In 2004, the author Damian Barr published Get It Together: Surviving Your Quartlerlife Crisis. Barr would go on to write poignant and beautiful books (including the memoir Maggie and Me), but this was not either of those things. It was more of a fun, generational howl — how is this stuff supposed to work? How are you supposed to become an adult in these conditions?
The dream of life in your 20s — flailing around not sure what to do, mooching from one dead-end job to another, but still managing to afford a gigantic, lovely apartment in the center of everything, failing romantically, hilariously, while it all turns out for the best, never feeling anxious for no reason or as if you are slipping through the sieve of polite society, too small and weightless to remain in the in-crowd — well, that dream was cracking a little.
As Barr put it in a radio interview, the question, essentially, was this: what if Friends, which by then was in its 10th and final season, was not very true to life?
Definitely, the economic winds were changing: Wages in the UK started to stagnate in 2003; in the US, graduate wages had been falling since 2000, and health cover had been cut for young employees, both graduates and not, since 2002. All of this, plus climbing student debt, was dwarfed by the 2007-2008 financial crash, after which everyone got much poorer, much faster. The casual 1990s elision between “young” and “carefree” was already not true by the mid-2000s.
Like everyone else, I have been thinking about Friends because of the premature death of Matthew Perry. He was more than the guy off Friends; his death poses deeper questions than about sitcom culture, mainly about the opioid crisis and the rapacious pharmaceutical industry that created it.
It is hard not to mourn, along with the actor, the spirit of the 1990s, with its relentless optimism and comically low stakes. It felt like a time when nothing could go wrong, and anything that did would be worth it for the anecdote.
Was that just about the economy, stupid? Or were there other things going on? OK, I came of age in the 1990s, and arguably everyone remembers with fond elation the decade they were young in, but I look at my kids now and I cannot for my life imagine them in 30 years, going: “Ah, the 2020s — heady, foolish times.”
The funny thing about Friends was that its characters did worry about money, and healthcare and work, but they emphatically did not worry about geopolitics. OK, that is not what a sitcom is for — yet try to imagine Ross, a scientist, now never thinking about climate change.
Today, Phoebe would be a member of Extinction Rebellion; Rachel would be into fashion sustainability; Monica would have seven different recycling bins, not 11 types of towel; Joey … well, Joey would be the same. You can have characters now who do not worry about the future, but they are not everyman characters: they are in space, or the past, or heaven, or maybe hell.
We stopped worrying about nuclear annihilation in the 1990s — Cold War and all that — and that alone gave the decade this intense hedonism that Friends seemed to mirror straight back, with a tighter script.
Its identity politics were all over the place. The implausible whiteness of the show was a major flaw — what conceivable myopia would lead you to set a comedy in Manhattan without a single black character until Charlie arrives in season nine? And Kathleen Turner’s trans character was a kind of pinata part, this flamboyant, colorful punchbag that everyone hit with a stick until sweets came out, but there was no hate in there. Two lesbian mothers made a decent, beautiful family, and Ross just had to make it work. There was always a subtext that, if nobody was a jerk, things would probably be OK.
Those three factors that stamped themselves on the 1990s — economic boom, respite from any existential species threat and a generalized presumption of goodwill — are hard to prise apart, and maybe they do all boil down to the economy, stupid. Chimeric and debt-fueled as the good times were, it is hard not to miss them.
As Taiwan’s domestic political crisis deepens, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have proposed gutting the country’s national spending, with steep cuts to the critical foreign and defense ministries. While the blue-white coalition alleges that it is merely responding to voters’ concerns about corruption and mismanagement, of which there certainly has been plenty under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT-led governments, the rationales for their proposed spending cuts lay bare the incoherent foreign policy of the KMT-led coalition. Introduced on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the KMT’s proposed budget is a terrible opening
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS