Trivial Pursuits: In defense of the unnamable '90s.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Abstract

AS THE 1990S RECEDE further into history and seeming irrelevance to our terrifying new world of suicide bombers, anthrax scares, flat-lining stocks, and comebacks by Michael Jackson and Garth Brooks, perhaps the oddest thing about the past decade remains its inability to generate a pithy, generally agreed-upon descriptor. Such sobriquets needn't be particularly accurate nor comprehensive to stock: Rightly or wrongly, we all remember the '80s as the Decade of Greed and the '70s as The Me Decade.

Despite an unprecedented economic boom and countless media spectacles downloaded directly from the libido of Geraldo Rivera (best remembered in this context as the author of the 1991 kiss-and-tell auto-biography, Exposing Myself), the '90s somehow turned out to be every bit as unnamable as a Sam Beckett novel--and twice as difficult to figure out.

Yet post 9/II, as Slate's Jacob Weisberg has observed, a new consensus is forming that the '90s were not simply unworthy of a clever cathall term, but downright contemptible. Forget that the Cold War ended, that everyone got richer in the '90s, that divorce leveled off, that crime fell, and that illegitimate births dropped. "In a matter of days" after the attacks, wrote Weisbert, "a cultural cliche was born. We had traded in a decade of triviality for an era of profundity."

The important thing to take away from the murder of 5,000 innocents, wrote The New York Times' Frank Rich, was that the attacks "awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream." Rich's colleague in banality at the Times, Maureen Dowd, gratefully waved goodbye to the "pampered, narcissistic culture" of the previous decade (a culture, it's worth nothing, that awarded Dowd a 1999 Pulitzer Prize for her "fresh and insightful columns on the impact of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky").

On the conservative end of the political spectrum, The Weekly Standard's David Brooks--who made a name for himself by chronicling the emergence during the '90s of "bourgeois bohemians"--sniffed that "the top sitcom [of the rpevious decade] was Seinfeld, a show about nothing." Summed up Weisberg, "Though Brooks disdains Dowd and Rich, he seems to share their gratitude...