Wednesday, November 11, 1998

Phrase whose time still has not come

By Bob Greene

HOUSTON - Fourteen months, give or take a few days.

That's how much longer we have to wait until the irritating phrase, in all of its many incarnations, is gone for good.

"The '90s."

Not the decade itself - just the phrase.

"Hey, it's the '90s."

"It's a '90s kind of thing."

"What can you do? It's the '90s."

"Well, this is the '90s."

Just today, I heard it twice within a 10-minute period.

An author was being interviewed about his new book, and he described a female character as having classic traits, but "being updated to make her a woman of the '90s."

An automobile was being promoted as having numerous features that allegedly made it worthy of being purchased: "Truly a car of the '90s."

It's not that this snuck up on us all - we could see it coming. This national predilection for making constant self-referential allusions to the decade in which we're passing through began as soon as the decade did - and even before that. "The '90s" was being used as a purportedly knowing, defining phrase well in the advance of the first day of 1990.

What's wrong with this, you say? Are these not, in fact, the '90s?

Of course they are. That's not the point. What is so annoying is that this may be the first decade that has had people ceaselessly referring to it while it was still going on. It has been like those politicians and athletes who constantly go around using their own names in sentences, instead of the first person singular: "When Charles Barkley goes onto the court, you'd better believe you're going to get a Charles Barkley game out of him," says Charles Barkley.

It would be one thing if the '90s had done anything at all to deserve this - if it had earned the right to shout its name in a hundred million different voices, with a hundred million different inflections, day after week after month after year.

After all, people always talk about the '50s. People always talk about the '60s.

But they talk about those decades now - after the fact. Whatever it was that was special about the '50s and '60s - good or bad - at least people, in those decades, had the good manners to let the decades end before they started blabbing about them. You never heard people, during the '50s and '60s, saying, "These are the '50s" or "What can you expect - these are the '60s." People didn't say those things because saying them would have been meaningless. "These are the '50s"? If someone had said that in, say, 1955, that person would have been looked at as if the person were an idiot. These are the '50s? Yes, these are the '50s - and that thing up above you is the sky.

The thing about the fingernails-scraping-across-a-blackboard "This is the '90s" phenomenon is the assumption on the part of those who speak the words that the words have great significance - that by the very fact of these being the '90s, the recitation of that fact illuminates a discussion in a profound way. Why did a person act the way she did at lunch? "These are the '90s." As if the reaction should be - oh, of course, she acted that way because she and we are living in this remarkable decade.

But this decade is not particularly remarkable. As decades go, the '90s have been rather tedious and nondescript. Things have happened, of course - in a 10-year period, things are inevitably going to happen. But certainly nothing so scintillating or society-changing that the decade itself has the right to take credit for it.

After all, the '70s are only now beginning to be mentioned as if they were a world-altering collection of years - and the '70s were in fact pretty cool. But they have waited their turn. The '80s? The '80s have got a long wait ahead of them, if there's any justice at all on Earth.

Not the '90s. The '90s pushed to the front of the line, and we haven't been able to budge them ever since. The '90s - epitomized by "This is the '90s" - have exhibited a sense of entitlement made all the more infuriating by their refusal to address the issue of what they have done to deserve it.

Why have we allowed this to happen for almost 10 years? And what do you think Gen. Eisenhower would have said if, after the D-Day invasion, he had been asked the secret of his success?

You can bet that Eisenhower's answer would not have been:

"Hey - it's the '40s."

Bob Greene's column regularly runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Chicago Tribune