Is it Over Already? I was Just Getting Warmed Up

The first question is what to call it. Circa Jan. 1, 2005, halfway through the first decade of the 21^st century, Slate’s Timothy Noah implored us to decide what to call the decade we were living in. Neither “aughts,” “naughts,” “ohs,” nor “double ohs” seemed to be catching. Either Mr. Noah lacks influence or the decade is simply unnamable, because as we stand on the precipice of 2010, we are no closer to an agreed upon moniker.

A proper name may be important because of our recent tendency to segment history by its third digit. In the past, I have acknowledged the usefulness of this shorthand, while adjusting the dates for the start and end times of each “decade.” For example, through my prism, the Roaring Twenties went from the end of WWI in 1918 to the crash of the stock market in 1929. The Forties (in America) went from 1941 to 1945 (1945-49 was its own era: “during the war”). The Fifties stretched from 1949 to 1963; the Sixties from 1964-1974; the Seventies mercifully short from 1975-1980; the Eighties thankfully a bit longer, ending in 1992; and the Nineties, the “end of history,” and the overness of the era of big government, all fell to earth with the Twin Towers in 2001.
 

British historian Dominic Sandbrook is dismissive of our proclivity to segregate history so, although as the author of a book entitled White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, even he must acknowledge the sometimes usefulness of the common nomenclature.

Sometimes naming your own era is impossible, because you have no way of knowing how the decade will be seen in retrospect. It’s true that Mark Twain was able to christen the late 19^th century as “The Gilded Age,” even as he lived it, but Twain was given to great foresight when it came to predicting how the future would see his own times.

We obviously can’t know how future generations will view this past decade, but there’s no harm in trying to guess.

If any word jumps into my mind to describe our departing decade, it is speed. The sheer speed with which change took place seems to have warped right past previous eras. Sure, people from every time-period feel that change is happening too fast and feels like things are getting away from them, but for 2000-2009, there’s a real point to be made. In a fascinating column in the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout argues that change is now so fast that there are no longer cultural “trends,” because there isn’t the time for any cultural attachment to become a trend.

The speed of communication made what might be called 100 years from now, the greatest leap of the past millennium. The internet existed before 2000, but its omnipresent use was truly a thing of this decade. And its use was epoch-changing.

Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons points out the sheer destruction the internet wrought.

The past decade is the era in which the Internet ruined everything. Just look at the industries that have been damaged by the rise of the Web: Newspapers. Magazines. Books. TV. Movies. Music. Retailers of almost any kind, from cars to real estate. Telecommunications. Airlines and hotels. Wherever companies relied on advertising to make money, wherever companies were profiting by a lack of transparency or a lack of competition, wherever friction could be polished out of the system, those industries suffered.

Digital communication made us want phone service everywhere and right now. We insisted on television “on demand” and were even granted the right to pause live TV, like some sort of god of the remote control. No longer would we watch our shows when the networks told us to, or wait until we got to the office to check our email. And the power we gained over our ability to access the world’s information with amazing speed, only whet our appetite for greater control. Now, we wanted in on the action, too. We will help pick the American Idol winner, instantaneously from our living rooms. We will decide which NFL games to watch, and what camera angles suit us. We will communicate our opinions to radio and TV shows even as those shows are taking place live. We will pay our bills in the middle of the night, do our banking on a Sunday afternoon, pay our taxes and parking tickets from our sofa, and shop from our kitchen. Every single newspaper in the world will be delivered to our doorstep each morning, and the vast majority of what has ever been written, composed, compiled, suggested, or discovered throughout history is available at our fingertips 24/7. For most of us in the year 2000, the tasks of transferring money between two bank accounts, setting up a corporation with the state, or researching a topic we had to speak or write about, were arduous affairs. Today, we can do all three on our lunch break.

Literally the entire world is mapped out for us in exquisite detail on a map that we carry with us wherever we go.

The decade evaporating Thursday night will be remembered as the rise of the digital era.

Of course, technology wasn’t the only thing that happened in the last ten years, but the rest isn’t nearly as positive. We should have known the 2000’s weren’t going to be so swell when we could hardly get out of the gate.

On the last day of the 10^th week of the decade, a “pop!” was heard from Wall Street to the Silicone Valley. The internet stock bubble had burst. The year ended with the most bizarre and unsettling presidential election in US history, and the next year ushered in a global war no one my age thought even to be conceivable. The decade ended with a system-threatening recession and double digit unemployment.

Sandwiched in between those difficulties was an endless stream of war-battered miseries, the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country for 40 years. It’s true that the global war on terror comes nowhere near other US wars in terms of casualties, but those other significant conflicts didn’t stretch across an entire decade. Soon, this war will have raged fully twice as long as the Civil War and WWII, with no quick end in sight. Its tragedy has been paraded before us, anthologized, and politicized like no other, and for ten long years. The sheer numbing effect of it all has created a throbbing undertone to go with all of the surface-level disasters of the decade. Murderous bombings in London, Madrid, Bali, Moscow and the sheer volume of attacks and attempted attacks never seemed to let up.

Americans, of course, carried on, as we did during previous wars. Sports continued to rise as a cultural focal point for all of America, selling more tickets and bringing in more ad dollars than ever before, but even here, the curse of the 2000’s had a last laugh. Of all the sporting achievements of the decade, Tiger Woods’ 12 major golf championships will best stand the test of time. Jack Nicklaus won 7 in the 60’s and 8 in the 70’s. No golfer has ever dominated a decade in so many ways as Tiger Woods did the 2000’s. But as everyone now knows, after the final golf season of the final year of the decade had ended, Old Father Time had a final card to play. And so, in a cacophony of explosions rippling like small town firecrackers on the Fourth of July, one after another floozy came forward, cashed her check, and further ripped the mask off our Sportsman of the Decade. And to think, we were so close to the finish line.

The rest of the culture seems an over-seasoned stew of mishmash—tart, but thin and unsatisfying. Reality TV; network competition shows; staged reality TV; the obligatory medical dramas; Springer-esque trashy reality TV; comedies with fat guys married to hot wives; pseudo-profound, tear-jerking reality TV that made many of you cry (you know who you are!); an indistinguishable slew of crime investigators, crime prosecutors, crime profilers, and (if I remember correctly) more than one crime-solving magi; and wince-inducing, look-away, how-can-they-put-this-on-tv, no-I-can’t-look-away, why-did-these-people-allow-cameras-for-this, JUST-TURN-IT-DAMMIT! reality TV.

The past decade in television will truly not be one highly syndicated.

Every decade has its sayings, and here, this decade was able to produce a few. Seemingly everybody spent most of the decade thinking outside the box (at this point, wouldn’t boxed-in thinking be almost avant-garde? Just sayin’). Then there is the always annoying just sayin.’ Poker’s one decade in the limelight gave us all in. Then there were those sayings wholly constructed from blogs, like heh, cough*cough, crickets, and  THE BUSHITLER/CHENEY FASCIST REPUGLICAN CABAL.  But maybe that last one won’t be a keeper.

In 2000, the iPod, YouTube, and Wikipedia had not yet been invented. Nor had Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Facebook, or Twitter. Google and Blackberry were two companies that were relatively unheard of and relatively useless. The iPhone was a far off dream.

On the other hand, Lehman Brothers, Chrysler, and the Rocky Mountain News seemed to be doing fine. What will the next decade bring? Which new companies will spring up and dominate the scene, making us wonder how we ever lived without them? Which mainstays of today’s commercial landscape will vanish?

Tomorrow, I’ll have my predictions for the next decade.