Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (45 page)

It is impossible to gauge the size or influence of the many groups of people who bought into these and other conspiracy theories in late twentieth-century America. Thinking of this sort had a long history, not only in the United States but also throughout the world. There is little doubt, however, that media reports helped, as earlier, to sustain popular American suspicions about all manner of people and things. As one critic of the media put it, “We have a system of news that tells people constantly that the world is out of control, that they will always be governed by crooks, that their fellow citizens are about to kill them.”
⁶⁴
The prevalence in the 1990s, as earlier, of such reports may have helped to contribute to a popular sense, though inchoate and inaccurate, that the nation was not only in decline but also in danger.

Y
ET ANOTHER SIGN OF DECLINE
, as pessimists saw it in the 1990s, was of a very different sort: the continuing spread of hyper-commercialization, consumerism, and materialism. Advertising, relying ever more heavily on sophisticated forms of niche marketing, had long since become virtually omnipresent. Ads were said to affect—and to afflict—Americans when they were very young. By the age of nine, children were estimated to have seen some 20,000 TV commercials a year. By then the children had become “brand-washed.” Large corporations paid millions for “naming rights” that enabled them to plant their logos and names on stadiums and buildings. Children were seduced by ads and persuaded their parents to buy sneakers costing more than $100 a pair. Logos—Nike, Adidas, Reebok—were ubiquitous on sportswear.

Some aspects of this commercial culture were potentially corrupting. Pharmaceutical companies poured money into medical schools and gifts into physicians’ offices, hoping to influence scientific research and to promote sales of their high-priced products. Some critics believed that pressure from drug companies hastened decisions of the Food and Drug Administration concerning approval of new medicines. Supposedly disinterested academic and government scientists earned large sums as consultants to corporations. Schools and universities struck deals that gave soft-drink- and snack-producing corporations monopolies on sales, notably from vending machines, of company brands. In return for video equipment, an estimated 12,000 public schools (including 40 percent of high schools in the country) provided Channel One to a captive audience of 8 million pupils. This was an MTV-style commercial channel that delivered two minutes of ads for every ten minutes of “news.”

Major universities spent huge sums of money on quasi-professional athletic teams, hoping that gate receipts and broadcasting contracts would cover their enormous budgets for varsity sports. Requiring their athletes to display commercial logos on their uniforms, they received considerable payments from sportswear and equipment companies. By the early 2000s, several university football coaches earned salaries and perquisites (including commercial endorsements) that totaled more than $2 million per year. In most cases, however, revenue from university sports events did not meet costs, thereby threatening academic programs. Even where the money did cover expenses—at perhaps a dozen universities—the victory-obsessed culture created by the emphasis on big-time athletics obscured the educational mission of campus life.
⁶⁵

Before the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) signed a contract calling for Reebok to provide the warm-up suits that American athletes were to wear at the games. The Reebok logo appeared prominently on the jackets. But several Americans on the “Dream Team” basketball squad that won the gold medal had lucrative endorsement deals with Nike and balked at wearing the Reebok jackets when they stood on the stand to receive their awards. Michael Jordan, a Nike endorser, explained that it was a matter of loyalty, whereupon critics wondered, loyalty to whom: Nike or country? After tense negotiations, the athletes agreed to appear on the stand with American flags draped over their shoulders, covering the logos. Though the use of the flags—“for pride and to hide”—quieted the big-stakes bickering, the controversy exposed the considerable reach of commercial interests, not only in the United States but also in sports throughout the world.

Especially in the mid- and late 1990s, when prosperity advanced, materialistic values seemed to surge ahead. More than ever, it appeared, wants were becoming needs. Credit card debt, driven by fantastic consumer spending, reached new heights.
⁶⁶
Casino gambling and mega lotteries proliferated, filling the often poorly fixed coffers of state governments with millions of dollars in tax revenue while emptying the pockets of hosts of suckers. Las Vegas, where billion-dollar hotels were springing up, boomed as never before. Attracted by ads, image-conscious Americans bought name-brand bottled water costing $5, Italian biscuits priced at $1.50 apiece, and coffee at $3.50 or more per cup. SUVs, Jacuzzis, and other high-end products captured growing markets. Wealthy people laid out colossal sums for powerboats, cosmetic surgery, and “McMansions” erected in styles that ranged from Colonial Williamsburg to Godfather Mediterranean. The average floor area of new houses reached 2,310 square feet in 2000, as compared to 1,595 square feet in 1970 and 1,905 square feet in 1990.
⁶⁷
The author/columnist David Brooks satirized the tastelessness of “Bobos,” materialistic Americans who were at once
bo
hemian and
bo
urgeois. He gaped in awe at a kitchen “so large it puts you in mind of an aircraft hangar with plumbing.” Kitchens today, he wrote, “have lunch counters and stools and built-in televisions and bookshelves and computer areas and probably ‘You Are Here’ maps for guests who get lost on their way to the drink station.”
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Polls suggested that the rush to get rich especially overwhelmed young people. A poll in 1999 asked teenagers, “By the time you’re 30, what do you expect to earn?” The median answer was $75,000, which was almost three times as high as the actual median income ($27,000) of thirty-year-olds at the time.
⁶⁹
In the same year the British television show
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
was revised (and dumbed down) for showing in the United States and became a top-rated program. Attitudes and preferences such as these indicated that materialistic expectations, always strong in America’s abundant society, were if anything more powerful then ever. Bill Bryson, a smart and witty explorer of life in the United States, wrote in 1998 that Americans have the “intoxicating notion that almost any desire or whim can be simply and instantly gratified.”
⁷⁰

P
UNDITS WHO SURVEYED TRENDS
in popular culture perceived especially precipitous declines in taste during these years. They had a point. A dwelling on sex, always good for sales, seemed to be even more gratuitous and graphic. In 1991, Michael Jackson produced a video, “Black or White,” in which he grabbed his crotch, unzipped and zipped his fly, and appeared to masturbate. The sitcom star Roseanne clutched her crotch and spat on the ground after singing the national anthem (deliberately off-key) at a San Diego Padres baseball game. In 1992, Madonna published
Sex
, a coffee table book of photographs of herself, some of which displayed her hitchhiking and hang-gliding in the nude. Others showed her with naked celebrities—men as well as women—and engaging in graphic sexual encounters with men.
Sex
, which sold for $49.95, grossed an estimated $25 million during its first week in the stores.
⁷¹

Raunchiness such as this would have boggled the imagination of Americans in the 1950s, but by the 1990s it seemed difficult to shock people, most of whom had already been desensitized. One episode of
Seinfeld,
a well crafted, enormously successful sitcom, revolved around the question of which character could hold off the longest from masturbating. A survey in 2003 found that two-thirds of all television shows available during the prime-time hours between 7:00 and 11:00
P.M.
had some sexual content, including simulated depictions of sexual acts. The commercialization of hard-core sex became very big business. By the early 2000s, the “adult entertainment industry” grossed an estimated $8 to $10 billion per year from live shows, magazines, home videos, and pornography available on the Internet or by pay-per-view on cable television.
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Major hotel chains such as Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, and Holiday Inn, which profited handsomely from pay-per-view “adult” TV, reported that 50 percent or more of their guests demanded to have access to such channels in their rooms.

The “gross-out” nature of popular culture in the 1990s was indeed impressive. Profane radio “shock-jocks” like Howard Stern, who had risen to fame in the 1980s, employed bathroom humor and attracted large and devoted followings.
⁷³
By then it was common to hear words and phrases on radio and TV such as “kiss my a——,” “bitch,” “pi——ed off,” and the ubiquitous “this sucks.” Some rap groups reveled in the use of offensive language and misogyny. 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” released in 1989, used the
f
word more than 200 times, offered more than eighty descriptions of oral sex, and shouted the word “bitch” more than 150 times.
⁷⁴

Long gone, for sure, were the days when Clark Gable (in
Gone with the Wind
, 1939) was supposed to have shocked movie audiences by saying to the character Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Or the 1950s, when producers of the immensely popular
I Love Lucy
television show did not dare to use the word “pregnant.”
⁷⁵
That word, like “virgin,” had long been banned on the air. By contrast, in the 1990s it was estimated that profanity occurred once every six minutes on over-air TV, and once every two minutes on cable.
⁷⁶
Because virtually all households had at least one TV set, and Americans still watched television for an average of four hours a day, the boob tube had considerable potential as a vocabulary builder.
⁷⁷

The
Jerry Springer Show,
an over-the-air afternoon television talk show whose popularity rivaled
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
featured guests who humiliated themselves, thereby mesmerizing audiences in millions of American homes. One guest described her five-year marriage to a horse; another told of his romance with his dog. Fights between enraged guests—maybe staged, maybe not—enlivened the action on the show. When Madonna appeared on David Letterman’s late-night show in 1994, she used the
f
word thirteen times in twenty minutes. Though the word was bleeped out—network TV, after all, is “family entertainment,” even late at night—there was no doubting what she was saying. Madonna told Letterman that there was a pair of her panties in his desk drawer. “Aren’t you going to smell them?” she asked. Later in the interview she recommended peeing in the shower. “It fights athlete’s foot,” she said. “I’m serious. Urine is an antiseptic.”
⁷⁸

Violence of various sorts seemed bloodier than ever in lyrics, videos, television, and movies of the late 1980s and 1990s. A few up-and-coming stars of “gangsta rap” reveled in the shouting of misogynistic and other hateful messages. One rap song, Ice-T’s “Cop-Killer,” released in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, urged audiences to kill the police. Then as since the early days of TV, some of the most popular television shows starred professional wrestlers, among them women who (like many other female performers by that time) wore leather bras. The circus-like world of televised wrestling was so obviously unreal, featuring fake blood, vicious-looking body slams, and screamed obscenities, that its nearly non-stop mayhem was mainly amusing.
Cops,
a long-running, popular program, captivated viewers by showing real chases, fights, and arrests. Local news broadcasts, which in many areas of the nation preceded the national news, spent much of their time zeroing in on bloody car wrecks, shootings, knifings, and other scenes of violence.

Local television station managers thought nothing of firing experienced, middle-aged reporters in order to replace them with supposedly more attractive-looking (and lower-paid) neophytes. A few stations dumped personnel so as to free up money to buy helicopters that whisked excited reporters to crime scenes, fires, and other catastrophes. On-the-spot coverage of action scenes such as these—delivered in rapid-fire, sound-bite fashion—was believed to be the key to retaining the all-important loyalty of the so-called young adult audience. “If it bleeds, it leads,” station managers ordered. They insisted that the vast majority of viewers, having literally grown up before the tube, had little patience with slow-moving or time-consuming presentations of current events. Television, after all, was a visual medium that was most gripping when dramatic and confrontational. It aimed to offer immediacy and black-versus-white dialogues, leaving complexity for newspapers and magazines to provide.

Local news programs were tame compared with the sex-saturated soap operas that dominated TV during the day and with the violence-filled dramas that appeared later in the evening. Prime-time network programs of this kind showed an average of five violent acts per hour. Between 10:00
P.M.
and 6:00
A.M.
, when standards applied to the networks were more relaxed, the sexual and violent content of television shows expanded. The emphasis on sex and violence increased over the course of the 1990s, especially on cable TV, which was not subject to the relatively strict (though still permissive) guidelines that the FCC expected radio and over-the-air television stations to follow. In 1997, Comedy Central initiated its weekly cartoon series
South Park,
which featured foul language and racially offensive jokes. It was a hit, bringing millions of dollars in salaries to its stars. In 1998,
Sex and the City
appeared, highlighting swinging young people who slept around. That millions of Americans paid for cable TV to bring such programs into their homes indicated the ongoing drift of the culture. That violent shows were readily accessible to children understandably outraged critics.