Tag: America in the 1990s

2,530 words

See also: “Waco: The Incident that Kickstarted the Right”

Waco: The Aftermath, which follows 2018’s miniseries Waco and was made by the same production team, is a historical-fiction miniseries that examines the cultural impact of the FBI’s calamitous 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian “compound” in Waco, Texas which ended with a raid on April 19, 1993 in which 76 civilians were killed. The miniseries has three plotlines. The first centers on the criminal trial involving Branch Davidian Clive Doyle (John Hoogenakker) and his lawyer Dan Cogdell (Giovanni Ribisi), as well as co-defendants Ruth Riddle (Kali Rocha), Livingstone Fagan (Michael Luwoye), and Paul Fatta (Nicholas Kolev). (more…)

2,762 words

Peter Brimelow
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster
New York: Random House, 1995

Is it really wise to allow the immigration of people who find it so difficult and painful to assimilate into the American majority? — Peter Brimelow

In retrospect, the years of the Clinton administration were baffling. On the surface, the Democratic Party’s insane-asylum wing appeared to be ascendant. All the while, under the surface, conservative ideas moved from political success to success. (more…)

6,544 words

This is an excerpt from my memoir The Xena Years, about life in the nineties. It seems relevant today.

I had just climbed out of the pool when the woman bowed towards Mecca. (more…)

1,116 words

On a Sunday last May, while Minneapolis burned, my Yankee sweetheart and I indulged in a double helping of nostalgia. The engine that propelled us along this journey down memory lane was Blast from the Past, an American romantic comedy, now a little more than twenty years old, that celebrated the morals, manners, and milieux of an even earlier time and place, the America sacrificed on the altar of equality of opportunity in the annus mirabilis of 1965. (more…)

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin

1,328 words

I consider social media the biggest pestilence on the culture since the opioid crisis. . . and before that, the mass-dosing of the populace with antidepressants. . . and before that, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. . . but social media is good for a few things. (more…)

2,458 words

In 1998, when I was 12 years old, my father and I were watching television one evening when we stumbled upon an HBO made-for-TV movie called The Second Civil War.

The film has been largely forgotten in the years since, but its content — and the eerily accurate predictions within it — are quite astounding to behold today, 22 years later.

The film was directed by Joe Dante and has an ensemble cast featuring Denis Leary, Dan Hedaya, James Earl Jones, Beau Bridges, Phil Hartman, (more…)

2,425 words

I feel like I grew up in Twin Peaks, the fictional Washington logging town that gave its name to David Lynch’s iconic TV series, which aired on ABC from the spring of 1990 to the spring of 1991. Twin Peaks has one of the best pilots in television history, which was followed by an abbreviated first season of seven episodes. (more…)

1,420 words

Modest Mouse was formed in Issaquah, Washington, in the year 1992. Issaquah was formerly a sleepy community removed from the sprawl of the Seattle metropolitan area, but is now another far-flung bedroom town swallowed whole by the Microsoft and later Amazon-centered tech boom and its ensuing concreting of the Puget Sound (more…)

4,673 words

To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

I grew up in the final years of the Cold War. If you aren’t old enough to remember the Cold War, let me tell you that it was a trip.

(more…)

6,583 words

In tyrannies. . . to test the tyrant’s authority was to risk incarceration, torture, and death; in America’s democracy, by contrast, to contest the president’s authority was to win media attention, big book advances, posses of fellow-travelers, and lawyers such as Ken Starr crowding for business and prominence.

— Nigel Hamilton (more…)

1,944 words

You’d rather see me in the pen
Than me and Lorenzo rollin’ in a Benz-o
Beat a police out of shape
And when I’m finished, bring the yellow tape
To tape off the scene of the slaughter
Still getting swole off bread and water
I don’t know if they fags or what
Search a nigga down, and grabbing his nuts
And on the other hand, without a gun, they can’t get none.

— N. W. A., “Fuck tha Police.” (more…)