Take the presidential-election campaign. ““Bob Dole’’ was just a Generation A version of Max Headroom, programmed to mutter ““15 percent.’’ The Incumbent Icon kept saying, ““We’ve got to build a bridge to the 21st century.’’ On screen: a rickety overpass right out of Donkey Kong. And did the Olympics actually take place? Oh, yes: a bunch of towering multimillionaires stomped on the Angolan basketball team. Again. Gymnastics was nice, but led to ““the rock-and-roll gymnastics championships.’’ Here comes Macarena figure skating. In sports, rotisserie was reality.
On the other hand, sports gave us the only real event of the year: the World Series. The Yankees won it, in the Bronx, on grass, like they did when England had real royals. Flip the welfare state upside down, and you had the royal family. Which is what we did over here. Big Board numbers got bigger, while work forces got smaller. CEOs proved their mettle by carving companies up, selling them off and putting employees out to pasture. But the brokers’ thrills couldn’t match that of plummeting out of a downsized job into a shrinking safety net.
Alas, there was no movie in it. The big film of 1996 featured flying saucers the size of Wilkes-Barre. Like much of 1996, however, they were nothing more than bytes flying in formation. The movies made money, which is more than the record business could say. Hootie and the Whatevers could hardly give away their new album. The media had trouble getting a grip, too. What was MSNBC supposed to be: a Gap ad with laptops, or yet another set designed to look like Ozzie ’n’ Harriet’s house of the ’90s–a Tribeca loft? (Click here to SELECT ALL.) NEWSWEEK enjoyed its own morphing misadventure: a book not about Clinton (OK, about Clinton), by ““Anonymous’’ (OK, a real person), unknown to all but his agent (OK, we spotted him in the hall).
The cause of the TWA crash remained virtual, with advocates of all the possibilities cast into disrepute. Terrorist bomb? Knee-jerk bigot. Friendly-fire missile? Conspiracy nut. An accidental spark in the fuel tank? Luddite aerophobe. Then there was O.J.: either guilty but not in prison, or innocent and still on trial. The only thing you could be sure of in any major case was that some defense lawyer would say, ““My client just wants to put this tragedy behind him and get on with the rest of his life.’’ Good thing no one found Hitler alive at 107.
Morality-wise, flux was the word. Dick Morris lectured to political-science students. Larry Flynt was a movie hero. Snitching cigarette execs imitated Sidney Carton with the far, far better thing they did. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker came back. The whole landscape acquired a halo of unreality. Carmen Sandiego couldn’t draw a map of Rwanda, Bosnia or Chechnya that was accurate for more than two ceasefires. Karl Marx was still the uncoolest guy of the ’90s, but one thing he said–““All that is solid melts into air’’–rang true. Among the evaporating: Veterans Day parades, men who shave every day, golden wedding anniversaries, saying ““the F word’’ to indicate the F word, and character flaws unaccompanied by a medical excuse. ““Pinch me to see if I’m awake’’ became ““pierce me to see if I’m alive.''
Nineteen ninety-six was a cybervoid where elections threatened to become 1-900 polls, and sex, self-abuse with a task bar. We’ve got only three years–before 2000–to reclaim reality. Remember, you’re not a cyberintellect unbounded by space and time but a corporeal being who probably weighs too much. Try to reconnect with that. Tune your TV via the buttons on the set. Write somebody a letter in ballpoint pen. Lose the Filofax. Get a spiralbound notebook and admit that your life will fit into it. And when you refer to last year, write it ““199-.''
