Chuck Klosterman wrote a great piece for ESPN Magazine about why Barry Bonds matters. We’ll save his five reasons on that subject for another day, but his summation of the post-Clinton years is dead-on. The essay was excerpted in The Week magazine.
In November 2000, the United States held a presidential election, and nobody knew who won, so we just kind of made up an outcome and tried to act as if that was normal. Less than a year later, airplanes flew into office buildings, and everybody cried for two months. And then Enron went bankrupt, and the U.S. started acting like a rogue state, and The Simple Life premiered, and we re-elected the same president we never really elected in the first place. Later, there would be some especially devastating hurricanes and three Oscars for an especially bad movie called Crash…
If it’s the era of anything, it’s the Era of Predictable Disillusionment: a half-decade in which many long-standing fears about how America works (and what America has come to represent) were gradually — and then suddenly — hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who hadn’t been paying attention to begin with.
Right. Ignoring it won’t make it go away, nor does it provide exemption from being strapped in a seat on the Rove-conceived roller coaster of division and made-up strife we no longer even recognize as such.
Instead, we routinely take ardent stands on things previously of only passing interest to us, like stem cell research, gay people holding weddings, husbands unplugging wives from life support, and citizenship for Mexican workers. We debate absurd “solutions” to illusionary “problems” like putting a fence around the lower 48. Meanwhile, we either don’t notice or claim not to care when cameras are erected on every highway exit ramp and bridge, and better records of our cell phone calls are provided to the government than to us.
As Paris Hilton herself said, if caviar wasn’t expensive, no one would eat it. I’d rather think they’re putting something in the water than think we are just this easy to play.
