As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, there is
at least one crucial question that remains unanswered.
What the heck do we call it?
Most decades of any consequence get a trendy handle. The Fabulous
Fifties. The Swinging Sixties. The Roaring Nineties. But this past
10-year period? No one seems to know, not even the oracle. “The
2000s never attained a universally accepted name in the
English-speaking world,” Wikipedia shrugs.
Some Brits have taken to calling it the “The Naughties,”
in reference to the double-zeros, or its derivative “The
Oughties,” or my personal favorite, “The Naughty
Oughties.” Certainly a strong case can be made for the latter.
Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer and Pastor Ted Haggard come immediately to
mind. It even applies to the behavior of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney
and Karl Rove. Naughty, naughty boys, every last one of ’em.
Alas, the phrase’s playfulness renders it unsuitable as a
sobriquet for the nightmare through which we have just passed—and
from which we have yet to awaken. The Constitution is in tatters. Our
reputation remains battered. Wall Street’s still full of money
grabbers. We’ve been shattered.
That’s how the Stones might put it, anyway, and they
wouldn’t be wrong. By almost any measure, the 2000s have been a
decade in reverse.
2009
It’s enough to make you pine for President Bill
Clinton’s last year in office. The world was at peace, the stock
market was riding high, and Vice President Al Gore was poised to take
his rightful place in the Oval Office. We all know what happened next;
we’ve been on a downhill slide ever since. Therefore, since
stories must have happy endings, let’s work our way from the
bottom to the top, when the man from Hope reigned in a throne gilded
with the tech bubble’s insane profits.
Yes, those were the days. In stark contrast, 2009 might be called
the year we lost hope. As I write this, the Senate has just passed a
draft health-care reform bill that gives billions of dollars away to
the insurance industry, makes it a crime to not have health insurance
and contains no public option. In short, it has very little to do with
the health-care reform promised by President Barack Obama on the
campaign trail. The man who gave many liberals hope has once again
thrown the base to the lions.
It’s been like that ever since Obama took office in January.
To his credit, he immediately pushed through the economic stimulus
bill, which did more to keep the real economy wheezing along than a
multitude of bubble-inducing, too-big-to-fail bank bailouts. The
Democrats could have exploited their newfound power and pushed through
a bill three times that size. Instead, they caved into Republican
obstructionists, and Obama signaled his true allegiances by appointing
a half-dozen Wall Street insiders to his administration.
If that didn’t arouse the suspicions of Obama’s liberal
base, his next move, sending another 20,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan,
certainly should have. Transitions can be difficult; it seems no one at
the CIA passed along that there’s only about 100 Al Qaeda
fighters left in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, in November, Obama called
up another 34,000 soldiers, bringing the total U.S. troop strength in
Afghanistan to 100,000 and extending the conflict until, you know,
whenever.
That last move snapped the necks of even the most ardent Obama
supporters, particularly since it came immediately after the president
won the Nobel Peace Prize, a selection so absurd it still makes me
wonder if they have cable TV in Oslo, Norway.
Coming in a close second on the what-the-fuck-were-they-thinking
meter was Time magazine’s selection of Federal Reserve chairman
Ben Bernanke as Man of the Year for doing the only thing he knows how
to do: funnel trillions of taxpayer-backed dollars into Wall Street,
even as Main Street goes down the drain. The only consolation is that
Time once named Hitler Man of the Year.
Funny stuff. Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or
leave the country.
2008
Against that backdrop, 2008 seems like a pretty good year, even
though it ended with the government’s official declaration that
we’d been in an economic recession since the previous December. A
few economists warned we were on the verge of a second Great
Depression, but no one besides the millions of people who’d
already lost their jobs and homes seemed all that concerned about
it.
There were plenty of things to cheer about. For one, President
George W. Bush managed to complete his last year in office without
major incident, a considerable accomplishment, considering his
medication regime. Beleaguered Wall Street banks and investment houses
received a generous $1 trillion handout from the federal
government.
Then, of course, there was Barack Obama, whose very campaign implied
the American Dream might yet exist, as did Hillary Clinton’s, to
a lesser extent. It may have taken till the 21st century, but
we’ve finally reached the point where an African-American man can
not only be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, he actually
has a legitimate shot at winning. That is real change, and even
skeptics were momentarily buoyed upon the hopeful winds of
Obamamania.
Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was the comedic high point
of the year. What were Republicans thinking? Whatever their thoughts,
her arrival on the scene marked the end of the presidential contest and
what used to be known as the Republican Party. On election night,
Barack Obama easily won, Michigan became the 13th state to legalize
medical marijuana, and liberals were as stoned as they’d been in
years.
2007
Who can blame them? If anything, candidate Obama’s oratory was
more uplifting in 2007, in the months leading up to the presidential
primaries. After six years of terror alerts and rampant militarism, his
message of peace and prosperity for all sounded refreshingly
unfamiliar. Democrats had won back the House and pulled even in the
Senate after the 2006 midterm elections, and in 2007 you could feel the
political tide turning in their favor.
Unless your new home was underwater. Then all you could sense was
the weight of your mortgage resetting at a higher interest rate, even
though your home was worth 25 percent less than it was the year before.
The loose money policies championed by Bernanke and his predecessor
Alan Greenspan ballooned into the largest real-estate bubble of all
time, and as of this writing, it’s still deflating. Home values
overall are currently down 50 percent from their peak and still
falling; homeowners have lost an estimated total of $8 trillion in
value since the bubble popped.
But that’s not even the half of it. Imagine the credit market
as a supersaturated solution, carrying more debt than it ought to
because the various parties involved, mainly large corporate banks and
investment houses that work closely together, presume their business
associates won’t all attempt to cash in their chips at the same
time. In spite of this presumption, when doubt of one firm’s
ability to repay debt enters the system—as it did in the case of
Bear Stearns, after it became apparent its subprime holdings were
junk—panic quickly spreads and the credit market freezes up.
Financial institutions didn’t necessarily stop lending money
in 2007 because they lacked funds. They stopped lending money because
they no longer trusted one another.
That still holds today.
It all sounds quite horrible in hindsight, but it wasn’t all
bad. A resurgent Britney Spears went nuts, shaved her head and on
numerous occasions flashed her vagina in public; Paris Hilton got
busted for a DUI; Apple released the iPhone; and An Inconvenient
Truth won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
2006
By 2006, Americans, bogged down on two fronts in the Middle East but
flush with red-hot real-estate money, were ready for a new challenge,
like, you know, going to the movies. The film about Al Gore’s
crusade to stop global warming gave it to them, and remarkably, they
flocked to it in droves.
Anyone who’s ever run a garden hose from their tailpipe into
the car, climbed in, closed all the windows, locked all the doors and
turned the motor on can tell you that carbon emissions are lethal.
Well, they could tell you if they weren’t dead. That’s
basically Al Gore’s point in the film—we’re all gonna
die if we keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere. Of course, it
won’t necessarily be by asphyxiation. Some of us will drown as
the sea level rises. Others will die of thirst in newly formed deserts.
Still others will be swept away in Katrina-like superstorms. It’s
enough to make any rational person pray for an asteroid strike.
But as the recently concluded climate-change conference in
Copenhagen, Denmark, demonstrated, when it comes to global warming,
there may not be too many rational people left on the planet.
That’s why I’ve always preferred to address the carbon
issue from the standpoint of fossil-fuel depletion. According to an
increasing number of petroleum-industry experts, we may have reached
Peak Oil right around the same time An Inconvenient Truth was
released. That means that of all the oil that was ever in the ground,
only half of it is left. It took eons for this vast pool of petroleum
to form beneath the crust of the Earth; it took us less than two
centuries to burn through half of it.
The solution seems to be pretty straightforward: We’ve got to
use the fuel more efficiently in order to conserve it, which will in
turn reduce carbon emissions. All it takes is a crazy little thing
called engineering. We used to do it all the time in this country. We
could still do it today, if we had the political will.
But, you know, politics is the worm that keeps gnawing its way into
this apple. The first thing it eats is common sense.
Fortunately, social networking came of age in 2006, providing a
welcome distraction for the more than 1 million worldwide users who
signed on to MySpace. Oddly, most of the users appear to be amateur
prostitutes or failed musicians, which along with Rupert
Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace in 2005 explains why Facebook has
since passed it in popularity.
2005
The advent of social networking marked a generational shift in the
use of technology. Once fogies such as myself discovered just how much
time you could waste padding your friend count, we lost interest. Not
that we’re Luddites or anything like that. There’s simply
no way I could have written this story in the time I had allotted
without a computer and high-speed Internet connection. In the old days,
it would have taken three proofreaders to fact-check this piece;
I’m doing it on the fly, via the oracle, as I write. A
proofreader will still see it before it goes to press, but she knows my
work is wired tight, so it only takes her a couple of hours. In the
economic world, this is known as increased productivity. In the real
world, it means two proofreaders just lost their jobs.
But, hey! Who needs proofreaders? That’s what makes the
Internet such a lethal propaganda tool, as became apparent in the wake
of the 2004 presidential election. A conscientious print journalist
such as myself will at least consult Wikipedia before making up a fact.
But ever since John Kerry got swift-boated, well-paid web cowboys have
conjured up their own truth and disseminated it for mass consumption on
the Internet, where their loathsome lies are then churned into rancid
butter by hate radio and Fox News, which the rubes in the audience can
spread on their toast. The most surprising thing of all? It tastes
good!
That’s the problem with tools. And speaking of tools, Federal
Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown was the unanimous
selection for 2005’s “tool of the year,” for
completely bungling the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. One of
the deadliest hurricanes to ever hit the United States, Katrina left
1,836 dead in its wake and more than $100 billion in damage after
landing in Louisiana in August. Brown was subsequently forced to
resign.
2004
I am seeing a man, a tall man with a long face, a long, wooden,
expressionless face, like you might see on a cigar store Indian, except
the man isn’t wearing a war bonnet, and he has a hot wife who
bathes in ketchup and gives him lots of money. His name is John Kerry,
and he lost the 2004 presidential election without twitching a muscle
because he’s made out of wood.
2003
No matter what happened to us in 2001, there was no justification
for our invasion of Iraq. Bush lied, thousands of our soldiers and
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died for nothing, and we will never
relieve ourselves of this shame.
However, we could pass one measure that would prevent such war
crimes from ever happening again. We could bring back the draft.
I write this as an honorably discharged U.S. Navy veteran who
explored the idea of reenlisting after 9/11 until realizing the cause
was completely bogus. There’s nothing wrong with defending your
country, unless it’s under false pretenses. If every American had
to put his or her life on the line—in exchange for, say, free
health care for life—they might think twice before allowing our
leaders to lie us into a war.
Phantom mushroom clouds. Invisible weapons of mass destruction.
Backroom meetings which no one outside of Dick Cheney and his mutant
neocon minions attended. Would any parent have bought this bullshit if
their own child’s life was at stake?
2002
In 2002, they might have. Terror in the homeland was very real back
then, considering the events of the previous year, and a color-coded
bat signal kept the nation on high alert at all times. No one suggested
bringing back the draft; after all, the villain, Osama bin Laden, had
already been vanquished into the mountains of Tora Bora, and what was
left of the Taliban was about as threatening as a flea. But if they had
started a draft back then, we’d have the troops to do the job in
Afghanistan today.
Whaddaya say now, Mom and Dad? What Mom and Dad said in 2002 was
that they had no problem with Big Brother eavesdropping on their
telephone and email communications. No problem rolling back the
Constitution with regrettable legislation such as the PATRIOT Act,
still in effect today. No problem sending U.S. troops to Iraq, because
after all, it’s an all-volunteer army. They asked for it.
We all know why it happened then. But why is it still happening
now?
2001
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was living in a two-story
shotgun shack in Locke, Calif., with B.J. Quintana, an artist of some
renown. She called me down to the living room, where the TV was
situated.
The second I laid my eyes on the screen, the south tower of the
World Trade Center collapsed, in much the same way as those controlled
building demolitions you see on the Discovery Channel. It turned out to
be a replay. But then the World Trade Center’s smoking north
tower collapsed, in exactly the same way, in real time.
I think at this point, B.J. and I might have taken maybe a dozen
bong hits. Who could blame us?
We draped a giant American flag over the balcony and watched events
unfold on TV. The attack on the Pentagon. The endless replays of planes
crashing into buildings. The unexplainable collapse of WTC 7. Suddenly,
the bitter disappointment of the 2000 presidential election
didn’t seem to matter anymore.
Nothing seemed to matter anymore in the so-called New Normal, except
perhaps revenge.
2000
Even though it preceded 9/11 by less than a year, the 2000
presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore seems far more
distant in memory. Remember hanging chads? Those 19,000 Jews in Miami
who voted for anti-Semitic Pat Buchanan? The conservative Supreme Court
picking our president, instead of us? The theft of the U.S. presidency
10 years ago was maddening at the time, but in light of events that
came afterward, today it seems like a relatively minor incident.
It’s certainly not the open sore 9/11 remains today. From one
perspective, you could even say losing the election was the best thing
that ever happened to Al Gore. As the figurehead of the effort to slow
global warming, he’s come into his own, a respected elder
statesman who’s garnered his own well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, will always be remembered for The
Pet Goat, the book he was reading in that Florida classroom when
the Twin Towers came down. Who can forget Bush’s frightened,
contorted face in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11?
As I said from the outset, ever since Bush stole the election and
the subsequent terrorist attack on America, it’s been one long
slide to the bottom. To put it bluntly, the New Normal sucks. Bill
Clinton may have been a naughty boy, too, but during his last year in
office, we were at peace, technology stocks had pushed the market to an
all-time high, and Bubba had somehow survived the Lewinsky scandal.
True, the tech bubble began deflating before Clinton left office, and
he’d thrown the Democratic base under the bus years earlier. But
that’s infinitely more preferable than an endless war on
terror.
A friend once asked me, after listening to me rant and rave
endlessly about Barack Obama’s betrayal of the left during the
2008 campaign, “What if this is as good as it gets?” So
I’ve been trying to have a positive attitude about the coming
decade. The health-care reform currently heading for the
president’s desk may leave something to be desired, but it does
contain some important elements, such as making it illegal for
insurance companies to turn away patients with pre-existing conditions.
Our actions overseas may not have changed too much at this point, but
there’s no doubt America’s standing has risen in the world
since Obama became president. Maybe this is as good as it gets.
It certainly couldn’t be any worse. That may not be the
happiest of endings, but it’s all you’re getting. Now if we
could just figure out what to call it.