1990s o'clock
Hello from my home, where I am on evening one of a few of (let me be dramatic about this) solo parenting. The house has yet to explode and I even somehow took the trash bins to the curb so I am feeling accomplished. Or I was until something felt off and I realized it was that while I had served dinner I had not entirely eaten dinner, so am still sort of working on that.
As you may have noticed, I tried something a bit different: a Part 1 of a post here, and a Part 2 at The Canadian Jewish News, where I’m an editor. This was a bit of a fluke—I try to reserve all my Jewish-topics writing for there, and my sitcommery for here, and this topic really did feel split down the middle, and so, to do a “Seinfeld” reference, I cut the bike in half.
If there is an overarching theme to this newsletter (allow a moment of grandiosity), it’s that our times are not necessarily better or worse than others. So, so much of cultural criticism involves revisiting works from the past, only to say how Bad they were, how they could never be made now, not now that we are so very enlightened. I don’t think this adds up. Nor do I hold a RETVRN position with respect to 30 years ago.
I’m picturing a version of that “Frasier” where everyone had to go around in the circle and state their identity categories. It would be like, as the saying goes, a “Seinfeld” with smartphones. Ruins the whole concept.
The "Hays Code of the 90's" was about not offending the Great Undifferentiated White demo. If no one was categorized as a subgroup, most would not complain. Those that did tended to sound like Birchers explaining the secret communist plot behind fluoridation. That was post-1980's, a decade that did feature actual book and record (vinyl) burnings, plus a massive Catholic boycott of The Last Temptation of Christ and lots of other things. It was a commercial truce of exhaustion.
Also: three doctorates in Rhoda-ish?! OK, I wanna hear about that. (I had forgotten she was Jewish, but I was a small child at the time, so I just thought of her as Rhoda.)
elm
upon reflection my childhood was a cable access version of a Benetton commercial, but it didn't seem unusual or noteworthy to me at the time, so...