By Steve Sailer
02/23/2022
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
‘The Nineties’: Moments of Clarity
Steve SailerFebruary 23, 2022
When it was suggested that I review the new nonfiction book The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman, I assumed he would be an ideal analyst of that distant decade because, after all, he’d written that very 1990s novel Fight Club, hadn’t he? But it turns out that was by Chuck Palahniuk, which shows you what an expert on the 1990s I am. Being fourteen years older than Klosterman, I can tell you a lot about 1976–1986. But the 1990s are a blur for me from too much having-a-life. …
Klosterman, a rock critic, sportswriter, and all-purpose white male Gen-X culture nerd of the type who flourished before social media made the internet too easy, is still at it in a world grown suspicious of guys who are bright and white. He’s intensely intelligent, insightful, and sensible, qualities that don’t always coincide. He offers numerous fairly abstract conclusions about Generation X, but always based on countless examples.
He can also be very funny. For example, from his chapter on the Clear Craze:
Why, from roughly 1992 to 1995, did the beverage industry operate from the position that there was an underserved sector of the populace who desperately wanted transparent drinks?
Suddenly, store shelves were laden with Crystal Pepsi and Tab Clear, a vile-tasting caffeine-free diet drink self-defeatingly sold only in opaque cans. Supposedly Coke used Tab Clear to torpedo the expensive launch of Crystal Pepsi by confusing consumers through stupidity-by-association:
The prospect of a terrible beverage created to kamikaze a moronic beverage is an apt metaphor for this entire period of marketing.
Read the whole thing there.
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