What was wrong with the 90's?

I saw The Doom Generation (1995) last night: it was in the cult section at the video store, looked interesting. Mixed feelings about it. Great directing: the film was edgy and exciting and visually very creative. And it had incredibly explicit sex and violence and Rose McGowan spent pretty much the whole film naked, so there's another plus. This, however, doesn't make up for an abominably bad script and downright unforgivable acting.

But it got me thinking about the 1990s. What was wrong with the world then? You had Bill Clinton, the internet, video games, a good economy, you'd think things were going well. But the culture of the times seems (today, anyway) garish and nihilistic. Things were ostensibly going well, but I have to think that Nevermind and Blue Velvet and Rent wouldn't have been made if there wasn't some unexplainable current of despair running through the American collective unconscious. Douglas Coupland probably knows what I'm talking about.

Then again, maybe avant-garde nihilism was a way of escaping the cultural wasteland of an increasingly corporate/consumerist society. But that doesn't make it good art.

Here's an untapped market: Urban-marketed chewing gum. Picture a gold foil packet filled with nuggets of gum shaped like cut diamonds and little interlocked chains, in flavors like "Ballin' Blueberry", "Pimpin' Pineapple", "Gangsta Grape".

The key to ballin' is, of course, ostentatious spending. The gum will cost five to ten dollars a pack. How baller would you be if you spent ten bucks on premium chewing gum?

Self-Help

Or, I could make a little money by writing a self-help book. You don't actually need to give very good advice at all; all you have to do to get published is make a lot of metaphysical claims and paint a big picture, and tell people where they fit.

How about this: Because of chaos theory and all the rest, everything is connected to everything else. Everything you do affects everything else in the world to some extent. So, when somebody does something evil or a big catastrophe happens, it is literally your fault. You are responsible for 9/11, for Katrina, for the JFK assassination, because of the fundamental interconnectedness of things. What should you do about it? Well, since everything's so complex and you don't know what consequences will follow from your actions, the best thing to do is nothing at all.

That's pretty liberating, don't you think? It's your fault that the war in Iraq is going poorly - specifically your fault - and you shouldn't bother doing anything about it. That would sell a million copies. It's better than "The Secret", for sure.