The Aughts

Honestly, reviewing a decade is about as arbitrary as celebrating the end of a month or voting. Proper holidays and eras are marked by actual important events, interesting folk tales, or at least battles with orcs. All this decade nonsense is merely a byproduct of our number system. There's no cosmic significance, it's just the swapping of a digit.

That said, people put a lot of stock into it. In the U.S. at least, each decade is associated with a particular movement or aesthetic, even if it is a little forced. The sixties are remembered for the hippies, peace and love and LSD. What people forget is that it all took place in the last couple of years of that decade. But to be fair, if you remembered the movement during the seventies -- a decade marked by disco of all things -- it would be the tale of a massive cultural hangover, of failure, selling out and buying in.

But what the hell, right? Here we are, at the end of a decade that my own generation had a strong hand in shaping. If the twenties are represented by flappers and gangsters, the fightin' greatest generation belongs to the forties, and the eighties are slick wall street types, then there is little doubt that these aughts of ours will be remembered for the hipsters. And that's pretty depressing.

Here's the story, just in case the rock you were trapped under was larger than mine. Evidently, all those American Psycho assholes from cheerier economic times cut back on the cocaine long enough to raise some kids and put money away for them. This is called a trust fund, and it had to be explained to me because I am a poor boy from Appalachia and I do not understand such things. Naturally, these horrible little brats grew up into insufferable pricks with disposable funds and bad attitudes. They all moved to Brooklyn so they could hate each other more efficiently and for some reason this became the new hotness. Thanks to them, the rest of us will seem like total dipshits when future generations research the aughts via their Wikipedia brain implants. The end.

Of course that's not entirely accurate, and certainly doesn't do justice to the actual artists, musicians, and whathaveyous who laid the groundwork for the subculture in the first place. I'm simply taking the long view. I assume the scene looks different from a Williamsburg art gallery than it does from where I'm standing, but I'm standing here, and you can't have it both ways. The fact of the matter is that whether or not there are legit roots, the legacy will be idiotic fashion, bad beer, worse drugs, and ennui.

I must note that I honestly don't think the hipsters themselves are to blame for most of this. The pace of our society is such that the phases most subcultures go through happened to this one more or less at the same time. The whole thing was packaged for mass consumption before it even got the chance to define itself, burn out, and become the object of scorn in an organic fashion. Hipsterdom was exported simultaneously as a glamourous lifestyle and a stinging insult to its practitioners. The label itself is caustic, yet it can be applied to just about anyone in their twenties during the aughts if you look hard enough. Clothing, taste in music, choice of hangout, anything can identify you as a member, but there is no unifying philosophy, no community, no camaraderie to gain, only derision. It's almost as if the hipster subculture was created in a lab, the result of some nefarious scheme to devise the best possible social scene to stifle and slander an entire generation of young people.

It is somewhat unfair to come down too hard on a group characterized by a compulsive yearning for the authentic, even if the result was being unable to appreciate anything at all. Just look at what the the larger culture offered up this decade. It was a parade of mediocrity -- a decade of revamps, throwbacks, and revivals. Somebody somewhere crunched the numbers and decided that it just didn't add up to invest in new ideas when re-packaging old stuff guaranteed returns. Music artists made careers out of organizing the work of their forbears. Hollywood saw fit to defile just about every great comic book ever written and raked in an obscene amount doing it. Practically every decade this century has its music featured in themed dance parties at least once each week.

There was good stuff in there. This is a culture of such impressive excess that even niche art can sometimes get a chance. It was difficult to take heart from these small victories, though. Just ask a fan of Arrested Development or Firefly. Fresh, challenging stuff had to fight to survive in a market flooded with dime-a-dozen reality television shows and an endless stream of half-hearted movie remakes and sequels.

It's ironic. Our artistic culture these last ten years became a watered-down facade while at the same time the usually shadowy power apparatus came clean in unprecedented ways.

Make no mistake, our government has never been shy about using violence to forward the agendas of the economic institutions pulling the strings. After Vietnam though, they usually tried to hide that sort of thing -- private contractor assassins, special forces, propaganda, you name it. Failing that, they at least had to sell it really well. After September 11 -- that would be the one in 2001 in case you forgot -- they didn't really need to bother. All they have to do now is point at a country, mumble something about freedom and the founding fathers, maybe shed a single mournful tear and BOO-YA -- instant righteous war with a group of people who don't stand a chance.

The charade is now so paper-thin only the willingly ignorant can pretend it's there at all. Take Iraq, the war they tried to excuse on the basis of protecting folks from weapons of mass destruction and later as a humanitarian mission to free the Iraqi people from an oppressive regime. It all makes sense, provided you ignore the fact that North Korea had a far more viable nuclear program with a far crazier leader's finger on the button, and the fact that there are regimes in less oil-rich parts of the world that make Saddam Hussein look like George Fucking Washington. The military-industrial complex must perpetuate itself, and everyone needs to get on board or shut the hell up. Flower that up and amend the constitution, because that's how it works now.

Here in the U.S., the decade was presided over by George W. Bush, a man who has made great strides for the incredibly ignorant and unreasonably ambitious demographic. While I'm fairly certain he had very little to do with actual policy, his administration gave us endless wars, curtailed our rights, invaded our privacy, bombed the shit out of all kinds of people who didn't deserve it and cemented the swaggering, slack-jawed cowboy image the rest of the world has always had of anyone born on this part of the land mass. Naturally, after eight years, there was a bit of a backlash from all that. In 2008, the American people took the unprecedented step of electing someone who vowed to make war with furrowed brow as opposed to the throbbing erection of his predecessor. If there really were personifications for the decades, even the hippies would give us a swirly and take our lunch money.

If you too were disappointed that the armed conflict issue was settled by a vote between "war" and "more war," then I hope you weren't expecting great strides in the area of economic justice, because it wasn't even on the table. And by "not on the table," I mean of course such issues were swept from the metaphoric table, in the heat of passion, in order to create a space upon which the wealthy and powerful could make sweet sweet love to one another.

Imagine for a second that you get the chance to explain the recent financial meltdown to someone in the nineties through time travel or something. "You have to watch out for the investment banks and financial services industry on Wall Street," you'll say. "I know everyone's doing well now, but they've found a way to more or less artificially inflate their profits due to lack of oversight and regulatory loopholes. The problem is that the whole system is built upon the gamble that the housing market is never going to decline. But it will! When it does, all these old and reliable financial institutions will start falling like flies."

"Wow," your apprehensive listener will say, "that sounds serious. But how is that such a big deal? This is capitalism. Aren't they supposed to fail if they make a bad gamble?"

"That's the worst part," you'll elaborate while accentuating the story with bombastic gestures. "In the dead of night, government officials who used to work for Wall Street firms meet with the owners and executives and arrange to give them billions of dollars to keep them afloat with almost no strings attached. Over the next year or so, the economy will go into a tailspin, and this bailout system will expand."

"Uh... okay," your listener will edge away, but you'll grab them by the shoulders and lean in, eyes all crazy.

"The people responsible for the crisis get off without even a slap on the wrist. In fact, they all get huge bonuses. The stock market rebounds, but unemployment stays at record highs. Even though the whole idea of bailing them out was to avoid financial collapse, we give money to the people and institutions who caused it and let them do as they please with it. It's a disaster!"

"Oh," they'll say. "Wait here while I call the president," But they'll lie to you and call security instead, and you'll spend the rest of your life in a padded room mumbling about collateralized debt obligations and swatting at the ephemeral pixie bankers that harass you day and night.

No sane society would have allowed this to happen in the first place, but when things came to head in late 2008, the powers that supposedly represent us not only failed to dismantle this impenetrable and destructive system, but more or less gave the perpetrators license to continue indefinitely, comfortable with the knowledge that the government will bail them out if anything else goes wrong. As I write this, there is no substantive financial regulation being put in place or even really discussed, and an attempt to reform health care has morphed into a huge giveaway to the insurance companies who are responsible for that problem in the first place.

And every night you can turn on the television to watch tongue-in-cheek populist pundits scream and cry about any perceived -- and they are all perceived -- instance of resistance to our glorious "capitalist" system. The word itself has been reduced to meaninglessness. It has become a system completely unconcerned with long-term sustainability or any consideration for the society that supports it. It wears the trappings, but the merit-based system to which people refer died long ago and what rose in its place was something new. It no longer pretends to be more than a naked racket and so I feel it requires a new name, just for the sake of intellectual honesty.

When your children come of age, and you take them by the hand to go down to the local Wal-Mart to be implanted with the mandated computer chips to track corporate loyalty, brand preference, and hereditary debt to the banking overlords, you can tell them about the aughts and how a very clever person on the internet started calling it crapitalism.

While it wasn't invented during this decade, it's fair to say that the last ten years were when we figured out how we would make use of the internet. It is the technological tool with the greatest potential for the empowerment of small groups and individuals, and the societal element that will likely define our civilization until its collapse. Of course, we use it primarily to more efficiently scam one another, but this should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to the nature of the modern homo sapien.

To be fair, this is likely going to be the next decade's battle. Those who want to free information, grow communities, and subvert the old order are not likely to strike a deal with the forces who want to use the internet to cram advertisements in your face before they stomp on it -- at least not any time soon. The aughts were the years we used to experiment with it. We now have an understanding of its potential -- for creation and destruction, freedom and control -- and we can start to imagine just what we can do with it, and what we ought to avoid.

Previous generations imagined flying cars and laser guns by now. Fortunately for science fiction writers, technology seldom plays out exactly as expected. When this decade began, I never imagined I'd bother to own a cellular phone. It seemed to be quite an expense for such a small convenience. However, as I write this, I have in my pocket a device that can communicate with satellites to determine my exact location. Maybe it's not as exciting to everyone as it is to me, but we are living the science fiction of ten years ago.

So far we are not doing very well with it, I have to say. While this decade has seen the exploration of Mars, the mapping of the human genome, and the construction of a device intended to smash reality into its constituent parts, we have also been forced to witness the nastier side of advancement. We've seen the rejection of reason in favor of a soothing fairy tale to explain where we come from. We've seen people cry over the definition of the word "planet." We've had to watch our media and elected officials quibble over the extent of climate change while completely failing to address the thousands of other examples of how humanity is destroying the Earth.

Putting aside the question of whether or not a technological solution to our problems is possible or even desirable, it is a goal I can at least understand. We aren't even trying for some kind of Star Trek future anymore. When space-faring alien life forms visit our bleak world centuries from now they will conclude that we were a petty, violent people who had the means to avoid destruction but were too busy applying all our effort into the accumulation of personal wealth. I'd always hoped we were capable of more than that.

It's frustrating because we have the awareness to see just how oppressive and wasteful and foul our society has become, but we ignore it. We have the tools to tear down and replace the obsolete power structures that tell us how to live, but we forsake them. I still think we are a species with the ingenuity and gumption to learn from our mistakes and come up with something new and better, but we just aren't trying.

Apparently there isn't even a consensus on what to call this decade. I think "the aughts" is the perfect name for ten years we utterly squandered. Ten years in which the curtains were pulled back and we caught a glimpse of exactly how things work, but we decided to keep chatting with the giant flaming head.

In ten years, we'll declare another arbitrary milestone. While the most recent one left much to be desired, and that can be somewhat depressing, we always have the next one. Maybe the tens will be the decade we get worked up and do something. I wonder what that review will be like.

Personally, I want to write it in bullet holes. I want to write it in fire on the White House lawn. I'll write it in morse code, clinking my shackles together in the hope that someone can hear it. I want to write it with brainwaves that ride superelectrons straight into your cerebrum. I want to scratch it into the wall of a ruined building with what's left of my fingernails. I want to write the story of how we got it right or the story of how we went down in flames. I don't care as long as it's not the story of how we sat on our hands for ten more years.

If I don't write it, then I hope I die well -- or it's because I'm too busy having sex on the fucking moon.