The other side of the 1990s

{"text":[[{"start":5.8,"text":"I heard the name of Ratko Mladić a few thousand times growing up. The television news would bring him into the living room like an uninvited guest each evening. But a disintegrating Yugoslavia was far from south London, and hard for even adults to fathom. Besides, there were other names to conjure with. Liam Gallagher. Dennis Bergkamp. Pamela Anderson. A Bosnian Serb in epaulettes didn’t hold the attention."}],[{"start":34.7,"text":"You see, even at the time, the 1990s were being whitewashed. The decade has come to stand for sane politics, a Goldilocks economy, enough internet to amuse the world but not enough to wreck it. Demand for the Oasis reunion attests to the nostalgia. So do the comments under YouTube clips of This Life (“We never knew how good we had it”) or Friends."}],[{"start":57.58,"text":"It takes an act of will to remember the other 1990s. Mladić’s recent death might jog memories. The Srebrenica massacre, for which he was later convicted, was not even the biggest mass murder of the period. That was the Rwanda genocide. The mild politics of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton was a veneer on top of a decade of raw de-civilisation. (To be fair, and although his zeal to save the world proved ruinous in the end, Blair said as much at the time.)"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":86.84,"text":"All the roots of our present troubles were there. Post-Soviet Russia became anarchic — unpaid pensions, gang wars — and therefore ripe for a strongman. Newt Gingrich and Fox News, which first broadcast on October 7 1996, prefigured Maga."}],[{"start":103.08,"text":"Day-to-day life was nastier. Yes, it was. Never mind what you “feel”: the number of crimes in England and Wales reached a record peak in December 1995. It is now less than half that level, despite the population being higher. The US data is similar. As a social achievement, this drop in crime has few equals, and even fewer convincing explanations. Still it seems to leave no dent in the idea — the legend — of the 1990s as a more innocent time. We don’t know how good we didn’t have it."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":134.64,"text":"I am conflicted here. Nostalgia is often provably wrong. It is also dangerous. A nation is likelier to vote for a reactionary if it believes the past was better, especially if that past was recent enough to be recoverable. Notice the Maga fixation with China’s WTO admission, just 25 years ago, as a historic wrong turn for the American worker. Smart demagogues don’t romanticise the long-lost past."}],[{"start":162.14,"text":"On the other hand, nostalgia is so common that we must at least entertain the idea that it serves a use. That is, partial and unreliable memory, as a trait, has been evolutionarily selected for."}],[{"start":173.6,"text":"So, what might be the benefit of it? Self-protection, for one. To remember bad things is harrowing. If the brain does not keep an accurate record of the past, be glad of it. This is the theme of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, in which people live in a fog of constructive denial. You don’t close a book of his believing the main character would be better off confronting the truth. No doubt, Europeans know that Srebrenica should haunt them more. That is not the same as actually wanting to live in a world in which it does."}],[{"start":204.24,"text":"Another benefit of nostalgia is that it can spur reform. If we don’t find the present wanting relative to the past, what would be the reason to make changes?"}],[{"start":213.24,"text":"Either way, so many people are so good at misremembering the past that it seems risky to question the habit."}],[{"start":219.46,"text":"I’m one of them. Having had occasion to revisit childhood haunts of late, I realise that I have deleted lots of adverse or embarrassing memories, and without conscious effort. Did that really happen? What, over there?"}],[{"start":232.24,"text":"Even the period of wanting to be somewhere better, which is a common one in the lesser suburbs, now feels like an afternoon’s worth of teenage moping. Reader, it went on for a decade. What use is there in dwelling on it? Would I have built the life I wanted if I had dwelt on it? Knowing what and how to forget is a priceless skill. Hindsight is not 20-20, thank God."}],[{"start":255.2,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1788750728_1629.mp3"}