Culture

On Thursday nights in the 1990s, millions of American living rooms looked the same. In one house it was Family Matters. In another it was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. In another it was a rerun of The Cosby Show. You were not tuning in for a lesson on identity. You were tuning in because you knew what it was like to have a sibling who annoyed you, a parent who caught you lying, or a family member who could turn a normal evening into chaos. ...

There is a collective hallucination currently infecting our cultural memory. If you listen to modern media or scroll through “revised” history on social media, you’d be led to believe that the slang of the late 20th century was only used by a handful of fringe bigots or “problematic” outliers. That is a flat-out lie. The reality is much simpler, much more pervasive, and much more uncomfortable for the “virtue” era to swallow: for decades, words like gay and retarded were the undisputed, universal standard protocol for every kid in the country. ...

Somewhere along the line, society decided that plain old competence was too cruel a sorting mechanism. We could not just say one person is intellectually sharp and another person is socially graceful. That would leave somebody without a trophy. So we pulled off one of the slickest little semantic scams of the modern self-esteem era: we took people skills, wrapped them in the prestige language of IQ, and handed socially adept mediocrities an honorary genius badge. ...

Every photo album holds a quiet contradiction. Look at images from 1991 and you don’t see the 1990s. You see the 1980s: the clothes, the malls, the cars, the interiors, the hairstyles, the tone of everyday life. The same happens with 2002, which still looks like the 1990s, or 2012, which resembles the 2000s more than the decade it technically belongs to. This isn’t a glitch of memory or a trick of nostalgia. It exposes a structural truth about how culture evolves: our cultural decades do not match the calendar decades we assign to them. ...

I honk back at everything. It doesn’t matter who the horn was for. It doesn’t matter if I can even see the car that produced it. If I’m behind the wheel and a horn goes off anywhere in the vicinity, I honk. Once, firmly, with purpose. Then I continue my drive like nothing happened. I’d been doing this for years before I ever thought to question it. Then one afternoon, somewhere in stop-and-go traffic with a horn going off three or four cars ahead, aimed at someone I couldn’t see, about something I’d never know, my hand went reflexively to the center of my steering wheel. Afterward I asked myself: why do I do that? Why am I joining an argument I was not invited to? ...