Plenty of people argue that packaging decades up with meaning is a pointless exercise, that it takes a while for decades’ to accumulate a set of historical cliches. But the 2000s (a decade that struggled even to gain a sensible nickname) arguably seems to have been accumulating meaning for the past few years like a sticky sweet grabbing fluff down the back of the sofa.
The early-2000s trend for history books summing up whole decades and talking heads shows dissecting the 20th century year by year (I still await I LOVE 1939) made the 2000s a decade that analysed itself even while it was still going.
Sometimes, TV news felt like a bad episode of The X-Factor, recap after recap of news events that occurred a few years, months or even days before. With 24-hour-news, the same reports ping-ponged at us in a shitty cycle of misery. The 2000s threw the waiting of the ‘90s and the dread of the ‘80s into sharp relief.
The ‘90s was a transitional decade, a decade where not only pop but the whole bloody carcass of culture started to eat itself. Modern art took Duchamp’s Fountain and pissed all over the idea, TV rushed even further away from drama towards the heights of “real life” programming. Politics was busy clearing out the deadwood of a Conservative government just in time to give us a brand new version of the same old faintly seedy, largely inept MPs, only this time with red rosettes on rather than blue.
In the ‘80s, the Left had a clearly defined villain to tilt at in Margaret Thatcher while she gave the Right someone to cheer. Blair, Brown and Cameron all dream of being such transformative figures but they remain in the shadow of Thatcher, compared to her and destined to be judged even more harshly than her.
Blair gave up his convictions (such as they were) to forge a closeness with the most reviled American President in modern history while Brown mortgaged his in his desperate slobbering rush for the premiership. Cameron’s time is not here yet but it looks frighteningly like it will be a moribund mishmash of Blair and Thatcher.
The ‘80s were a time of definable enemies – the IRA, the Soviet Union – the ‘90s a decade for false optimism and theories that history had ground to a halt. The credulous and callow seemed somehow to believe that the breakdown of the Soviet Union could guarantee a more peaceful Europe and that the end of “active operations” by the IRA would end the actions of the group’s most extreme wings or mean the end of terrorist threats to the UK.
Our ‘enemies’ now are harder to quantify. The noughties was also a decade of repeats, A second George Bush waging Gulf War 2: This Time It’s Because Daddy Said I Should. Old timers from previous administrations popping up in the White House like William Shatner relentlessly cropping up in Star Trek movies. “Oh look, it’s Donald Rumsfeld, back for another run round the Pentagon and there’s good old Dick Cheney, I haven’t seen him since the last time we invaded Iraq”.
Gordon Brown promising a renewed sense of purpose delivered a sequel to Tony Blair that was more divided and less coherent, like a concussed chicken had been put in charge of policy.
The ‘80s and ‘90s were the decades where we most throughly planted the seeds for Islamic fundamentalism to arrive on our doorsteps with some plastic explosives, some anthrax and a list of countries we’d fiddled about with. Buggering about with Iran and Iraq since the early 20th century obviously didn’t help but in our tireless work allowing Saudi Arabia to ride roughshod over democracy in return for oil and lack of desire to get rid of Saddam Hussein as well as years of installing puppet regimes did little to stem the rise of violent fundamentalist Islamic groups.
Fundamentalists of all stripes were the biggest danger of the noughties. If we were to distill the dangerous faces of the decade onto t-shirts, the leading contenders would have to be Osama Bin Laden and George Bush. Bin Laden represents just one of many jihadi leaders who sought to wage war on the West but appropriately he became the face of terror not only by financing vast acts of terror but also by being the one most able to exploit the age of Youtube.
George Bush was also the face of many. The neo-conservative thinkers at the heart of his administration were hawkish and keen to intervene in the Middle East before 9/11, influenced by the position of think-tanks like the Project For A New American Century. 9/11 was a transformative moment for the world not only because of the horrific number of lives lost but also because it became the unquestionable defence for using force as part of Bush’s “pre-emptive strike” doctrine.
The terrorist attacks on September 11 2001 were unquestionably one of the most terrible crimes in history. They were also a catalyst for terrible crimes, for the torture programmes of Abu Grahib, for the dark arts of extraordinary rendition where the noughties fascination with outsourcing reached its most extreme conclusion – placing interrogation in the hands of third party regimes who feel less squeamish about getting their hands bloodied.
The Blair and Bush governments soiled the reputations of both the US and the UK more thoroughly than any before them, putting their citizens in more danger and removing more freedoms in a self-defeating campaign to “defend freedom and fight terror”. An endless, unstoppable war on abstract nouns.
Eric Hobsbawm said the Short 20th Century lasted from 1914 to 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. But while he might suggest that the 20th Century came to an end then, the 21st Century did not come early. Instead we had the Phoney Ceasefire, the prematurely declared end of history when we looked largely benignly on the collapse of our old enemies, not realising that like a nightmarish boss at the end of a computer game, they had not gone away but simply splintered into a thousand smaller, less predictable pieces.
Now Russia is on the rise again with many of the elements that were once the plutonium-tipped-umbrella-shiv sharp end of Soviet foreign policy clinging on to power. Putin slid from President to Prime Minister until he can slide back again, Russia has launched it’s own propaganda channel for the UK (Russia Today) and is working tirelessly to strengthen its umbrella of influence in the former Eastern Bloc.
Rather than moving towards nuclear disarmament, the group keeps getting bigger like a member’s club with an even more malign list of bastards on it than a bad night at the Groucho Club. North Korea is teetering like a very angry Scottish drunk who lost his leg in a shark kicking competition, China, India and Pakistan are on the verge of a very nasty set of border skirmishes and Iran’s moderates are in desperate need of support.
The noughties was the decade where everything atomised – where the enemies became less clear cut, the friends became less helpful and the future became more uncertain. Declaring the end of history didn’t make us look back and learn lessons from it any more than we had tried to at any time in our long and bloody residency on this planet. The noughties was the decade when the internet and the spread of the mobile phone made communicating far easier but it was also the decade that showed that we as a species hadn’t got any better at listening to each other.
The volume of talk keeps growing but the number of people actually saying anything is declining. The nourishing bits of popular culture are rare and rich but the distractions and the tasteless soulless pap are being dished out with ever bigger ladles. Don’t worry about the CCTV cameras or the plans to detain you indefinitely, here’s Celebrities Falling Off Ladders and When Jordan Tried Home Brain Surgery.
When America was offered a Presidential candidate who actually spoke in complex sentences and promised to be a respected figure on the world stage, it took the chance. But he had been pilloried already for not doing enough while simultaneously letting himself down by not sticking to his guns on the key issues like health care reform. Watching the man who tackled race head on when the Reverend Wright scandal bubble up to destroy his campaign, claim that he “did not campaign on a public option” is a depressing sight.
But at least the US has a leader who renewed interest in politics among its youth, at least it has a leader who has dared to talk about big ideas and seek to inspire. In the UK we have three Wurzel Gummage like men, ever ready to pull on the head they think will appeal most to the electorate – three men who were all found to have exploited the Parliamentary expenses system now crowing about how their hair shirt is itchier than everyone else’s. Gordon Brown, a man who backed reducing regulation and freeing the banks, now bashing the bankers like he’s playing a Square Mile themed game of Whack-a-mole.
As platforms like Facebook and Twitter have made it easier for us to campaign about the insignificant issues (who gets to number one, how much we dislike Jan Moir), as nation we’ve become more willing to vote for The X-Factor winner than we are to choose our leaders. The noughties have left us with a climate where Simon Cowell can suggest creating a “political X-Factor” with a red telephone for Number 10 to call and not be roundly laughed at.
The noughties was the decade that the last crumbs of belief in the political system were stomped to a fine mist by scandals and disappointments, by anti-war marches ignored and expenses fiddled. The noughties have been a decade of renewed fear and confusion but also a period in which we’ve been presented with the tools to come together more quickly.
As much as Twitter’s relationship with the Iranian elections was flawed, it was an interesting illustration of how a major news event can be altered by our ability to spread messages unmediated by “expert” commentators. Services like Twitter and Facebook open to abuse from actors in the security services but all means of communications ever invented are.
The internet has become almost as vital as a connection to the national grid or the water mains. It will become even more so in the next 10 years. Personal freedom has been under threat throughout the noughties and it’ll be a big theme in the years to come. We have to fight the desire of special interests to fight against net neutrality and seek to combat the insidious spread of CCTV and other surveillance technologies.
The evidence that they make us safer is scant, those that want to live outside of the surveillance society will find methods to do that. Mortgaging the freedoms in a democratic society that it took us hundreds of years to achieve for a specious sense of security has been one of the noughties biggest failures.
We can arrest the decline but we have to revitalise our sense of political engagement and turn the growing public conversation into something that defines solutions rather than simply highlighting complaints.