The Nameless Decade

Update 12/30: A version of this is on the Rescued List at Daily Kos.

Update 1/02: Think Progress notes exactly how much of nothing this decade was for American workers: zero net job growth and the first decline in median income since the 1960s.

Ten years ago, I speculated on what this first decade of the 21st century ought to be called. The choice wasn't obvious, and the alternatives weren't very appealing. I used this conundrum as a way to talk about purpose: would this be the decade of zeros--the postmodern, consumer society, corporate dominated nothingness-- or the decade of the Oughts--when we assumed responsibility for what we ought to do, our responsibility for the future?

The problem of what to call the decade was solved by ignoring it, which pretty much sums up how that responsibility idea went. As trend writers this week struggle to come up with something to say about the past ten years, a new title is bandied about--the "noughties." (As my piece linked above traces a bit of the history of "ought" for zero as slang for "nought" as nothing, zero or the "o" in x's and o's, this piece from this week explains more about "nought.")

Whatever you call it, writes Paul Krugman, it's been a big zero. "Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever."

In terms of economics, he writes, this was "the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing." He suggests we just call it the Big Zero.

My 1999 piece questions the whole enterprise of dividing experience into decades with their defining characteristics. At best, it's shorthand for an image, a mood. Mostly it's advertising.

But when it comes to time, I realize more and more I can only speak for myself, with some reference to my contemporaries. Maybe that's why I can locate a complex of feelings as well as images for "the 50s" or "the 60s." But when it comes to the decade we're leaving, I've got nothing.

I have images and memories, of course. But nothing defining. This decade for me is nameless because it is incoherent, without defining characteristics. Except perhaps for the cell phone. That's not much to hang a decade on.

It wasn't bland. It was extreme, but in every direction. How can you define a decade that began with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and ends with Barack Obama? It may be remembered as the decade of lost opportunity, of too late a start, of fatal delay and suicidal strangeness. And with a little hope near the end.

Of course people who grew up, got married, etc. in this decade will always remember its textures. But apart from what began in 2008, let's hope this decade is forgotten, that it remains nameless. And the next one is very different.