Year of the indifferent

Monica. Mergers. Missiles over Iraq. 1998 was a year of roiling turmoil and history-making events. But shhhhhhhhh -- you'll wake the public.

Styles Year in Review by Jason Gay

History will judge it proper that 1998 ended with a swift, rude kick in the public behind. The general reaction to last week's double-punch -- missile strikes over Iraq and a presidential impeachment -- called to mind the response of a shiftless college student who, after being warned repeatedly that he is going to flunk out of school, finally flunks out of school. "Huh?" the public seemed to be saying. "What happens now? How come nobody told me things were this bad?"

That's pretty much how 1998 went. The past 12 months witnessed a startling stretch of national complacency in the face of repeated and significant warnings. Prosperity, driven by a healthy national economy -- solid growth, good wages, minimal inflation, low joblessness, and a healthy, if mercurial, Dow Jones average -- promoted a pervasive indifference to the implications of local, national, and international events. Children hungry? Pass the butter. Environmental trouble? Power up the Range Rover. Only when threats became direct and personal-- ATM surcharges, lousy MCAS scores, Viagra side effects -- did the public evince substantial, sustained outrage.

WINNERS Pfizer Mike Capuano Damon & Affleck Mo LOSERS Foxborough Lois Pines Spooky World Leslie Boorse ENOUGH ALREADY Lounge VW Beetles Davis Square = Paris Cloning CAN'T GET ENOUGH Cate Blanchett The Donnas Tom Finneran Underground apartments WATCHABLE A Farmer's Wife Who's the Caboose? Teletubbies How I Learned to Drive UNWATCHABLE Wait Until Dark Meet Joe Black Politically Incorrect The Real World-Road Rules All-Stars OVER Swing Supermodels Electronica Ray Flynn RISING Pirates Hard cider Mach3 Chihuahuas HUH? "It depends on what your definition of is is." "Mike McGwire and Sammy Souser!" "Thank you, India" "Caribbean Dogpatch" YEESH Barnicle goes ballistic on News Night with Margie Ready "If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid, would she be lying?" Ol' Dirty Bastard at the Grammys Opie & Anthony & Menino HEAVEN Empty MBTA trains Lucinda Williams at the Somerville Theatre Curious Liquids Anthony Lane in the New Yorker HELL FleetCenter halftime shows Eighth District congressional debates Alan Dershowitz & Carly Simon singing "We Shall Overcome" at Harvard Clinton rally P.O.V. RAH Nomar Sergei Sam Gash UMass football BOO Dan Duquette John Harrington Bob Kraft NBA

To be sure, a certain amount of public apathy toward the serious and newsworthy is expected. What was so alarming about the 1998 brand of indifference, however, was its decadent shortsightedness -- its refusal to acknowledge that some things happening to other people do, in fact, matter to us all. In retrospect, it now appears, we didn't need to be rabid critics or defenders of the president to recognize a brewing constitutional crisis in Washington. We didn't have to live in the Middle East to be directly affected by Saddam Hussein's stonewalling of UN inspectors. The same went for Israel, Northern Ireland, the war in Kosovo, and the terrorist bombings at the US embassies in Africa. A closer look at the Microsoft antitrust trial reveals that maybe it isn't just a geek show with few implications beyond Bill Gates's pocket calculator. And the fallout of the Exxon-Mobil merger could soon reach a street corner near us.

But these days, it seems, news is just entertainment, and actually having an opinion puts you on the fringes. Convictions are for crackpots; passion is for extremists. We have collectively convinced ourselves that because our lives are so jam-packed and busy -- and how can they not be, with global-
positioning devices in automobiles, and cell phones with caller ID and *69? -- that we simply don't have time to sort the significant from the merely distracting. We'll worship celebrity, and occasionally we'll endure some learning in short, glitzy, spoon-fed doses -- thank you very much, Saving Private Ryan and The Prince of Egypt -- but for the most part, we don't want to endure anything heavier than Calista Flockhart.

Because of this, our Person of the Year for 1998 wasn't really Bill or Monica, Hillary or Saddam, or a scientific pioneer, or a peacemaker in a war-torn nation. It was Prince Claus, the husband of the Netherlands' Queen Beatrix. Earlier this month, the staid prince untied his necktie at the beginning of a fashion show and tossed it at his wife's feet, proclaiming it a "snake around my neck," thus triggering a spate of tie-loosening throughout Northern Europe and a flood of media coverage. That, it seemed, was the political gesture of this indifferent year: personal, trivial, and easy to undo.

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The year dawned with the grim news that Michael Kennedy, who had survived a year of scandals surrounding his reported dalliances with a family baby sitter, had died the day before on a ski slope in Aspen. Kennedy met his end after he struck a tree while playing a game of "ski football," a sport that requires participants to toss a football back and forth while hurtling obliviously down a mountainside. The Kennedys had allegedly been warned by the local ski patrol; indifference to the warnings, it seems, cost Michael Kennedy his life.

But it was Bill and Monica, of course, who set the true tone for the year of indifference. The Lewinsky affair, which broke in late January and wrapped up (for now) with a presidential impeachment, provided an unexpectedly neat set of bookends to 1998. Once indifferent to the charges against him, Clinton saw his remarkable escape artistry desert him by year's end. Pundits enjoyed pointing out that a relationship that brought a White House intern to her knees had, in the end, brought the president to his own.

For a while, the whole thing was -- yes -- fun. When the year began, no one could have imagined turning on the television Sunday morning to find Georges Will and Stephanopoulos bickering about blowjobs -- to say nothing of that, um, cigar and an unexpected use for Altoids, those "curiously strong" mints. The scandal came with a perfect guidebook: the Starr Report, a 453-page tome that, despite its obvious prosecutorial and sexual excesses, was both well-executed and deliciously funny. Consider passages such as this one, on page 100:

In addition to the "wish list," Ms. Lewinsky said she enclosed in the packet a pair of sunglasses and a lot of things in a little envelope, including some jokes, a card, and a postcard. She said that she had written on the card: "Wasn't I right that my hugs are better in person than in cards?" The postcard featured a "very erotic" Egon Schiele painting. Ms. Lewinsky also enclosed a note with her thoughts on education reform.

Good stuff, to be sure. But we actually got bored of it pretty quickly. Instead of a nationwide civics lesson, the Lewinsky affair was more like a bad $40 million porn flick -- once you were shocked that people (the president!) were actually doing this stuff, it was hard to be shocked again and again. Within weeks, the case was reduced from a national scandal to a shrill shouting match largely confined to Washington, DC, which looked more than ever like a Byzantine island apart from the indifferent American mainstream.

Partisans in Washington were fond of blaming the messenger -- the media -- for the public's turning away from the Lewinsky affair, and there was no question that coverage of the scandal was, at times, way overdone. From the moment it was broken by right-wing Web gossipmonger Matt Drudge, the whole thing was tainted with unseemly tabloid unseriousness -- which begat literary unseriousness and even pop-cultural unseriousness. Did we really need to know, for example, what William Styron made of the Clinton crisis ("It is not our puritanism but our absence of decency," he wrote in the New Yorker) or what the rapper Fat Joe thought ("It ain't his fault that he's a playa," he told Rolling Stone)? Dunderheaded predictions from Pundit Nation -- Sam Donaldson said in January that Clinton would resign within a week -- only contributed to the public's revulsion at the sex-filled saturation coverage.

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the year in review

art - classical - dance - dining - fiction
film - jazz - local music - news - non-fiction - 1 in 10
rock - styles - television - theater - wine

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But in this 200-channel, 24-hour-news-network, Internet-access era, there's saturation coverage of virtually everything. And while it's easy to blame the media, it is still the public that ultimately decides what is and isn't important. The public may have been turned off by media overkill in the Lewinsky affair, but why not by the similar hoopla surrounding May's final episode of Seinfeld, a show, appropriately, "about nothing"? Why did we shy away from persistent stories of trouble in the Middle East or Kosovo, but rivet ourselves to the television to watch Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in a mano-a-mano slugfest for Roger Maris's home-run record? (And why did we pooh-pooh the news that McGwire's record owes a shout-out to androstenedione, a substance banned in the Olympics and the NFL?)

Easy. Because in comfortable times, we surround ourselves with comforting news. We hitch our wagons to the accessible and the unchallenging; we do not wish to cause a stir by engaging in the strange, the risky, the potentially provocative. This is why incumbents are reelected in boom times -- we're happy to leave the heavy lifting to people we already know. The danger, of course, is that our complacency leaves those in power free to go about their business behind the curtain, while we, a nation of Alfred E. Neumans ("What, me worry?"), remain distracted by our little pop-culture puppet shows.

This is why, for example, the president of the United States can launch a missile strike against a foreign threat just hours before his congressional colleagues vote on whether he should be impeached. Clinton understood that we might get a little upset when the bombs started flying -- and we did, for a minute, barking "Wag the dog! Wag the dog!" -- but ultimately, he knew we'd trust his judgment and not think too hard about it. And he was right: within hours of the first blitz over Baghdad, we were firmly in line behind the troops.

In fairness, the news came fast and furious in '98, especially toward the end. One day in December it was censure talk; the next, impeachment; the next, Iraq; the next, House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston, finally fessing up to his own marital indiscretions and resigning from office. There are Puff Daddy videos with slower pacing than that, and it was easy to feel overwhelmed by the, well, overwhelmingness of it all.

It was easier, it seemed, to track the little things -- like whether retired baseball great Joe DiMaggio was dead yet. DiMaggio, an American icon by virtue of his 56-game hitting streak and his stints as Mr. Marilyn Monroe and Mr. Coffee, had fallen into a coma following a bout with pneumonia. But the daily, round-the-clock speculation over his condition -- it was reported that clergy administered last rites three times before he took a turn for the better -- was startlingly macabre. It finally took the Yankee Clipper himself to rise from his hospital pillows and angrily tell his doctors, in effect, No . . . more . . . press.

It was, perhaps, the quote of the year. Joe D's last great stroke may have been to tell us to stop paying so much attention to the little things. Indifferent to the rest of the world, we were missing the big stuff.

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And there was plenty of big stuff, of course. Despite the Monica-induced gridlock in the Beltway, 1998 was replete with major newsmaking events. We had plenty of reasons to get off the couch; plenty, even, to get angry.

Internationally, there was a land-for-peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, a historic deal that threatened to be undone as extremists on both sides protested it. A similar pact in Northern Ireland, too, almost unraveled following a horrific car-bombing in the hamlet of Omagh, which killed 29 people; it may yet collapse under the posturing of hard-liners on either side of the Troubles. There was the continued exposure of war crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda, and an up-yours exchange of nuclear tests between India and Pakistan. There was, at last, the admission from Switzerland's government of the nation's complicity in Nazi crimes -- and an agreement to pay reparations to the families of Holocaust survivors (a similar admission followed later from Volkswagen, which acknowledged using Jewish slave labor to facilitate World War II-era Fahrvergnügen).

We cared for a little while about terrorist bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania, which prompted retaliatory US missile attacks on sites in Sudan and Afghanistan. This return fire, like last week's attack on Iraq, was curiously timed (it closely followed the president's August 17 admission of wrongdoing in the Lewinsky case) and may have been incorrectly targeted. But the public didn't exactly spill into the streets. In the end, the exchange of explosive devices did little more than help anoint a new American bogeyman: Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Islamic fundamentalist with Ayatollah-type politics and Rockefeller-type Benjamins. (Fundamentalists, it should be noted, have now replaced Russians and Eastern Europeans as Hollywood's foreign enemy of choice; for more info, see the Denzel Washington vehicle The Siege.)

When it came to domestic events, it was a little harder to be indifferent. A rash of high-profile violence left people everywhere feeling shaken -- even if crime statistics showed that the country was increasingly safe. In Arkansas, a pair of middle-school students rang a fire alarm and hid in the woods as their teachers and classmates left the building -- whereupon they coolly, methodically picked them off with hunting rifles. Similar episodes followed in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and in Springfield, Oregon -- where 15-year-old freshman Kip Kinkel, who had been busted the day before for having a loaded .32-caliber pistol in his locker, showed up at school with a .22 and proceeded to empty a 50-round clip, killing two. In Buffalo, New York, physician and abortion provider Barnett Slepian was shot by a sniper through the kitchen window of his home. And in Tennessee, a challenger in a state representative's race brought new meaning to the term negative campaigning: down in the polls and losing ground, he shot the incumbent dead.

Locally, Boston's impressively long respite from gang violence came to an end; police said a December shooting inside a Roxbury barbershop was proof positive that a new group of gangster wanna-bes was at large. Murder also came to Martha's Vineyard, where a pair of drug-related homicides shook the bucolic island community. But the most startling news came inside a federal courtroom in Boston, where a series of FBI hearings continued to shed light on the cozy relationship between law-enforcement officers and their criminal informants -- and still yielded no sign of mob kingpin James (Whitey) Bulger.

While crime and violence occasionally stirred the indifferent public, the political scene enjoyed no such attention. Voter turnouts for November's general election were the worst in state history -- less than 40 percent overall. The net result of the state's most expensive election ever was the removal of the "acting" from the title of Acting Governor Argeo Paul Cellucci (the "Argeo" he removed himself). In other news, the mayor of Somerville -- Somerville! -- was elected to Congress after winning a 10-candidate horse race for the Democratic primary. Cambridge's Jarrett Barrios became the first openly gay man elected to the Massachusetts House, and treasurer-elect Shannon O'Brien became the state's highest-ranking elected woman, but both events were essentially ignored.

More likely than not, we were distracted by stuff such as the arrest of Stephen Fagan, who is alleged to have swiped his two young daughters from his estranged wife in 1979 and fled the state, eventually changing his name to William Martin and transforming himself into the Bentley-driving husband of a Palm Beach socialite. (Fagan says he was merely trying to protect his daughters from their mother, who he claimed had a drinking problem; she claimed it was narcolepsy.) L'affaire Fagan, which appeared to be ripped straight from a Days of Our Lives script, was a perfect kind of 1998 distraction: intriguing, small in scale, and ornamented by Fagan's two attractive daughters, now grown and unfailingly loyal to their smooth-talking dad.

But Fagan, too, vanished quickly from Boston's radar screen, and we moved on to something else. The public's attention span for news events in 1998 resembled Godzilla's rampage through New York -- we moved from borough to borough, stepping on cars, grabbing buildings, taking bites, spitting out and moving on. Cloning bad! Kevorkian evil! Screw the *#^$&"* NBA! Public judgments were swift and brutal. Maybe it was overload and saturation; we were asked to process too many events at the same time. Or maybe facts alone weren't always enough.

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Stephen Glass may have been trying to tell us something. Glass, a bespectacled twentysomething law student and writer for the New Republic, was a budding magazine wunderkind when the news broke this spring that his wondrously fantastic stories had, indeed, been wondrously fantastic -- Glass had invented entire characters and plot lines for many of his pieces. But editors and readers had swallowed them whole. More than anything else, Glass understood that in order to engage people in these indifferent times, you had to take them an extra step.

Certainly Patricia Smith thought so. Smith, a Metro/Region columnist for the Boston Globe, was shown the door in June when it was revealed that she, too, had concocted portions of her columns. She tried to explain her indiscretions in a final apology: "Instead of popping out of J-school in a nice, neat, byline-ready package, I was fueled by a heady mixture of naïveté, ambition, and an almost insane love for the powers of language," Smith wrote. Transparent as that plea sounded, however, it looked downright earnest next to the griping of Mike Barnicle, who attributed his own downfall as a Globe columnist (amid charges of fabrication and plagiarism) to a witch hunt galvanized by a "summer of media introspection."

The irony, of course, is that no introspection was occurring at all, which allowed all the fallen to get right back up. By year's end, Barnicle was reading a column on national radio and writing for ESPN The Magazine; Glass was shopping a book deal in Manhattan; and Smith, an accomplished slam poet, had staged a triumphant return on a Cambridge stage, chronicled with a wet kiss in the following week's New Yorker.

More than anything else, the lack of sustained outrage at these media indiscretions demonstrated the continued merger of information-gathering and entertainment -- "infotainment," or, as magazine-biz bigwigs call it, "synergy." Synergy is the reason a Time magazine cover story this month -- WHO WAS MOSES? -- was pegged to a movie, The Prince of Egypt, that hadn't even opened yet, and why another cover story was devoted to Oprah's dud Beloved a month before. (Once a film had to actually be a hit before it ended up on the cover of a national newsweekly.) It's also why the queen of synergy, Tina Brown, left the most coveted job in magazine journalism, the editorship of the New Yorker, to assume the reins of a publication bankrolled by Miramax Pictures, which hadn't even put out a single issue.

Ominous as it is, media synergy makes sense; entertainment and news have been drawing closer together for years. In the business community, however, synergy seemed to be occurring simply for synergy's sake. This year saw unprecedented consolidation in the businesses of energy (the Exxon-Mobil merger), communications (Bell Atlantic and GTE), technology (America Online's $4 billion purchase of Netscape), automobiles (Chrysler and Daimler-Benz), sports (Fox purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers and plunked down $1 billion for Manchester United soccer team), and money management (the Citicorp-Travelers tryst).

The media seemed to enjoy this game of merger one-upsmanship, as if hoping to canonize the world's biggest company by year's end. And sure, it was easier to joke about Exbil and Moxxon than to recognize that this merger was actually the reversal of the government antitrust policy that broke up Standard Oil, and that it would lead to at least 9000 layoffs. Or that the Chrysler deal meant the US government had spent 1.5 billion dollars in 1980 to bail out the beleaguered corporation, only to see it bought by Germans almost two decades later.

Behind this consolidation, of course, is the drive toward globalization -- the increasing recognition that traditional boundaries of land and ocean no longer matter. What matters most, as always, is increasing a company's power, customer base, and bottom line. While globalization certainly has its benefits for the business community, its benefits for the rest of us are less clear. Economists and sociologists alike have pointed out that these global supercorporations are, in many ways, new countries -- rich and powerful, with worldwide political and economic clout, and no pesky underclass or democratic ideals to drag them down.

On the local level, globalism is busily diminishing the distinctiveness of our communities. Here in Massachusetts, for example, Star Market may look like a big whopping company next to your neighborhood quick-mart, but Star -- a chain native to Greater Boston -- was recently purchased by Shaw's, part of a British-owned conglomerate, in order to allow it to remain competitive with Stop & Shop, which is owned by the Dutch.

As consumer culture becomes more homogeneous, so do human desires -- and also human fears. It makes perfect sense, then, that the biggest-grossing film of 1998 was Armageddon, in which a ragtag team of oil riggers is sent into space to destroy a big asteroid before it smashes the earth into smithereens. (Another asteroid flick, Deep Impact, grossed more than $100 million.) For all its crudeness, an asteroid shattering the planet is a pretty ingenious movie plot. It's the ultimate direct threat. You can't be indifferent about an asteroid. You have to care.

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The public still cares in some places, of course. They sure care in the mountains and foothills of western North Carolina, where fugitive Eric Rudolph, who stands accused of the bombings at an Alabama abortion clinic and at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, is alleged to be hiding out from federal authorities. A phalanx of government authorities descended upon the region, only to be stymied by the fed-hating locals, who are less than willing to help the Man find his way around the mountains.

But elsewhere, most of 1998 didn't seem to mean that much. Maybe it was the year itself -- with the millennium and all the Y2K hoo-hah approaching, 1998 seemed insignificant and small. Like a Super Bowl pregame show, it was something we wanted to get over with so we could enjoy the main event.

Thankfully, sociological trends, like stock-market upturns, experience corrections. And at the end of 1998, the public appeared to be waking from its yearlong slumber. The fireworks of impeachment and Iraq provoked a delayed, but substantial, public outcry. Allegations that bin Laden was plotting an attack on American soil put us on edge, too. Locally, activists held a good old-fashioned sit-in -- a sit-in! -- at the State House to protest the slashing of welfare benefits. Passion appeared to be trickling back to the public, and it was about time. Like that shiftless college student, we had blown off our responsibilities for almost a year, and we had found ourselves in the dean's office in deep, deep trouble.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.

Additional research for this story provided by Rachel Malamud.