Chuck Klosterman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I had the fear that Russia might invade the Ukraine, which now is Ukraine. That’s come back. The notion that Japan would buy up the entire world. This idea that you had crack babies who would become these super-predators. There were a lot of fears that, in retrospect, seem relatively slight compared to what we now face. Although that is common, I think, to amplify fears in the moment, and then retroactively look at anything that didn’t happen and perceive it as, “Well, I guess maybe we were amplifying that too much at the time. ” If 9/11 doesn’t happen, we look at the attacking of the USS Cole very differently. We look at the first attempt on the World Trade Center very differently. Now that seems like a precursor to a plan that had been in existence for this long stretch of time, and this was always the goal. But if 9/11 doesn’t occur, it’s almost a forgotten event. It’s really difficult when writing about history, but particularly history that people have lived through. The hardest thing about writing a book about the ’90s, I found, was the bifurcation between people who remember the ’90s almost like they just happened. That these things — the release of Nevermind or these Quentin Tarantino films and all these things — that this is still the history they’re living in. Then for other people, it’s no different than the moon landing. It’s just exposition about an event that they didn’t experience. How do you write a book with the idea that maybe half the audience is going to be in category A, and half the audience is going to be in category B? It was a complicated problem. Did I need to literally explain what a compact disc is? I asked myself that at one point. Then I would be like, “Well, when I was growing up, I fully understood what a reel-to-reel was and what an 8-track was, even though I didn’t necessarily purchase them.” But something has changed about the way time is perceived. I sense that you’ve recognized this too — 10 years is different now than the way it used to be, and it’s — Yeah, I think there’s a break point. Maybe it comes at 9/11, but since then, everything has felt weird, and a lot of aesthetics hasn’t changed very much. Music doesn’t go through phases the way it used to. Movies intensify, maybe, in terms of special effects or number of superheroes, but they don’t evolve the way they used to. The ’90s, to me, was the last part of earlier history.…

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