the times | Tuesday May 24 2022 3times2
learning from the live streamed
defamation proceedings between
Amber Heard and Johnny Depp?
Even our comparable technological
achievements can seem trivial next to
those of the 1990s, just as Skylab was
a big, geostationary bore after the
Apollo missions. Today marks the
opening of a railway that will
eventually knock minutes off the
time it takes to get from Reading to
Shenfield. Eurostar launched in 1993
and took us beneath the sea to Paris.
Similarly, the repeats of the world’s
biggest, most salacious scandals seem
to have descended in Hegelian fashion
from tragedy to farce. The Nineties
was marred by the disintegration of
the marriage of the heir to the throne
and the woman who would be queen.
It ended in a full-blown tragedy that
threatened to loosen the British stiff
upper lip for ever. What have we
today? The defection of a secondary
heir and his Hollywood bride to Los
Angeles, where they well-meaningly
chide us for not being nicer people,
benign Lord Haw-Haws broadcasting
to us from Channel Oprah. It would, as
Oscar said, require a heart of stone...
But the Nineties tribute act that is
our decade rarely makes us laugh.
There is a feeling of best-laid plans
gang aft a-gley, of purposes mistook
and fallen on their inventors’ heads.
How dare Premier Blair’s efforts for
peace in Ireland, efforts that began
upon election in 1997 and ten years
later tempted the hand of history to
alight on his shoulder, end up in a
power-sharing Stormont where theFrom left: Drew
Barrymore (1991) and
Chiara Ferragni (2021)
in ripped jeans; Anneka
Rice. Top: Diana,
Princess of Wales and
Prince Charles in 1991.
Above: the Duke and
Duchess of Sussex.
Below left: Terry
Wogan and Sonia, the
UK’s 1993 Eurovision
entry; Sam Ryder, who
finished second this
yearto Susanna
Reid’s interview
with Boris
Johnson this month.
And abroad? In the 1990s
we looked for the post-Cold
War peace dividend and
saw instead the former
Yugoslavia cascade into hell.
Today we similarly accept
the counterintuitivetragedy of war in which the KGB’s
most notorious pensioner intends to
create the former Ukraine. What’s
happening? Exactly what Tim
Marshall in his excellent book
Prisoners of Geography explained. “We
have neither conquered our geography
nor our propensity to compete for it.”
Mark Twain, an even better writer,
maintained that history does not
repeat itself but that it often
rhymes. Our Twenties are not
roaring but quietly reciting a
not very good poem that
quotes better lines from
greater times, a Waste Land
of what was never worth
recycling in
the first place.
We devoured
the televised
trial of OJ
Simpson in 1995,
viewing his
acquittal on a charge
of murder as an
aberration rather than a
proof of the disaster of
American race relations.
What lesson, or
equivalent value, are weAlthough
we are
weary
of them,
some
Tory MPs
are not
too tired
for sex
it feels like we’re back in the 1990s
politicians refuse to share power?
How could the early Nineties’
attempts to lower the age of
homosexual consent have produced
a climate in which an independent-
minded sixth-former is forced to leave
her school for asking the wrong
question about biological sex?
In 1992 the European Union was
created out of the European
Community. On the mainland, the
ensuing single market on January 1,
1993, was so popular that songs were
composed about it. Many British
politicians muttered dissenting
descants, descants that eventually
became the anthem of Brexit.
The nation voted to get out, but
somehow, six years on from the vote
the tunes are still sung, but in the key
of whine. Certainly, we must count our
long European experiment a failure,
but how little excitement is there to
post-Brexit! How puny our ambitions!
Jacob Rees-Mogg is minister of state
for Brexit opportunities. Cometh the
hour, cometh the man.
The Twenties are a bleak sequel to
the Nineties, because our present is
built on the ashes of the dreams of
our younger selves. History, in the
bellicose sense, did not end with the
end of the Soviet Union and no more
did the European Union extinguish
nationalism. We have, instead, the
return of borders (although sadly not
the return of Borders bookshop,
founded in Britain in 1999, dead ten
years later).
Above all, the hope of a global,
peaceably trading world, formalised
by the creation of the World Trade
Organisation in 1995, has vanished.
In the late-Nineties TV fantasy The
West Wing, the White House speech
writer Toby Ziegler explained why the
WTO protesters were wrong. “Free
trade stops wars. And that’s it. Free
trade stops wars! And we figure out
a way to fix the rest. One world, one
peace — I’m sure I’ve seen that on a
sign somewhere.”
No one would write that line now,
not even Aaron Sorkin.
At such times of the same again but
maybe worse it is tempting to call
progress a myth and conclude that life
is a zero sum game in which happiness
can neither be created nor destroyed
but merely redistributed. Yet there is
progress.
The Hubble Space Telescope was
launched in 1990, and last month
discovered a rapidly growing black
hole in the early universe. The just
launched James Webb can see objects
so much further back in time.
The internet, dismissed by some in
the 1990s as good only for saving
lonely singles trips to the porn store,
has truly proved every man’s portal to
the wide world. In the 1990s the sirens
sounded to warn us that multichannel
television would destroy quality
television. Today its successor, digital
streaming, has spun a golden age of
creativity.
And here’s something. Linda
McCartney began her vegetarian and
vegan food brand in 1991. Today you
can order a vegan burger in
McDonald’s. It may, like the Nineties,
repeat on us, but it may also save our
planet. Now, there’s a challenge
worthy of Anneka Rice.COVER: MIRRORPIX; BELOW: REX FEATURES; GETTY IMAGES; REUTERS; BBCdl
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