Remembrance of things past: A wartime reverie

It's sad when someone who's only 24 years old spends most of his day drowning in intense nostalgia. Such, however, has been my fate over the past week. For while some have reacted to Dubya's desert quagmire with anger or frustration, my primary sentiment has been different. More than anything else, I miss the nineties.

You kids today may barely remember a time when Americans felt safe, rich and contented, but such was the state of the nation during my undergraduate years. The Cold War was finally over, and what came next was a time of seemingly infinite possibility. We were being led by a man from Hope, and a sense of optimism imbued us all.

I'll never forget the first time that I logged on to Al Gore's exciting new computer network, for example. The Internet would surely revolutionize everyone's lives eventually, and it certainly did provide us with plenty of free pornography in the meanwhile. It was a glorious time to be an adolescent male.

But the World Wide Web wasn't just the global village's high-tech smut shack; it was also a venture-capital greased gold mine. If you were a 20-something of the '90s and decided that the hot dog market could be revolutionized through a system of digital distribution at wieners.com, you'd soon have Wall Street execs beating a path to your door, each carrying a briefcase stuffed to bursting with filthy lucre.

Personally, I made a couple hundred a week writing (I'm not making this up) multiple-choice science quiz questions for teens. A bunch of my classmates had somehow convinced local investors that they could make a financial killing by amassing a giant digital database of these quiz questions. In the nineties, such ideas seemed almost plausible.

With cash piling up in our bank accounts, and ever-available from newfangled ATM's, college students with even the most minimal computer skills were living better than their parents. Looking for new ways to spend our money, we discovered that good cigars weren't just for middle-aged businessmen celebrating the birth of their first grandchildren, that thrift-store clothes needn't be sold at thrift-store prices, and that coffee tasted much better when it cost five dollars a cup.

As for entertainment, there was always CNN. Back before anyone had thought to call it "reality television," the still-dominant news network provided us with 24 hours a day of meaningless fluff. Americans were presented with a series of real-life soap operas starring a cast of delightful eccentrics from Kato Kaelin to Ted Kaczynski. Sure, the occasional lives might have been lost, but never more than a couple at a time. And the best soap opera of them all didn't involve a single exploding parcel or bloody glove — just a hidden microphone, a stained blue dress and, so characteristic of the period, a cigar.

All of the joys of that innocent time came together in a single moment, when CNN announced that the Starr report was now available on the Web, and suggested that those with dirty minds might enjoy skipping straight to the section about a certain human humidor. Sipping a Mocha Frappuccino, my jaw dropped as I read on and on (and on) about the vilest private practices of our highest public official. Yes, those were the days . . .

Soon, however, the joy and hope of the nineties would come to a crashing halt. It is my firm conviction that Ralph Nader is to blame, although Karl Rove, the Hallibur-ton Corporation and al Qaeda may also have played significant roles. Yet regardless of the reasons, it's clear that our new millennium will be rather grim for the foreseeable future.

Today, the gay nineties seem like an American version of Weimar Germany — the period of glorious decadence before the killing and dying began in earnest. We've gone from Internet boom to Bush bust, from an all-O.J. CNN to an all-war Fox News, and from Hope, Arkansas to Despair, Texas.

I, for one, would like to go back.

Mike Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y.