The Bunker Decade
by Michael Schaffer
DECEMBER 8, 2009 TAGS:
It’s hard to remember now, but the awkwardly named, disaster-filled decade that will reach its unlamented end on New Years’ Eve actually began with a panic. With the benefit of hindsight — not to mention memories of the dot-com bust, election 2000, 9/11, Anthrax, Enron, WMDs, Katrina and the global financial meltdown — the jitters that had people hiding in bunkers as the Aughts dawned seem downright silly: Americans were worried their computers were about to turn on them.
How sweet and innocent it all was! Prosperous and at peace, a nation still rushed to the ATMs as the old century wound down, withdrawing the maximum in case of calamity. And when Y2K didn’t deliver chaos, most of us just spent that emergency cash, even more convinced that we were indestructible. Only 10 days into the ’00s, veritable hosannas greeted the biggest financial deal of all time, the purchase of venerable Time Warner by the Internet newby AOL. “This alliance is unbeatable,” a Wall Street analyst told CNN.
The analyst’s employer? Bear Stearns.
It turns out we were wrong about the machines. They, and maybe they alone, weren’t out to get us. No, it was everything else. And as the decade winds down, it’s hard to escape the feeling that things might have turned out better if we’d just stayed in our goofy Y2K hideaways the whole time. Instead, the real history of the Aughts sent us into real bunkers — and we never really came out. Call it the Bunker Decade.
The fear came from near and far. It came from evil people who piloted airplanes into New York and Washington. It lurked in the shoes of strangers on intercontinental flights, in envelopes that arrived without return addresses, in the illicit travel plans of Pakistani nuclear scientists. Having so recently left the shadow of imminent nuclear holocaust, Americans suddenly found themselves consumed with a messier form of impending destruction.
But the story of the Aughts would be simple if it were just about peril from without. So much of the pain, though, was self-inflicted. Politicians dishonestly maneuvered us into war. Bankers placed criminally stupid bets. CEOs cheated stockholders, home run champions deceived fans, emergency responders bailed out on an entire city and prominent bishops let down their most vulnerable charges. And we were pretty beastly to one another — giving the lie to the Greatest Generation myth that crisis somehow brings out our best.
It’s naïve, of course, to expect consistently honorable behavior from human beings. What made the Aughts so scary wasn’t so much the specific domestic or foreign bad actors. It was that the institutions of American life — the very things that were supposed to protect us from the things we fear — didn’t seem up to the task.
Thus our vaunted free press failed to puncture the Iraq war lies, and then failed again to fully question the lords of Finance. Our vaunted Constitution never managed to keep a president from snooping on Americans without permission. Our pricey government agencies couldn’t regulate Wall Street gimmickry or maintain Louisiana levees. Our military hardware couldn’t nab a mass murderer at Tora Bora and our war planners couldn’t foresee an insurgency in Iraq. Our financial geniuses were deluded hucksters. And our brilliant engineers were — well, they were all too often in India or China.
Even democracy, that most venerated aspect of American life, seemed to be in trouble. Whatever you think of hanging chads and recount law, the fact is that in 2000, a guy who got fewer votes managed to become president thanks to an anachronistic constitutional quirk. A decade later, the quirk is still in place. Our political system seems incapable of addressing it. It’s no surprise, then, that even with a new president, one who carried an absolute majority, hefty chunks of the opposition still see him as illegitimate.
Institutional rot, of course, takes more than a decade to do its damage. But there’s a certain parallel between the sense of domestic distrust and the sense of foreign menace that together defined the decade’s tone. Beginning with 9/11, the country felt threatened by thoroughly alien outsiders. And in our domestic polarization, it became clear that a lot of our fellow citizens seemed alien, too.
Demographers tell us that modern residential trends mean we’re less and less likely to even live next to people who disagree with us about society. And the magic of the contemporary mass media means we’re just as unlikely to share virtual space with them, either: With online and cable options for every niche, every lifestyle, every ideology and every taste, we’ve spent this decade of anxiety not in a single national bunker but in a myriad of tiny ones. We’re almost as wary of the Americans in the next bunker as we are of the folks across the ocean.
The 1970s were famously all about Me. The Bunker Decade, by contrast, was all about Them: Huddled in our cocoons, we watched with alarm at what They were up to: The liberals! The Republicans! The Muslims! The immigrants! The neocons! The gays! The Bible-thumpers! The climate scientists! Goldman Sachs! It’s no surprise that the decade’s major pop-cultural trend involved networks ditching expensive scripted shows — which offer an ever-so-slight chance at empathy for one of the characters — in favor of reality TV, with its myriad of new opportunities for Schadenfreude-fueled gawking at Them.
Historians, I suspect, will someday add another dimension to the central metaphor of the Bunker Decade: They’ll note that all our obsessing over Them was in fact a distraction—a Mass Distraction, to coin an Aughts-appropriate term — from the real story of the decade, the dramatic decline of American power and influence.
But just as the AOL deal, the last hurrah of the roaring ’90s, contained the seeds of that happy epoch’s undoing, so too do the final ignominies of the Aughts, maybe, offer some turning point of their own. Though we may still reflexively blame our national penury on some specific Them — and though we might even be right about it — it’s a lot harder now to hide from reality. Our institutions and our icons and our dollars may be discredited, but at least we’ve shed some illusions.
So, good riddance, Aughts. Here’s wishing that the decade to come will be richer and more peaceful. And maybe that it’ll have better TV, too, even for those of us who won’t pay for HBO. But in the spirit that the new decade needs most — non-bunkered, mutually agreed-upon reality — it’s probably best not to expect those things. Still, the Aughts didn’t quite extinguish our ability to hope.
Michael Schaffer contributes regularly to Obit, where his column Grim Reader appears Friday. Schaffer is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
How sweet and innocent it all was! Prosperous and at peace, a nation still rushed to the ATMs as the old century wound down, withdrawing the maximum in case of calamity. And when Y2K didn’t deliver chaos, most of us just spent that emergency cash, even more convinced that we were indestructible. Only 10 days into the ’00s, veritable hosannas greeted the biggest financial deal of all time, the purchase of venerable Time Warner by the Internet newby AOL. “This alliance is unbeatable,” a Wall Street analyst told CNN. The analyst’s employer? Bear Stearns.
It turns out we were wrong about the machines. They, and maybe they alone, weren’t out to get us. No, it was everything else. And as the decade winds down, it’s hard to escape the feeling that things might have turned out better if we’d just stayed in our goofy Y2K hideaways the whole time. Instead, the real history of the Aughts sent us into real bunkers — and we never really came out. Call it the Bunker Decade.
The fear came from near and far. It came from evil people who piloted airplanes into New York and Washington. It lurked in the shoes of strangers on intercontinental flights, in envelopes that arrived without return addresses, in the illicit travel plans of Pakistani nuclear scientists. Having so recently left the shadow of imminent nuclear holocaust, Americans suddenly found themselves consumed with a messier form of impending destruction.
But the story of the Aughts would be simple if it were just about peril from without. So much of the pain, though, was self-inflicted. Politicians dishonestly maneuvered us into war. Bankers placed criminally stupid bets. CEOs cheated stockholders, home run champions deceived fans, emergency responders bailed out on an entire city and prominent bishops let down their most vulnerable charges. And we were pretty beastly to one another — giving the lie to the Greatest Generation myth that crisis somehow brings out our best.
It’s naïve, of course, to expect consistently honorable behavior from human beings. What made the Aughts so scary wasn’t so much the specific domestic or foreign bad actors. It was that the institutions of American life — the very things that were supposed to protect us from the things we fear — didn’t seem up to the task.
Thus our vaunted free press failed to puncture the Iraq war lies, and then failed again to fully question the lords of Finance. Our vaunted Constitution never managed to keep a president from snooping on Americans without permission. Our pricey government agencies couldn’t regulate Wall Street gimmickry or maintain Louisiana levees. Our military hardware couldn’t nab a mass murderer at Tora Bora and our war planners couldn’t foresee an insurgency in Iraq. Our financial geniuses were deluded hucksters. And our brilliant engineers were — well, they were all too often in India or China.Even democracy, that most venerated aspect of American life, seemed to be in trouble. Whatever you think of hanging chads and recount law, the fact is that in 2000, a guy who got fewer votes managed to become president thanks to an anachronistic constitutional quirk. A decade later, the quirk is still in place. Our political system seems incapable of addressing it. It’s no surprise, then, that even with a new president, one who carried an absolute majority, hefty chunks of the opposition still see him as illegitimate.
Institutional rot, of course, takes more than a decade to do its damage. But there’s a certain parallel between the sense of domestic distrust and the sense of foreign menace that together defined the decade’s tone. Beginning with 9/11, the country felt threatened by thoroughly alien outsiders. And in our domestic polarization, it became clear that a lot of our fellow citizens seemed alien, too.
Demographers tell us that modern residential trends mean we’re less and less likely to even live next to people who disagree with us about society. And the magic of the contemporary mass media means we’re just as unlikely to share virtual space with them, either: With online and cable options for every niche, every lifestyle, every ideology and every taste, we’ve spent this decade of anxiety not in a single national bunker but in a myriad of tiny ones. We’re almost as wary of the Americans in the next bunker as we are of the folks across the ocean.
The 1970s were famously all about Me. The Bunker Decade, by contrast, was all about Them: Huddled in our cocoons, we watched with alarm at what They were up to: The liberals! The Republicans! The Muslims! The immigrants! The neocons! The gays! The Bible-thumpers! The climate scientists! Goldman Sachs! It’s no surprise that the decade’s major pop-cultural trend involved networks ditching expensive scripted shows — which offer an ever-so-slight chance at empathy for one of the characters — in favor of reality TV, with its myriad of new opportunities for Schadenfreude-fueled gawking at Them.
Historians, I suspect, will someday add another dimension to the central metaphor of the Bunker Decade: They’ll note that all our obsessing over Them was in fact a distraction—a Mass Distraction, to coin an Aughts-appropriate term — from the real story of the decade, the dramatic decline of American power and influence.But just as the AOL deal, the last hurrah of the roaring ’90s, contained the seeds of that happy epoch’s undoing, so too do the final ignominies of the Aughts, maybe, offer some turning point of their own. Though we may still reflexively blame our national penury on some specific Them — and though we might even be right about it — it’s a lot harder now to hide from reality. Our institutions and our icons and our dollars may be discredited, but at least we’ve shed some illusions.
So, good riddance, Aughts. Here’s wishing that the decade to come will be richer and more peaceful. And maybe that it’ll have better TV, too, even for those of us who won’t pay for HBO. But in the spirit that the new decade needs most — non-bunkered, mutually agreed-upon reality — it’s probably best not to expect those things. Still, the Aughts didn’t quite extinguish our ability to hope.
Michael Schaffer contributes regularly to Obit, where his column Grim Reader appears Friday. Schaffer is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
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Greg Miller wrote on December 8, 2009 7:05am
aughts - A decade such as that from 1900 to 1909 A.D., or 2000 to 2009, where the digit in the tens place is zero [Report Comment]
Jim Memmott wrote on December 8, 2009 5:59am
What an interesting, well-researched and well-argued essay. It's hard to write off a decade, and I'm sure there were many good things as we moved from 2000 to 2010, but, at the moment, they seem outweighed by the bad. [Report Comment]
Andrew McKie wrote on December 8, 2009 4:57am
That's not what "aught" means, in any of its senses. You're thinking of "nought", perhaps. [Report Comment]
