"}I feel most of our discourse is resurrecting what we interred in the late 1990s.\u00a0
It\u2019s tempting to think of the 1990s as the era of The End of History, after Francis Fukuyama\u2019s essay of the same name. It was the decade when nothing happened and everything was ephemeral. It was just another bubble that popped.
ESPN and FX recently resurrected the OJ Simpson trial as high drama about race and justice in America,\u00a0but back then it was just trash.\u00a0That\u2019s all everything was. Gennifer Flowers had sex with Clinton and had the tapes. Clinton\u2019s spokesman called the story \u201ctrash for cash.\u201d The New York Observer gave Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly the annual white trash award. The New Yorker\u00a0was more precise:\u00a0\u201cTrailer trash is what they call people out here,\u201d the locals told their reporter. In August 1994,\u00a0New York ran a cover story on\u00a0the defining figure of the decade: White Trash.\u00a0\u201cThey\u2019re everywhere. Lock up your Twinkies.\u201d
It\u2019s tempting to reduce Fukuyama to that moment, when the Berlin Wall came down and there was nothing worth watching on television. After socialism, there was nothing.\u00a0There would be no struggle. All contradictions would be resolved. All needs would be satisfied. \u201cThere would be neither art nor philosophy,\u201d he wrote,\u00a0\u201cjust the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.\u201d In a footnote, Fukuyama wrote that the End of History might look like the postwar American way of life. And if liberal democracy is the natural end of human history, then Fukuyama might be the philosopher of fully-realized human: Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, or Roseanne. Everything was personal, and everything else could be set aside.
Although there was neither art nor philosophy, it was not clear that there was much time for the caretaking of the museum of human history. The most pressing public questions involved the president\u2019s private affairs. \u201cIt was the summer when a president\u2019s penis was on everyone\u2019s mind,\u201d Philip Roth wrote of 1998.\u00a0That August, Brett Kavanaugh thought the most important questions for the president were ones like these: \u201cIf Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary\u2019s office, would she be lying?\u201d\u00a0When the president bombed Iraq in December, Congress accused him of using a bombing campaign to distract the country from his impeachment proceedings. They wouldn\u2019t be so easily distracted.
It\u2019s easy to mock, but making the 1990s about the End of History is a mistake. There\u2019s some reality to it: By the end of the decade, most Americans thought that politics was inconsequential.\u00a0Congress really did impeach the president for lying about whether he had had an affair.\u00a0
But if the End of History did capture a mood, it was\u00a0only one characteristic of the late 1990s, not the early 1990s. If the second half of the decade represents\u00a0the End of History and the temporary triumph of a certain American way of life, the first half of the decade represents the persistence of History, and a mood much like our own.
There was little optimism in early 1990s.\u00a0There was endless hand-wringing about race and inequality.\u00a0The 1992 New York Times Notable Books list\u00a0doesn\u2019t include Fukuyama\u2019s book, but includes many books that might as well have been published yesterday:
AMERICA: WHAT WENT WRONG? By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. (Andrews & McMeel, paper, $6.95.) This expanded newspaper series by two Pulitzer Prize winners finds that the economy has been altered to favor the already favored.
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA. By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Norton, $14.95.) A sane and temperate discussion of how ethnic historians are creating intellectual ghettos, fragmenting society and undermining the ideal of political unity.
THE END OF EQUALITY. By Mickey Kaus. (Basic Books, $25.) Mr. Kaus, an editor of The New Republic, argues boldly and radically that the present welfare system, corrupt and corrupting, should be eliminated and replaced by a guaranteed jobs program.
FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL: The Permanence of Racism. By Derrick Bell. (Basic Books, $20.) A prominent scholar of race and the law argues, with allegory, fables and dialogues, that our progress against racism so far has been illusory.
TWO NATIONS: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. By Andrew Hacker. (Scribners, $24.95.) The thesis of this challenging book by a distinguished political scientist is that unto this day black people have not received a fair shake as American citizens \u2013 and that most white Americans don\u2019t believe this.
WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE: The Betrayal of American Democracy. By William Greider. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Mr. Greider, a former assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, presents a comprehensive guide to the American political system, which, he argues, is now a \u201cgrand bazaar\u201d of moneyed interest groups and a grand attempt to obscure this fact.
From the vantage point of the early 1990s, the White Trash wave was not a sign of peace. It was there in the epitaphs of their bestsellers, that irrepressible cliche:\u00a0\u201cThings fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.\u201d That was Yeats by way of Robert Bork. It could have been anyone.\u00a0
Everything was a sign of how things were coming apart. The recession, the urban crime wave, the Los Angeles riots, and Ross Perot\u2019s populist independent campaign were all signs of American decline. And that was just 1992.
In April, Los Angeles burned.\u00a0Within twenty-four hours of the first assaults, there more than one thousand structural fires reported across the county.\u00a0Rioters snaked north and east, along Wilshire, through Koreatown, up to Hollywood. There were enough looters getting in and out of store parking lots\u00a0to cause gridlock across the city.\u00a0
They could not even control the streets. On the first day, the police tried and failed to retake Normandy and Florence. \u201cWe were simply overwhelmed,\u201d the police chief said.\u00a0Firemen were assaulted as the fires raged.\u00a0\u201cThey tried to kill them with axes,\u201d the fire chief said. The leader of the most powerful country in the world had to send in the Marines to take control of his country\u2019s second-largest city.
Three thousand soldiers and fifteen hundred Marines arrived in Los Angeles to meet the two thousand National Guard soldiers already deployed and the three thousand more recently activated. They moved to riot hotspots in armored personnel carriers, armed and in combat dress. For days, caravans of Humvees overran downtown and south Los Angeles. After the riots, the Army and the Marines withdrew from the city, but remained on alert at the air stations in Orange County.\u00a0
\u201cThis is a lot different from attacking an Iraqi bunker,\u201d one soldier told the Los Angeles Times. \u201cThere you know who the enemy is.\u201d
It took more than twenty-thousand police and soldiers and a dusk-to-dawn curfew to restore order to the burning city. There were\u00a0fifty-three dead, many killed in confrontations with the police.\u00a0The deadliest riot in modern American history was over. It was not nearly enough: a fraction of the 2,589 homicides the Los Angeles County coroner would count that year.\u00a0
It was an anxious era, and not just in Los Angeles. In 1993, one hundred and eleven American cities were more dangerous than Afghanistan. The greatest cities were some of the worst: Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago were three times as dangerous as Afghanistan is today, and Washington was eight times as dangerous.\u00a0
New York City was experiencing its own unfathomable crime wave. Mayor David Dinkins called New York a \u201ccity under siege\u201d and promised to be\u00a0\u201cthe toughest mayor on crime this city has ever seen.\u201d In September 1990,\u00a0New York ran a crime feature that asked \u201cHow safe is your neighborhood?\u201d and listed the city\u2019s most dangerous subway stations,\u00a0Time ran a cover story on \u201cThe Rotting of the Big Apple,\u201d and even the Trotskyist Workers Vanguard\u00a0was telling readers that \u201cthe fear is real.\u201d
Ghettos and barrios have become\n\u201cfree fire\u201d zones as drug gangs shoot it\nout with each other and the cops. The\nvictims are primarily blacks and Hispanics,\noften children like nine-month-old\nRayvon Jamieson, slain by stray gunfire\nin his grandmother\u2019s Bronx kitchen,\nor Veronica Corrales, the nine-year-old\nstruck by a bullet while sleeping in\nher family\u2019s car on a Brooklyn street.\nTwenty-three \u201cgypsy\u201d cab and livery\nservice drivers have been murdered this\nyear. But the bourgeoisie doesn\u2019t care\nabout them.
It has become easy to think of Donald Trump as a creature of the 1970s, out of place in the modern world, but our anxieties about race, crime, and immigration did not peak until the early 1990s. And they were not the anxieties of the Heartland alone.
She was a twenty-eight-year-old investment banker at Salomon Brothers, a vegetarian, and a graduate of Wellesley and Yale. She\u00a0lived alone on East 83rd Street. The Upper East Side was one of the safest neighborhoods in the city, but\u00a0when she returned home, at eight-thirty or nine-thirty in the evening, she would run six or seven miles through Central Park.\u00a0
Early one morning\u00a0in April 1989, she was found in a shallow ravine by the 102nd Street Traverse.\u00a0She had been there, bleeding into a puddle, for four hours. Her skull had been crushed, the surface wrinkles of her brain flattened.\u00a0She had lost three quarters of her blood. Twelve days later, she would wake from her coma. She\u00a0had already been given last rites.
The five accused eventually had their sentences vacated. They had left no semen, no blood. And here\u00a0was hardly enough time for them to assault the woman by the 102nd Street Traverse.\u00a0They were busy assaulting strangers on the other side of Central Park North.\u00a0\u201cThat was the issue,\u201d one defense lawyer said. \u201cBut we didn\u2019t say, \u2018No, when the jogger was raped, my client was on 96th Street, mugging someone else.\u2019 That would have been self-defeating.\u201d
In 2002, another man assumed sole responsibility for the attack.\u00a0He was linked to seven other rapes in the seven months surrounding the attack. He had raped another woman in Central Park just two days prior. In 1991, he plead guilty to four rapes and the murder of a pregnant woman.\u00a0And his semen matched.\u00a0
The Central Park Five had been fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Matias Reyes, the true assailant, was just seventeen. In the year of the assault, 42 percent of New York\u2019s homicide arrestees were under twenty-one.\u00a0That was also a record year in New York City: 2,245 homicides, the most in the city\u2019s history, and 3,125 forcible rapes, largely of men and women without the privilege to receive much newspaper coverage.
Full-page advertisements ran in the\u00a0Times,\u00a0Post, Daily News, and Newsday.\u00a0\u201cWhat has happened to our City over the past ten years?\u201d it asked. Then it answered:\u00a0\u201cWhat has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we knew it.\u201d The author, Donald Trump, described his\u00a0\u201cdeep-seated feeling that what\u2019s happening in society today has to be stopped.\u201d He was not alone.\u00a0
In December 1990, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0Editorial Board said the city now resembled the worst of the Third World:
The streets already resemble a New Calcutta, bristling with beggars and sad schizophrenics tuned in to inner voices. Crime, the fear of it as much as the fact, adds overtones of a New Beirut. Many New Yorkers now think twice about where they can safely walk; in a civilized place, that should be as automatic as breathing. \u2026 Regaining the streets means fighting three related enemies: crime, homelessness and filth. Increasing levels of violent crime make physical fear a constant, nagging fact of daily life. The homeless mentally ill convey a subtler sense of menace \u2013 that the city has lost its moral bearings, that things are out of control.
Crime, homelessness, filth.\u00a0The headline: \u201cTo Restore New York City, First, Reclaim the Streets.\u201d It was the sort of thing Donald Trump might say.
In the face of this wave of urban violence, you could read the Los Angeles riots as an epitaph for the American way of life. Rioters carried placards. \u201cNo Justice, No Peace.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s a White Man\u2019s World.\u201d \u201cBurn, Baby, Burn.\u201d\u00a0Some Americans seemed to live in another world entirely. Nightline\u00a0asked three gang members about the truck driver that had been dragged out of his truck and beaten on national television. The first: \u201cHe knew better. He saw what was happening.\u201d The second: \u201cIt was a CIA.\u201d The third:\u00a0\u201cThey saying that, well, we burning down our own community. I mean, we don\u2019t own none of these liquor stores.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0
President George H. W. Bush declared Los Angeles County a disaster area. He sounded exhausted.
No one watching the television coverage of the violence yesterday afternoon and evening could have any reaction other than revulsion and pain. Mob brutality, the total loss of respect for human life was sickeningly sad. The frustration all of us felt seeing helpless victims pulled from vehicles and assaulted, it was hard not to turn our eyes away.\u00a0
He traveled to the scene of the disaster. \u201cI can hardly imagine the fear and the anger that people must feel to terrorize one another and burn each other\u2019s property,\u201d he said. Then he went to Koreatown. These immigrants, he said, had\u00a0\u201cgrabbed a piece of the American dream, and built something. To see it shattered is not the American way.\u201d\u00a0
\u201cThis isn\u2019t the American dream,\u201d he said.
Outside the United States, some Asians had doubts about the entire American project.\u00a0Two weeks after the riots, Vice President Dan Quayle began a speech with a defense of diversity against the challenge of homogeneity. \u201cFrom the perspective of many Japanese\u201d \u2013 the vice president had spent the week in Japan \u2013 \u201cthe ethnic diversity of our culture is a weakness compared to their homogeneous society. I begged to differ with my hosts. I explained that our diversity is our strength.\u201d\u00a0It was not an applause line.
One remarkable thing is how even prosperous and liberal Americans felt enormous anxiety about crime and immigration. In 1991, Haynes Johnson interviewed one prosperous Bay Area resident who happened to think rioters were better off dead:
High on the hills of Oakland, overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate, rises a cluster of elegant houses, the homes of judges, doctors, lawyers, architects, business executives, and university officials. All races and backgrounds are represented there. Success is their common denominator.
In the fall of 1991, a great fire swept the hills, leveling many homes and reducing others to blackened shells. No sooner had the smoke and flames subsided than the very poor of the inner-city flatlands of Oakland swarmed up to loot, invading even some houses that had survived the fire and were still occupied. One of the hill people took to sitting at night in his living room with a baseball bat to ward off the looters. He\u2019s seventy years old, a man of distinction in government and university circles, and someone I\u2019ve known for years.
\u201cIt\u2019s more than drugs and crime,\u201d he says of the problems he sees afflicting America, \u201cit\u2019s deterioration of the fabric of life altogether. I have always been upbeat, superpatriotic. But I\u2019m depressed. If Alvin Toffler is right that change increases at an ever-accelerating rate, and if the British Empire lasted five hundred years, maybe the post-World War II American Empire will only last seventy-five years.\u201d
He pauses, then talks about his reaction to televised scenes of plundering after a Florida hurricane that fall. \u201cNow whenever I see a looter, I say shoot the bastard,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t care if they shoot the fuckers.\u201d
Haynes Johnson\u2019s 1994 state-of-the-nation book, Divided We Fall,\u00a0describes America in almost Trumpian cliches.\u00a0
What I heard at the beginning in the below-zero shadows of Maine was what I heard at the end in the broiling sunshine of San Ysidro, Califomia, where U.S. Border Patrol members vainly tried to check a tidal wave of illegal immigrants entering from Tijuana, Mexico: that America was in trouble, that it needed to change, that it faced more disturbing questions than anyone could remember. This belief was held even by those who survived the Great Depression and World War II.
Based on what I found, failure to address America\u2019s increasing racial and ethnic tensions, economic inequities, and the rapidly widening gap between the haves and have-nots will inevitably result in new and greater explosions. The Los Angeles riots of April 1992 were not an aberration.
I have to stress that this was not an expression of unusual nativism, but a common attitude. In September 1993, the\u00a0Los Angeles Times\u00a0poll showed that 86 percent believed that illegal immigration was one of the three most important problems facing California. In November 1994, the state passed a ballot proposition \u2013 59 to 41 percent \u2013 withdrawing all public services for the undocumented. It was held up in court, but the 1996 federal welfare reform bill achieved much the same thing: It made illegal immigrants ineligible for almost all state and federal benefits.
If Haynes did not feel warmly about the\u00a0\u201ctidal wave of illegal immigrants,\u201d Donald Barlett and James Steele \u2013 they of the 1992\u00a0Notable Book America: What Went Wrong?\u00a0\u2013\u00a0were positively hostile to Mexican factories:\u00a0\u201cAmerican corporations are closing plants or slashing work forces in the U.S. and shifting the jobs to Mexico,\u201d highlighting the hundreds of Mexican factories with thousands of workers, each depriving an American of their livelihood. That was the \u201cgiant sucking sound\u201d that won Ross Perot 19% of the vote in 1992.
It\u2019s easy to dismiss Perot as another right-wing populist. He was anti-immigration, anti-trade, tough on crime. You would expect it to be a Republican message. But nothing about the politics of the early 1990s is that simple. When Perot briefly dropped out of the race, two-thirds of his vote went to Bill Clinton.
I find it difficult to read the early 1990s except as a time when the End of History seemed distant, when the nation\u2019s\u00a0deep anxieties over race, crime, immigration, and national decline deepened.\u00a0Nothing seemed inconsequential. It was a portentous time, with much to be portentous about.
Perhaps more shocking than anything else is how quickly everything turned around. Crime dropped astonishingly rapidly. Unemployment fell to record lows. Wages rose. Poverty fell. Throughout the 1990s, the United States was the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth, but it wasn\u2019t until the end of the decade that it felt like it.\u00a0
Here was the optimism and confidence Fukuyama had predicted in the early 1990s. Here was the country without struggle, where all human needs were satisfied and all social contradictions were resolved. Here was where the anxieties of the early 1990s could be interred.
For the past few years it has felt like everyone I knew was digging up those bones. I hope that now we can bury them all again.