Only Mostly Rubbish
Less than 30 hours to go in this decade. No idea what we’ll decide to call this decade. It’s not like they ever decided what they should call this one. And now that we’re ready to shuffle the corpse of this one off in a few more hours in a haze of alcohol and bad decisions, it seems as appropriate a time to being writing the epitaph for the next one as ever. The 2000’s haven’t been complete rubbish. Only mostly rubbish.
I for one navigated the chasm between my third and fourth decade on the planet only to find that in retrospect my thirties were a relatively useless span of years. I changed jobs, gained weight, and started going gray. Also it bears mentioning that for the modern American male, you spend the majority of your professional career while in your 30’s being viewed alternately as an overly ambitious career climber and an inexperienced whippersnapper. Most often by people younger or older than you by less than a decade themselves. There’s something settling about forty.
But the past decade—like my past decade—is wholly remarkable for its utter lack of utterly remarkable things. Yes, yes, yes– there are images of the 2000’s forever burned in our collective memories. The attacks on 9/11. President Bush and the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of the aircraft carrier declaring the end to a war that we’re still fighting. Paris Hilton’s eyes lit up like a raccoon sifting through a trash can on her “accidentially leaked” sex tape. Notoriety is the new black. It goes with everything. Sheryl Crow hit it earlier in the decade—”We got rock stars in the White House, and all our pop stars look like porn.”
Ford brought back a Mustang that looks like a Mustang, and Pontiac ceased to be. We have our first black president to close the decade. One that ironically began with our first special ed president. We spent ten years getting more. Too much actually. And I suppose the challenge is to see if we can pay for it all in the next ten. My bold prediction is that we will have to learn to do without. Money, much like matter, can neither be created nor destroyed. Yet no one can seem to figure out where it’s all gone.
Banks have failed. Automakers have failed—oops, covered that one already. Even Jay Leno—the most infuriatingly populist of the no-talent late night hosts—has failed. Jay has failed because he’s the ideal American product. Loud. Rich. Smarmy funny in that used car salesman way. But we’ve stopped buying American cause we’ve come to view the product as crap. We’re lucky Jay failed. If he hadn’t, then all original scripted programming would’ve vanished into the air like the settlers at Roanoke. And we’d have been subjected to a Malcolm McDowell-like cavalcade of night-time viewing more fitting for an ill-thought through remake of A Clockwork Orange.
America makes art for the dinner theater crowd.