Chuck Klosterman – Everydave Life

The first thing you notice about Chuck Klosterman’s But What If We’re Wrong? is that the cover seems to be printed upside down. Which within a few pages, seems to make sense since the book essentially asks if anything we currently assume we “know” is correct, or will be seen as such a few centuries down the road. Maybe gravity isn’t what we think. Maybe Shakespeare wasn’t an especially gifted writer. Maybe octopi are smarter than we are. Maybe many eight-limbed sea creatures are actually called “octopusses”. Why are we so sure?

After all, it wasn’t all that long ago in terms of mankind’s history that people were sure if you went for a long enough sail, you’d sail right off the edge of the world into oblivion. Or, as he points out, that until Newton got banged on the head by an apple about 350 years ago, gravity didn’t “exist”. Or at least, it didn’t exist in our understanding. People had noticed that if you drop a rock off a roof, it would fall, but they assumed that was because the rock simply desired to be on the ground. If it wished to be up, it would just have floated around. Not surprisingly then, one of his first premises is a grabber – maybe we’re wrong about gravity.

Now he doesn’t propose that a rock dropped from above isn’t going to fall, ten times out of ten, but merely that our scientific understanding of the phenomenon may be flawed… and he backs that up with some complicated theories from top-notch scientists who reference things like space-time continuums and alternate universes which reminded me that high school was a long time ago and even then, I only got “C”s in physics! To make matters worse, he admits that when Brian Greene tried to explain it to him, patiently… twice… he didn’t understand it either. He talks to Greene and to Neil Degrasse Tyson in the book, two scientists mostly known to ordinary Joe Six Packs like me through their guest appearances on TV’s Big Bang Theory. Which was one big takeaway of that portion of the book – that the scientific jibber jabber Sheldon spouts on the show are actually based on real things physicists are working on – super symmetry, multiverses operating simultaneously and so on. The other big takeaway is that to simplify, Greene believes we still have a lot to learn and many current scientific “facts” may be proven wrong; Tyson on the other hand suggests that everything can be explained by advanced math and since we have a good grasp on that, we’re now right about everything. At least science-wise. I have to say that while I didn’t understand most of the concepts, it seems to me reasonable to assume we’re still learning and some of our ideas currently may seem laughably dumb in two hundred years, akin to fears of boating off the corner of the globe.

Thankfully he doesn’t spend the whole 200+ pages on physics. He quickly references Moby Dick ,for instance. He points out that when Herman Melville wrote it, he was immensely proud… but soon became distraught because it barely sold and those who did read it tended to attack it in debates and reviews. It was seen as a bad, flop of a book. Fast forward a hundred or so years and as he sees it, any list of the Great American Novel starts and finishes with it. It’s certainly considered one of the finest pieces of literature ever to come from the New World. The book is the same; people’s opinions and evaluations of what makes great literature have shifted. (I might add, though he didn’t point to it, much the same is true of the movie It’s a Wondeful Life, a flop and almost a career-killer for Jimmy Stewart at the time, but since being found by cable TV decades later in the ’80s, now ranked as an essential holiday classic for the ages.) From there he tries to ponder what the future generations will view as the great novels and writers of our time. An interesting idea, and he’s probably right that the opinions of the 23^rd Century will be different than ours now. Salman Rushdie might be viewed as excessively wordy and pompous for all we know, Danielle Steele might be seen as the great voice of our century. Who can say with certainty? He ponders the subject and considers the most likely answer to who will be remembered and revered will be no one we know now, someone with a very limited following writing somewhere like the “dark web.” Of course, his own logic seems to fail him at times. While not specifically mentioning “political correctness”, he points out that until the start of this century, “best of” retrospectives seemed to concentrate mostly on White males, but that’s been changing in the past 20 years or so. Now lists of “bests” seem to be more inclusive of other races, and of females. He thus jumps to conclude that the greatest writers of the here-and-now will necessarily be non-White, visible minorities and probably transgendered, somehow assuming that the current shift in attitudes is permanent despite arguing that most opinions of culture tend to be rather transistory and change from decade to decade.

Chuck was a writer for Spin and something of an expert in pop/rock music, so he also tries to establish what the future will remember of “rock”. It’s a lengthy chapter, which among other things tries to distinguish between “rock & roll”, “rock n roll” and “rock” (deciding that April Wine’s “I like to Rock” is the ultimate “rock” song of all-time, but not the ultimate rock n roll or rock & roll song) He notes that we remember composers like Beethoven and Mozart but have forgotten equally talented contemporaries of theirs and figures that is how the future will remember “rock”. One or two names will live on while most others, often equally-talented, will be long forgotten. He examines the Beatles and even though they have been in all likelihood the most influential and successful purveyors of it, suggests they may not be remembered because we seem to have a bias for remembering great individuals instead of groups or collectives. Canadians art lovers might counter with “Group of Seven” – probably the best-known and loved homegrown visual artists but known by a collective name rather than seven individual ones – but I digress. He comes down to suggesting maybe Chuck Berry will be remembered as an embodiment of the spirit of rock, or maybe Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan will be. There he makes the interesting point that if the future will remember Dylan, it will think of rock as being more political and astute than it really is; if Elvis is, it will be seen as even more about superficiality and performance over musicianship or substance than it is. Of course, he hedges his bets and also suggests maybe Journey will be the one artist remembered. But wait, Steve Perry fans, don’t get too excited… he doesn’t think it would be on their merit but because of that one song used in one TV show.

He expects future anthropologists will study TV most closely of all our forms of entertainment and pop culture (a questionable assumption), and makes the leap to assume that they will anoint The Sopranos as the finest thing ever to appear on that medium, because, it seems he thinks that. Ergo, the song that plays at the end of the series, “Don’t Stop Believing” will be held in special reverence and assumed to be the epitome of music of our lifetimes. Although he also points out in a rare display of humor, that he may be wrong and future university courses may instead obsess over every episode of Three’s Company instead.

He notes that our opinions of presidents keep changing and predicts once everyone old enough to have voted for Ronald Reagan dies, future political scientists will point to him as a terrible leader and wonder how he ever got elected – without that grandfatherly charisma to look back on and remember, they’ll see him being in charge of an economy that was in bad shape and got worse for most Americans, see his deregulation as harming the nation and draw no ties between him in the White House and the collapse of the USSR a year later. He figures that seismic bit of history will be attributed to the Soviet Union being a society built on 19^th Century agrarian cultures not suited to the modern world. Which led into one of the more interesting topics he studies in it – if the USA can survive. And if it falters, will it be because the Constitution is seen as being infallible and eternal even though drafted in a totally different world which had no concept of nuclear weapons, terrorism, or even the polarization of politicians we see today. What if we’re wrong about the Constitution being the answer to keeping the country united and running properly?

It’s a complicated book, and a bit frustrating in places, but thoroughly interesting. It really gets one re-examining our carved-in-stone beliefs and opinions (which are so ingrained we don’t even see them as “opinions” but as “facts” instead) . It made me look backwards a little at all the changes that have taken place in my lifetime and wonder what will lie ahead in the next 50 or so years. I mean, when I was a child, there’s no way I would have believed that here in 2024, most people would carry a little flat playing card-sized thing in their pocket that could play almost any song they want to hear, watch university lectures or Asian porn in high-definition, call up most of the books in the library and let them read from it, let them send a note instantly to someone on a different continent and have in the process made the whole huge “landline” telephone network obsolete. Yet, here we are in 2024 and people complain their tenth generation I-phone only has a 30 megapixel camera and needs rebooting every few months.

To me, it would seem the only constant is change. But then again, …”but what if we’re wrong?”.

There’s an old Chinese curse that says “may you live in interesting times!”. Well, the 1990s were interesting and I lived through them. They’re now a good ways behind us in the rearview of life, chronologically and culturally. So, no surprise that I enjoyed reading the book entitled The Nineties, A Book (truth in advertising there!) by Chuck Klosterman. But I’m not sure I’d like Mr. Klosterman quite as much.

The ’90s were interesting…just not as interesting as the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s or the decades which have come after it. It was all in all, a comparatively docile, almost boring time when, on the grand scale, not a lot happened. There were two minor skirmishes in the Middle East but the Cold War had ended, temporarily as it now would seem, acts of terrorism were generally small, localized and more often than not overseas, putting North American minds at ease. Most economies were doing just fine… at least on our side of the world. Russia was struggling a little, but at least they were peaceful and electing their leaders, so we figured all was dandy in that part of the world. And for people like myself, it was when our generation – Generation X – found a name and its footing in the Grown-up world. Klosterman speaks to all these topics and much more in his book, a decent summation of the 10 years, or 12, we call the ’90s. Wait – I can hear you saying “12? A decade by definition is 10 years!”. True as that might be, Klosterman suggests the “’90s” began in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, reuniting Germany and putting a visual to the concept of the “Iron Curtain” dissipating and freedom sweeping former Communist lands. And it ended, he argues, on Sep. 11, 2001, when the carefree days of the ’90s suddenly came crashing to the ground.

Overall, its a nice, nostalgic look back at the decade when people still generally considered a phone something attached to your wall that you called to talk to people on and when you had to be home on Thursday nights to see “Must See TV”, or else… you missed them (unless your VHS was set up and didn’t go on the fritz). No binge watching a whole season on the weekend back then, needless to say.

Which leads to the biggest change-maker of the decade – the internet. Only by 2000, many Americans still couldn’t comprehend how much of a life-changing factor the “World Wide Web” was going to be. But as the author points out, at the time, about half the population didn’t have internet access, or in many cases any interest in obtaining it and those who did probably used AOL and to get there had to listen to half a minute of screeching sounds as their dial-up modem connected. Newspaper readership was still about the same in 2000 as it had been about 30 years prior and Napster was in the process of being shut down but seemed like a college phenomenon to most older people who still bought their music. On CDs – compact disc sales actually peaked in the year 2000, at just under one billion units in the U.S. alone. By 2010, they’d be a quarter of that.

Klosterman looks over the big news events of the ’90s like the brief Gulf War, the “Waco seige” (as someone who knows many people in Waco, I can add that the locals hate that description and almost invariably point out that the compound and the uprising took place some 20 miles away from the city), the Columbine shooting and of course, O.J. Simpson. He has some interesting details and insights into each and lets his opinions show through. He refers to O.J.,like so many of us do, as a killer who got away with it : “two people had been brutally killed by a familiar celebrity.”

And of course he reminds us of Monica Lewinsky and the man who made her a household name, Bill Clinton. He writes a lot about Clinton.

As befitting a book by a Gen X-er about the ’90s, he also looks back at pop culture. How alternative music became the norm. How Seinfeld and Friends ruled the TV world. He disliked both but preferred Seinfeld, it would seem because being a “show about nothing” was different and fit the times. Curiously, he forgets to give a shout-out to the ultimate TV symbol of the times, the Simpsons. To him, it only merited one passing brief mention, in context of a movie it spoofed . He mentions how Titanic succeeded to not only make a profit but become the biggest movie ever at the time, despite long odds against it. He correctly notes that for all the hype about Nirvana, Garth Brooks sold more records that decade than anybody else. In his opinion by taking on the persona of a classic rock macho man, dressed up in a country costume, to replace the aging rockers made redundant by the Seattle grungers.

Which leads to my personal beef with the book. While it’s great Klosterman expresses his own opinions, I find them at times both contradictory and sometimes condescending. He’s the typical hipster art snob in places, the one who thinks that Quentin Tarantino was the only person making worthwhile movies but wasn’t elevated to James Cameron or Steven Spielberg heights because only a tiny handful of people like Quentin and himself were smart enough to understand them. And then he writes as much about Reality Bites as almost any other film or cultural event, but only to detail how it only appealed to us Gen X types because everyone else could see how idiotic the Winona Ryder character was in it. He seems to in places deride Nirvana but then spends three pages praising “Smells like Teen Spirit” suggesting will still be a cultural cornerstone 50 or 100 years from now and that it , and only it, changed the face of popular music. “(it) is not transposable. It had to be this song, delivered by this person.” (Italics his, not mine.) But then he casually suggests in that time period, Pavement might have been the best band in the world, while limiting R.E.M. to a brief passing reference and forgetting about U2 – the biggest touring rock act of the decade – altogether. Such are the contradictions of Klosterman. Which are expanded when looking at politics.

While seemingly identifying himself as a “progressive” rather than even a “liberal” or “Democrat”, he barely disguises his disdain for President Clinton, although he grudgingly admits “the Nineties were a good time to be president and (Clinton) was a good president for good times.” Much of this was due to Clinton’s willingness to compromise to get things done, but more than anything it seemed to revolve around Ms. Lewinsky. He states that a “progressive” a decade or two from now will not be able to comprehend how “slick Willy” could be elected, let alone twice, and worse yet, have been popular! Whether or not you agree with that, or somehow think Arkansas Bill was the very first president to have sex outside of his marriage, it seems incredible that the left-wing Progressive writer in turn had no real complaints about Clinton’s bookends, Presidents Bush 1 and 2. In fact, he didn’t see any differences between George W. and Al Gore, other than people thought Bush wasn’t as condescending and would be nicer to have a beer with. Perhaps correct, but it seems silly to suggest that Bush pushed the same agenda Gore and the Democrats did, and sillier yet to suggest the American public didn’t care at all who won the election and were bored with the recounts and tussle after the 2000 election. He must have been on another planet to have experienced it that way; I was in a different country but saw day after day of stories about the election and the protests about it in the news and how high the fevers ran on both sides.

However, he might be right in suggesting that in the end, the course of the country for the 2000s might not have been as influenced by the “hanging chads” as we thought then. About nine months after Florida was officially called for Bush’s favor, who knows what would have happened had Gore been in the White House. Because then the World Trade Center came crashing down and as Klosterman states, all at once, “the Nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.”

The Nineties. Sort of a “decade about nothing”…which isn’t such a bad thing we now can see.

Tag: Chuck Klosterman

But What If Chuck Is Right?

A Decade About Nothing