Crack the Sky
Several weeks ago my wife and I were trading ideas for what movie to watch on a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon. I suggested The Grifters, the tremendous Stephen Frears film with John Cusack (by far his best role), Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening (lousy, as always), and she parried, “That’s pretty recent, let’s dig back a little further.” I did a double-take and said, “Sweetie, 1990 isn’t recent.” We saw the film when it was released at an uptown theater in Manhattan, and while we clearly remember that night—eating at Ollie’s afterwards—I’d say 36 years ago is from the “olden days.”
But, as I said, it’s a classic, and ripe for the wave of 1990s nostalgists that’ve sprung up in the last decade. I was in early middle-age during the 1990s, and a lot was really fun, a lot very silly and on the surface America was humming along. I couldn’t stand Bill Clinton’s presidency, and his Arkansas litany of ugly double-dealings, mostly covered up or ignored by the media (save R. Emmett Tyrrell’s American Spectator, which self-destructed from Clinton brow-beating; The Wall Street Journal was also vigilant), not to mention Hillary and that awful “war room.” Nostalgia’s a tricky concept, especially today; it’s a combination of glossy, edited ruminations about the past and marketing vehicle.
I remember seeing the vastly overrated American Graffiti in the fall of 1973 as a college freshman. It capitalized on weird 1950s nostalgia like the return of the hula hoop (a flop), the group Sha Na Na (short-lived, despite Woodstock appearance) and crew-cuts; later came the TV series Happy Days and the abomination known as “The Fonz.” I was flummoxed at the 1950s glorification; no one I knew cared about that mixed-up decade, except for pop and country music.
Careful politicians in the 1990s were usually “graceful” in public—as opposed to Trump today, who was excoriated last Saturday for saying he was glad one of his tormentors, Robert Mueller, had died, an honest reaction but one that goes against the pro forma not “speaking ill of the dead”—but no less loathsome and hypocritical. Clinton was playing to Republicans when he gave a eulogy at Richard Nixon’s funeral in 1994, a deft calculation; less characteristic, and galling, was his no-show at the World Trade Center when it was first bombed in 1993, with six fatalities and over 1000 injuries. That was a strange George Bush “Katrina” moment for Clinton and I still don’t understand it. It was terrorism, but Clinton during his eight-year tenure, ignored threats that he was privy to.
I don’t get the revisionism over John F. Kennedy Jr.’s atrocious monthly magazine George, in part due to the widely panned TV series Love Story, about Kennedy and his wife Carolyn Bessette. Talk about digging from the bottom of the barrel; George’s fatuous mix of celebrity and politics made the short-lived, and unlamented Egg look like the mid-1960s Esquire.
I don’t take The Bulwark Substack seriously—it’s a collegiate effort at best, just a constant drumbeat of anti-Trump nyah-nyahs—but did click on its March 17th entry, headlined: “JFK Jr.’s Former Magazine Zombified Into a Conspiracy Theorist Slop Shop.” Joe Perticone writes: “Maybe Ho’s version of George is a perfect fit for this moment. JFK Jr. was the most prominent member of his generation of the Kennedy dynasty, and he wanted to turn politics into a lifestyle brand. RFK Jr. is now the most prominent Kennedy, and he and his MAHA movement have blended public policy with vibes and cultural identity better than JFK Jr. ever did.
You can take your “vibes” and shove it: JFK Jr. was “prominent” because of his looks (and father), but he was a dope, which was demonstrated by his speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention that nominated Michael Dukakis. (The celebrity media at the time called the remarks “iconic.”) RFK Jr. is often as fruity as an overripe plum, but is easily the smartest of the Kennedy third generation.
And then there’s The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd getting dewy-eyed about John-John. She starts: “Once, in the mid-1990s, John F. Kennedy Jr. called me. He had a great voice, with a seductive thread of mischief running through it. Even on the phone, I could feel the magnetism of the reigning dreamboat.” JFK Jr. was pitching Dowd to puff up his fledgling George, which the onetime “face” of the Times op-ed roster, didn’t fall for, believing that the “dreamboat” was meant for less frivolous pursuits. I didn’t watch Love Story, but find this Dowd snippet hard to believe: “A legion of new acolytes is emulating Bessette’s chic ‘90s minimalism… while men in Gotham are comically imitating John’s carefree style, biking in suit and backpack, with a Kangol hat or backward baseball cap.”
Like Dowd, I don’t live in New York now, so I’ve no idea if this “imitation” of Kennedy is true. As for his “carefree” style, as I’ve noted before, Kennedy lived a block away from my family in Tribeca and I’d see him at the popular café Bubby’s or the local bodega. He was a rude dude, onetime checking out the Post’s Page Six for mentions, and then skipped the plebeian line, and threw a couple of bucks at the cashier for a bottle of water. That’s 1990s nostalgia I’ll do without.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023