The roaring nineties

I wish I had grown up in the nineties.

Now before you say anything – I mean I wish I had really grown up in the nineties. I wish I had ‘come of age’ during the nineties. I wish I had been born in 1974 and not 1984. I wish it were currently 1997.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. CompuServe, dial-up connections and Playstation. Clunky mobile phones reserved only for flashy businessmen. You’re also thinking really bad boy bands, haircuts and tracksuits.

But I’m thinking that it was a golden age. I mean it. A real golden age. Growing material wealth went hand in hand with almost limitless hope. Global Warming? Terrorism? – These things were trivial, fringe interests. Communism had fallen. Western democracy was the bee-knees and things simply couldn’t get any better. Didn’t the machines in the ‘Matrix’ choose to replicate the year 2000 as the pinnacle of human civilisation? Aren’t the compilation CD’s I still have from that year some of the happiest and upbeat music I own? It was a time when anti-globalisation rallies attracted hundreds of thousands and when America’s youth, however naively, could comfortably rebel and bring tear gas to the streets of Seattle. Good times. Innocent times. Hopeful times.

Take TV for example, what do we have today? 24, The Unit, Battle Star Galatica, Heroes, Lost. As great as they are, they're all about moral dilemmas with large doses of hero/nationalistic worship thrown in for good measure.

Now look at the 90’s: Seinfeld, The X-Files and Buffy.

The X-Files! Just for a split second consider the sort of world that could spawn the X-Files - A world in which America simply couldn’t think of anyone that would wish them harm! They had to delve into the realms of the supernatural to find bad guys back then! How incredible is that? Just how great a world was it if ghosts and ghouls were all that people were afraid of?

While American audiences have come to accept that Jack Bauer has no choice but to disregard the Geneva Convention in the pursuit of justice – when did you ever see Fox Mulder suggest prolonged torture as a perfectly viable means of discovering the truth? No. In the 1990’s the biggest threat to America (if TV is to be believed) was the cigarette smoking man. The threat came from within their own untrustworthy government! And today? The government is nothing less than a beacon of divine justice in a hellish world of atheists and heathens.

Damn Al-Queda!

And damn the decade of distorted western culture for which they are responsible.