early one morning in April 1989, she was found in a shallow ravine by the 102nd Street Traverse. She had been there, bleeding into a puddle, for four hours. Her skull had been crushed, the surface wrinkles of her brain flattened. She had lost three quarters of her blood. Twelve days later, she would wake from her coma. She had already been given last rites.
The five accused eventually had their sentences vacated. They had left no semen, no blood. And here was hardly enough time for them to assault the woman by the 102nd Street Traverse. They were busy assaulting strangers on the other side of Central Park North. “That was the issue,” one defense lawyer said. “But we didn’t say, ‘No, when the jogger was raped, my client was on 96th Street, mugging someone else.’ That would have been self-defeating.”
In 2002, another man assumed sole responsibility for the attack. He was linked to seven other rapes in the seven months surrounding the attack. He had raped another woman in Central Park just two days prior. In 1991, he plead guilty to four rapes and the murder of a pregnant woman. And his semen matched.
The Central Park Five had been fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Matias Reyes, the true assailant, was just seventeen. In the year of the assault, 42 percent of New York’s homicide arrestees were under twenty-one. That was also a record year in New York City: 2,245 homicides, the most in the city’s history, and 3,125 forcible rapes, largely of men and women without the privilege to receive much newspaper coverage.
Full-page advertisements ran in the Times, Post, Daily News, and Newsday. “What has happened to our City over the past ten years?” it asked. Then it answered: “What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we knew it.” The author, Donald Trump, described his “deep-seated feeling that what’s happening in society today has to be stopped.” He was not alone.
In December 1990, the New York Times Editorial Board said the city now resembled the worst of the Third World:
The streets already resemble a New Calcutta, bristling with beggars and sad schizophrenics tuned in to inner voices. Crime, the fear of it as much as the fact, adds overtones of a New Beirut. Many New Yorkers now think twice about where they can safely walk; in a civilized place, that should be as automatic as breathing. … Regaining the streets means fighting three related enemies: crime, homelessness and filth. Increasing levels of violent crime make physical fear a constant, nagging fact of daily life. The homeless mentally ill convey a subtler sense of menace – that the city has lost its moral bearings, that things are out of control.
Crime, homelessness, filth. The headline: “To Restore New York City, First, Reclaim the Streets.” It was the sort of thing Donald Trump might say.
In the face of this wave of urban violence, you could read the Los Angeles riots as an epitaph for the American way of life. Rioters carried placards. “No Justice, No Peace.” “It’s a White Man’s World.” “Burn, Baby, Burn.” Some Americans seemed to live in another world entirely. Nightline asked three gang members about the truck driver that had been dragged out of his truck and beaten on national television. The first: “He knew better. He saw what was happening.” The second: “It was a CIA.” The third: “They saying that, well, we burning down our own community. I mean, we don’t own none of these liquor stores.”
President George H. W. Bush declared Los Angeles County a disaster area. He sounded exhausted.
No one watching the television coverage of the violence yesterday afternoon and evening could have any reaction other than revulsion and pain. Mob brutality, the total loss of respect for human life was sickeningly sad. The frustration all of us felt seeing helpless victims pulled from vehicles and assaulted, it was hard not to turn our eyes away.
He traveled to the scene of the disaster. “I can hardly imagine the fear and the anger that people must feel to terrorize one another and burn each other’s property,” he said. Then he went to Koreatown. These immigrants, he said, had “grabbed a piece of the American dream, and built something. To see it shattered is not the American way.”
“This isn’t the American dream,” he said.
Outside the United States, some Asians had doubts about the entire American project. Two weeks after the riots, Vice President Dan Quayle began a speech with a defense of diversity against the challenge of homogeneity. “From the perspective of many Japanese” – the vice president had spent the week in Japan – “the ethnic diversity of our culture is a weakness compared to their homogeneous society. I begged to differ with my hosts. I explained that our diversity is our strength.” It was not an applause line.
One remarkable thing is how even prosperous and liberal Americans felt enormous anxiety about crime and immigration. In 1991, Haynes Johnson interviewed one prosperous Bay Area resident who happened to think rioters were better off dead:
High on the hills of Oakland, overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate, rises a cluster of elegant houses, the homes of judges, doctors, lawyers, architects, business executives, and university officials. All races and backgrounds are represented there. Success is their common denominator.
In the fall of 1991, a great fire swept the hills, leveling many homes and reducing others to blackened shells. No sooner had the smoke and flames subsided than the very poor of the inner-city flatlands of Oakland swarmed up to loot, invading even some houses that had survived the fire and were still occupied. One of the hill people took to sitting at night in his living room with a baseball bat to ward off the looters. He’s seventy years old, a man of distinction in government and university circles, and someone I’ve known for years.
“It’s more than drugs and crime,” he says of the problems he sees afflicting America, “it’s deterioration of the fabric of life altogether. I have always been upbeat, superpatriotic. But I’m depressed. If Alvin Toffler is right that change increases at an ever-accelerating rate, and if the British Empire lasted five hundred years, maybe the post-World War II American Empire will only last seventy-five years.”
He pauses, then talks about his reaction to televised scenes of plundering after a Florida hurricane that fall. “Now whenever I see a looter, I say shoot the bastard,” he says. “I don’t care if they shoot the fuckers.”
Haynes Johnson’s 1994 state-of-the-nation book, Divided We Fall, describes America in almost Trumpian cliches.
What I heard at the beginning in the below-zero shadows of Maine was what I heard at the end in the broiling sunshine of San Ysidro, Califomia, where U.S. Border Patrol members vainly tried to check a tidal wave of illegal immigrants entering from Tijuana, Mexico: that America was in trouble, that it needed to change, that it faced more disturbing questions than anyone could remember. This belief was held even by those who survived the Great Depression and World War II.
Based on what I found, failure to address America’s increasing racial and ethnic tensions, economic inequities, and the rapidly widening gap between the haves and have-nots will inevitably result in new and greater explosions. The Los Angeles riots of April 1992 were not an aberration.
I have to stress that this was not an expression of unusual nativism, but a common attitude. In September 1993, the Los Angeles Times poll showed that 86 percent believed that illegal immigration was one of the three most important problems facing California. In November 1994, the state passed a ballot proposition – 59 to 41 percent – withdrawing all public services for the undocumented. It was held up in court, but the 1996 federal welfare reform bill achieved much the same thing: It made illegal immigrants ineligible for almost all state and federal benefits.
If Haynes did not feel warmly about the “tidal wave of illegal immigrants,” Donald Barlett and James Steele – they of the 1992 Notable Book America: What Went Wrong? – were positively hostile to Mexican factories: “American corporations are closing plants or slashing work forces in the U.S. and shifting the jobs to Mexico,” highlighting the hundreds of Mexican factories with thousands of workers, each depriving an American of their livelihood. That was the “giant sucking sound” that won Ross Perot 19% of the vote in 1992.
It’s easy to dismiss Perot as another right-wing populist. He was anti-immigration, anti-trade, tough on crime. You would expect it to be a Republican message. But nothing about the politics of the early 1990s is that simple. When Perot briefly dropped out of the race, two-thirds of his vote went to Bill Clinton.
I find it difficult to read the early 1990s except as a time when the End of History seemed distant, when the nation’s deep anxieties over race, crime, immigration, and national decline deepened. Nothing seemed inconsequential. It was a portentous time, with much to be portentous about.
Perhaps more shocking than anything else is how quickly everything turned around. Crime dropped astonishingly rapidly. Unemployment fell to record lows. Wages rose. Poverty fell. Throughout the 1990s, the United States was the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth, but it wasn’t until the end of the decade that it felt like it.
Here was the optimism and confidence Fukuyama had predicted in the early 1990s. Here was the country without struggle, where all human needs were satisfied and all social contradictions were resolved. Here was where the anxieties of the early 1990s could be interred.
For the past few years it has felt like everyone I knew was digging up those bones. I hope that now we can bury them all again.

Kontextmaschine

Dreams of the Nineties