The Nineties on CNN

Cafe Society
21

Just got around to finishing Can We All Get Along. Damn. Powerful, sobering stuff, and it hits about a hundred times harder to know that, if anything, things are WORSE now. At least Rodney King lived to tell about it.

Bill Clinton’s despicable victim-blaming policies were by far the biggest reason I didn’t vote for him in '96. Let me be clear: I stick up for the downtrodden, the powerless, the victims of society, the guys on the absolute bottom, for one simple reason…I am one. From my first day of preschool to today, every single damned moment of my life, I got no breaks, no free rides, no coddling, no pats on the head or aw-babys. And for Clinton, who was at least ostensibly not a hardline Republican, to enact welfare reform, have different standards for crack and “good” cocaine, allow outrageous stereotypes like “welfare queens” to flourish, implement a ludicrous “three strikes” law…all designed to punch down, smash down, break down…just unforgivable.

And let’s never, ever forget the 900-kiloton elephant in the room: They had no choice. So you can’t treat them like the Irish, or the Italians, or the Mexicans, or the Muslims. Their being here is completely your ancestors’ fault. Funny how that never seems to come up in the discussion.

Not surprised no one else has responded. This has to be the most depressing episode so far, and I’m including the terrorism one.

22

Is it on Netflix yet? That’s why I haven’t watched or responded.

23

I caught the tail end of on episode last night (not sure which one), but Gee Whiz did they give George Bush a figurative Blow Job! All of a sudden, he’s the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.

To paraphrase some random talking head: “The World owes him a great debt for allowing the Soviet Union to quietly crumble into the dust-bin of history”.

Yeah, okay.

24

I haven’t even seen an ad for this show yet, but offhand I can think of…

The O.J. Simpson murder trial

The Columbine massacre

The Oklahoma City bombing

Riots in L.A. following the Rodney King trial

‘Gangsta’ culture, gang wars, murderous rivalry between hip-hop artists

The death of Princess Diana

The first Gulf War

The Bosnia-Herzegovina civil war and the Rwandan genocide (Naaaah…they’ll get a passing mention. Who cares about any of that?)

Rave culture and the proliferation of designer ‘club’ drugs (ecstasy, special K, etc.)

the original bombing of the twin towers and the rise of Osama, al-Queda, and the Taliban in Afghanistan

Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” and the resulting fallout

The death of Superman (It’ll be referenced at least)

The emergence of reality TV

The Menendez Brothers trial, the feud between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Amy Fisher and the Butafuccoos

“Alternative”/Indy culture (with nods to Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, PJ Harvey, etc.)

Hysteria over Y2k

25

New World Order started out promising, turned fairly intriguing, and then…fell completely flat when it became fixated on the '92 election. (And didn’t we already cover this territory in The Comeback Kid?) In particular, I wanted to see three things:

  1. Boris Yeltsin’s rule, in particular how it was such a monumental clusterfrag that the Russians saw a preening, homophobic, blood-soaked dictator as a big improvement, proving that our troubles with Russia didn’t magically disappear after the end of the Cold War.
  2. The horrific civil war in the former Yugoslavia and how Bill Clinton’s decision to get involved in it almost completely wrecked his foreign policy credentials.
  3. A complete, no-punches-pulled account of our relationship with Saddam Hussein and why it made dealing with him post-Desert Storm such a pain.

Instead we get a pity party for Bush Sr. and a few snippets of one of the most misguided, waffling presidential candidates in history. :rolleyes:

Don Draper - The Rodney King riots and O.J. Simpson were covered last week, and there were a few snippets of hip-hop. The Oklahoma City bombing is already confirmed for next week, and I’m pretty sure we’re going to see Columbine at some point. Desert Storm was handled this week. I’m certain that we’re going to see gangsta rap, rave culture, the death of Superman (and the comics boom in general), and various other pop culture snippets in passing, but again, these are not subjects CNN is comfortable dealing with in depth, so I’m not getting my hopes up. (I mean, seriously, you could do an entire episode about Michael Jordan or the grunge movement or tabloid television or alternative comics or the Nintendo-Sega wars, and we get Fish Police and Pat Buchanan. Sheesh.) Reality TV as a grand, all-encompassing movement didn’t really begin until 2,000’s Survivor, so I doubt we’ll see it.

26

How about things that got left out?

Examples that I can think of:

They mention that the Rodney King beaters got off, but there was no mention that two of them were convicted of a federal “violating his civil rights” charge for the beating and served time in prison.

Two things I don’t remember being mentioned in the TV segment: “Simpsons Mania,” and the whole Murphy Brown / Dan Quayle incident (where Quayle remarked in a speech how Murphy Brown having a baby was “a career choice”), which happened in 1992.

27

As usual, I’m catching only bits and pieces at a time, but they replay it often enough to end up watching the whole thing eventually. So far, it does not seem as good as the ones for the Sixties and the Seventies.

28

There was one thing in the terrorism episode that I was hoping to see, but pretty much knew it wouldn’t appear; when CNN was reporting from the scene of the Oklahoma City bombing, the desk anchor asked the reporter on scene who the government agents there thought did it, and the reply was something like, “The primary suspects are (terrorists from some country that was involved in some incident with the USA a week or so earlier - I want to say Syria, but I can’t find any reference to it)…oh, and today is also the second anniversary of Waco, but they’re dismissing that as coincidence.”

29

Terrorism Hits Home…wow, no kidding. <deep sigh> It’s downright depressing how predictable these stories turn out to be. Present these horrific acts of evil as just a bunch of stuff that happened in succession, be downright terrified of even glancing at the causes of terrorism, completely gloss over the fact that other than a very small handful of Islamic extremists (most of whom have legitimate grievances, BTW; better gloss over those as well), it is almost invariably WHITE MEN, and on occasion white boys, who perform the most heinous crimes. Jeeziz, Osama Bin Laden, an extremely dangerous and effective troublemaker, which we know because that’s why we took him as an ally against Iran, is outraged that infidel soldiers are stationed in his home country, and we can’t even bring him to the table to smooth things out?

But the biggest howler was at the 45-minute mark. Juliette Kayvem mentions how terrorists were successfully brought down by law enforcement techniques (which Michael Moore argues we should have used in the aftermath of 9/11, and I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary), but “we weren’t perceiving the threat as something bigger.” Good lord, is she truly, honestly arguing that the Sisyphean boondoggle that George W. Bush got us into in Iraq and Barack Obama could never bring himself to end was an IMPROVEMENT over bringing Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph to justice? Note how the solutions are never “Become more culturally aware, cooperate with lawful authorities in other nations to combat terrorism, and quit sacrificing the entire goddam world on the altar of corporate profits.”

What happened to Richard Jewell was a national disgrace. A good man destroyed by raving paranoid bullcrap. Cracked.com covered this once.

You know the big lesson we all should have learned? That one side always being pure good and the other always pure evil is garbage, but both sides always being equally good or bad is also garbage. Many times neither side is good, but one is clearly worse than the other. We’d already seen this several times with capitalist tyrants being deposed by communist slightly better tyrants, not to mention the Contras vs. the Sandinistas, and it would’ve been good to remember since Waco was a flippin’ textbook example of this. One one side you have overzealous ATF agents who are definitely too quick to use force, and on the other side you have a statutory rapist with an arsenal of illegally modified guns. Even if you have a legitimate beef with the federal government, David Koresh was just about the worst hill to die on.

Gah. Miserable episode. Expecting much better things from the tech one. Bill Gates is rarely not entertaining.

30

Just saw The Information Age. Again little that I didn’t already know, but at least it was a more even-handed take than anything on Bill Clinton or George HW Bush. I think it would make a nice introductory video for the right college computer course.

The thing that really struck me was how much more innocent and positive a time it was. It was all about this wonderful, revolutionary new technology and how it would open doors and bring the world into a new age. Such a far cry from the seemingly endless parade of libertarians and white supremacists and MRAs and mansplainers and racists and trolls and Gamergaters we have today (which, incidentally, hardly anyone seems at all interested in controlling), not to mention endless bleats of “both sides do it” and “but what about”.

It’s also kinda amusing how at one time the most evil person in tech was Bill Gates. The deposition was a real eye-opener; this is a man who achieved staggering wealth and global fame via initiative, understanding a developing market, and sheer ruthlessness, and when he has to answer for his practices, he tries to play dumb. Proof that not even the mightiest of men are immune to comical bungling when the pressure is on.

31

Just finished Isn’t It Ironic. I think the ending comment about how it such a vast, rich time for music said it all. This one could’ve been three hours…and should’ve been. As it is, it comes across as mostly another “whole bunch stuff” happened, although far less craven than Terrorism Hits Home. I did find it pretty remarkable than it was about an era that was MY TIME for music, which shaped my tastes in a way no era has before or since, and they still managed to play three songs that I absolutely cannot friggin’ stand: Just a Girl, Ironic, and I’ll Be Missing You. (And I’m not exactly rabid over Smells Like Teen Spirit, Wannabe, or whatever the hell that Backstreet Boys nonsense was.)

Eh…show it to your kids, discuss it at the dinner table, play some albums, you know the drill.

Lingering questions:

  • Whatever happened to Lilith Fair?
  • How did a fading MC Hammer look at the gross moral morass that was the East Coast-West Coast rivalry and decide, “Hey, that’s exactly what I need to rejuvenate my career!” as opposed to “Holy CRAP, I gotta get out while all my vital organs are still bullet-free!”
  • Was it a little ridiculous or incredibly ridiculous that two wealthy, powerful men were freaking murdered over some nebulous flap over poetry recitation? No, no, no, I will not get over it, screw that to hell, it’s poetry and it does not in a million years belong in the same echelon as real singing. For crying out loud, in the early years the MC wasn’t considered an “artist” at all! His purpose was to get the crowd fired up for the actual act. He was a facilitator, a catalyst, a cog in the machine…by design. Look, I’ve been asking for years for someone to provide a reasonable explanation to how the music industry’s equivalent of reading a Reader’s Digest article became a big enough deal to develop blood feuds over, and nobody’s ponied up.
  • For me, “alternative rock” was Gin Blossoms, Vertical Horizon, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Counting Crows, Matchbox Twenty, y’know, bands who went their own way and rejected the conventions of the big studios but weren’t so damn angry about it. What’s the general consensus on this? Does it still register with anyone?
32

Watching the technology episode, I was struck with how ancient the technology looks now but remember well how amazing and state of the art is all seemed at the time.

33

And…it’s over?

Hmph. I think that just illustrates the problem with covering such a recent period in history, pretty much the same reason high school history courses in the 80’s refused to even touch the Vietnam War. You have a lot of people alive who remember that period vividly, many of them partisan or politicized to the point of derangement, and the last thing CNN wants is them flooding the station with complaints. In future decades, we may yet get a harsh indictment of Steve Jobs, Janet Reno, or George HW Bush (although in his case, the biggest obstacle will be the fact that he’ll be rather overshadowed). It can’t happen now.

Think there will ever be a “The Aughts?” I think the need to sugarcoat the Dubya administration alone is going to make that a bridge way too far.