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MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3922 thread views

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

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The entirety of Freddie DeBoer's life outlook is that he loved hippies/bohemians in new york in the 90s and then turned out to be quite smart and a world view crystalized around that abstract attraction/memeplex. It was pretty clear in his infamous planet of cops piece and it explains exactly why he lives in a groundhog world of noticing the left has lost it's mind but waking up the next day completely forgetting that realization.

As for the 90s vs today, the tech sucked and was expensive, the domination of the moral majority sucked even though it's piercing light gave contrast to interesting subcultures just as much as modern progressivism sucks despite it's life giving contrast to communities like our own. The grass is greened by the lack of our, or at least my, current enemy but there is a cause for the sword in every era.

the domination of the moral majority

Was nonexistent.

You're not from the Bible Belt, are you? Christian zealots ran the show and were quite controlling in the 90s. Into at least the late 2000s they were teaching only creationism in science class and punishing kids at my public school for not participating in prayers or having books like Harry Potter or the Golden Compass.

Cracks didn't start showing in that dominance until the late 2000s with growing internet access providing locals who weren't with the program access to secular spaces, plus I think the close marriage between the Bush administration and evangelicals drove some wedges and made being a Southern Baptist less of an everyone thing and more of a Republican thing.

Was it really? I suppose this is one of those "my enemies are both strong and weak" things, but the old Moral Majority certainly could and did throw their weight around. It all seems quaint in hindsight and with the passage of time, and especially in comparison to today's new ideologies, but back then, nobody realized that "Judeo-Christian Morals" were a dying meme--quite the opposite, in fact! The Nine Inch Nails concept album Year Zero imagined a world where Tipper Gore/Mary Whitehouse moral concern, megachurch Christianity, and Bush-era jingoism were fused to create a dystopian America. That was in 2007.

Need I dredge up the tragedy of Jack Thompson? It's not a story the Jedi would tell you.

I even really liked that album. I can't help but think of it when looking back at how totally off we were, since I was very much of that crowd. Nice production, though.

Need I dredge up the tragedy of Jack Thompson?

A man who accomplished literally nothing other than discrediting himself? I mean you can if you want, I guess. Not sure where you're going with that though.

Was it really?

Yes.

but the old Moral Majority certainly could and did throw their weight around

If you mean the literal Moral Majority, it disbanded in 1989.

The Nine Inch Nails concept album Year Zero imagined a world where Tipper Gore/Mary Whitehouse moral concern, megachurch Christianity, and Bush-era jingoism were fused to create a dystopian America. That was in 2007.

Yes, key word being "imagined". Much like the Handmaid's Tale in a later era.

If you mean the literal Moral Majority, it disbanded in 1989.

Yeah, that group wasn't around in the 90's, but the spirit was definitely still there, I'd argue.

To what effect? In what way, in the 90s, did the moral majority actually exert meaningful influence on the culture, or on individuals?

Religious abuse of children and non-believers, censorship, restricting access to contraceptives and abortion, practicing marriages between children and adults, discrimination against atheists and other non-Christians, discrimination against sexual minorities, violating church-state separation, etc.

Religious abuse of children and non-believers

What is "religious abuse" of children? How were non-believers abused, exactly?

censorship

What censorship, specifically? Every attempt at censorship I saw in the 90s failed utterly. Carlin suffered no significant consequences for saying "the words you can't say on TV" on TV. Internet porn proliferated beyond all measures. Attempts to restrict artistic output, even when that output had obvious, legible, serious negative consequences, were uniformly rejected.

restricting access to contraceptives and abortion

How was it restricted? Roe was the law of the land. Condoms were handed out in public schools as a routine matter.

practicing marriages between children and adults

I have zero doubt that some religious people somewhere did this. Where was it done in socially significant numbers?

discrimination against atheists and other non-Christians

What discrimination, specifically? Who was discriminated against, and in what contexts?

discrimination against sexual minorities

Discrimination how, and against which sexual minorities? You know Matthew Shephard's murder wasn't actually a hate-crime, right?

violating church-state separation

What violations, specifically?

...I'm intimately familiar with the narrative that the 90s were a horror-story of oppression by moral busybodies, but I actually lived through them. The moral busybodies wanted to censor, restrict freedom, and otherwise impose their values through force of law, but they were completely unable to do so in any practical sense. Meanwhile, the people who decried their "restrictions" have gone on to actually censor, restrict freedom, and otherwise impose their values through force of law to a degree that is completely beyond even the caricatures they've generated of their opponents.

Those "explicit lyrics" labels were so oppressive, man...

It was pretty clear in his infamous planet of cops piece and it explains exactly why he lives in a groundhog world of noticing the left has lost it's mind but waking up the next day completely forgetting that realization.

I think he know the left is nuts, but he also has a nice gig going on he would not want to give that up either. I think he is able to compartmentalize it well. Being a leftist who criticizes the far-left is a good niche to be. You get tons of spillover from both sides and minimal to no risk of being cancelled, deplatformed.

I think this is it. I wondered about his hatred of Friends and then it struck me: he was that sorta middle-class not really fashionable white guy. He dislikes Friends because he wanted the romantic, hipster, cool, back in The Village when The Village was The Village vibe, and Friends was just too ordinary for him. That coffeeshop with the pun name where he got his overpriced cup of java? That was Central Perk, not some boho artsy joint of the 50s/60s, even as he pretended it wasn't.

Friends was the reality of city life for late 20s-early 30s college-educated or at least drop-out white people who moved there, not the romantic notion he desperately wanted to live and convinced himself he was living, because he was (the equivalent of) a starving artist in a garret:

You might picture a bunch of stylish Gen Xers trying to balance the era’s fixation on authenticity with the need to pay the rent. You might imagine them going to underground clubs and hearing music by independent artists on the come up. You might picture them in clothing that reflected the styles of the era, not necessarily flannel and bomber jackets but something that expressed at least a modicum of interest in contemporary fashion. You might think of their coffee shop as being a cool out-of-the-way place where the connoisseurs go, someplace with low lighting and a savvy clientele. You might assume that the New York they move around in is a hip site of artists and thinkers, the outsider’s New York that’s been dramatized in so many television shows and movies.

That's why he did that piece moaning about Friends. It drew back the veil and made him face the fact that he's not the cool kid he always wanted to be.

I do like Freddie, and I think he often writes good sense, but come on dude: Friends was just as aspirational for a lot of people who weren't American (and even a lot who were) who wanted that cool city living life just like you wanted, except you wanted the jazz artsy boho scene of the Beat Generation.

He's talking about the continuing popularity of Friends and if you read the piece, he clearly finds the premise of the show distasteful. If he was 14 when it aired, why the hell does he care that the show didn't have the kind of Cool Gen X Fashion about going to obscure clubs with savvy clientele? He's plainly unhappy with the view that it gives about NY, when he moved there for the romantic dream of city life. He wanted to be the cool city life guy, and now everybody's mental image of that time is Friends.

Right now Freddie is living the Ross or Chandler life, not the cool hipster life. Of course he doesn't like the comparison. Seinfeld also gets more hip cred than Friends , even if it's about a small bunch of sort of weird people hanging out in a friend-group, possibly because of the overlap with Jerry Seinfeld's real (professional) life as a stand-up comedian and the part he played in the show.

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