- OOPS! THE '90S ARE about to end and we
have not gotten around to naming the decade yet.
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- We'd better get moving. Since at least
the Roaring '20s, our collective national memory has fixed an identity
and a label on every decade. We had the Depression Decade, the World War
II decade, the Eisenhower Decade (counterbalanced by Elvis, among others),
the Hippie Decade (or, if you prefer, the Protest Decade), the Disco Decade
and, in Tom Wolfe's assessment of the '80s, the Money Decade.
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- But what will we remember when we remember
the '90s?
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- My guess: Naughtiness.
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- THE NAUGHTY '90s began with the shocking
and bizarre and proceeded to become even more shocking and bizarre.
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- There was District of Columbia Mayor
Marion Barry's televised arrest for smoking crack cocaine in 1990. Then
there was, to name a few lewd events, Pee-Wee Herman's indecency arrest,
the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill sexual harassment hearings, Amy Fisher's
"Long Island Lolita" drama with Joey Buttafuoco, Lorena Bobbitt's
assault on husband John Wayne Bobbitt, Heidi Fleiss' Hollywood sex entrepreneurship,
Prince Charles' taped phone sex with Camilla Parker Bowles, and the trials
of O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Hugh Grant, Marv Albert, and the Menendez
brothers.
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- How poetically appropriate, then, that
the Naughty '90s have led to the Oval Office, no less, with naughty bits
of the X-rated Starr report excerpted and announced word-for-word on national
television about the time most children were arriving home from school.
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- "The Tabloid Decade," blares
a headline on a thoughtful essay in the February Vanity Fair by contributing
editor David Kamp, assaying the "creeping trashiness" of our
news culture. That's a pretty good label for a decade in which the line
between tabloid and mainstream journalism has blurred in unexpected ways.
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- The big-three supermarket tabloids, the
National Enquirer, the Star, and the Globe, have steered away from stories
of UFOs and "Elvis' Face on the Moon" to go after exclusives
on O.J. or Monica. Meanwhile, the new cable news networks and TV magazine
shows found ratings bonanzas in pursuing the same thing, driving such stories
into even greater prominence in the stately older, more traditional media.
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- The impact on everything we used to know
about media and moral standards has been dramatic. Leave it to the Naughty
'90s, for example, to launch the redemption of Larry Flynt, first with
an Oliver Stone movie, then with his pay-for-sleaze outing of naughty politicians.
This week, days after Vanity Fair hit the newsstands, a new Washington
Post survey found that 40 percent of Americans questioned approved of Larry
Flynt's revealing of extramarital affairs by Republicans. Fifty-seven percent
said they disapproved.
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- On the other side of the political fence,
the Rev. Donald Wildmon's conservative American Family Radio network was
retracting erroneous radio reports, culled from what is an apparently anti-Clinton
Web page, that Democratic handler James Carville had beat his Republican
wife Mary Matalin. The retraction came after the Carvilles received a flood
of media inquiries by telephone following the false report. The political
has truly become personal in the Naughty '90s.
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- What made the '90s so naughty? Maybe
we Americans are going through a phase. After all, the Cold War is over
and the economy is up, while crime and the welfare rolls are down to 1960s
levels. Before the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted a year ago, Washington
media were lamenting how little America cared about Washington. In the
post-Cold War era, sometimes it takes a sex scandal to get big audiences
interested in the news, even while many complain that they are tired of
the story.
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- Were a state of national crisis, instead
of prosperity, in the air, chances are good that the White House and Congress
would have disposed of Monicagate, one way or the other, with greater dispatch.
In that sense, Clinton's legacy may be a victim of his presidency's success.
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- The Naughty '90s have set America to
flopping around in a national mud bath of sleazy news and gossip. It may
take nothing short of war or some other national crisis to push media and
public sensibilities back onto dry land.
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- Otherwise, the Naughty '90s could lead
to the Naughtier "Naughts," which may be the best label we Americans
can come up with for the new decade just ahead.
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- Naughty or nice, it's up to us.
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