Things Got Weird: On the Early ‘90s Crack-Up
Americans are good talkers these days. Prodigious at least. Our screens and links and tabs are filled with it. Talk, talk, talk. Streams of mouthy TikTokers and YouTubers. News channels transformed into neverending panel discussions. Novels dictated by insistent first-person narrators. Besides the economics of an easily replicable product—talk is cheap, we’re always told, usually in prelude to a fight—what accounts for all the blather? Is it because everyone has something to say? Or is it because regardless of the question—gaping income inequality, an increasingly irritable biosphere, or the appeal of a red-faced demagogue promising retribution to red-hatted crowds—nobody seems to have a good answer?
Things were not that different at the end of George H. W. Bush’s presidency, according to John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early
