New criticism: a history of the 1990s misses the good old days—and the truth. . - Culture and Reviews - The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years - book review

Reason, July, 2002 by John F. Pitney, Jr.

The Best of Times: America in the Clinton rears, by Haynes Johnson, New york: Harcourt, 624 pages, $27

THE YEAR 1964 came and went a long time ago, and Haynes Johnson seems none too happy about it. At least that's the impression one gets from this ironically titled essay on recent American history. Although the 19905 brought many economic and technological blessings, Johnson, a former Washington Post reporter who teaches journalism at the University of Maryland, detects "ill-defined currents of discontent; a sense that something is missing." It quickly becomes clear that he yearns for the old order of an assertive federal government that enjoys popular faith, a traditional media structure in which New York and Washington editors control the information flow, and a big-unit economy in which old-line firms make old-fashioned things under the watchful eye of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division.

In The Future and Its Enemies (1998), former reason editor Virginia Postrel coined a word for people like Johnson: stasists. Preferring yesterday's quiet ("stasis") to tomorrow's open-ended future, stasists are always warning us about troubling trends that call for more planning and regulation. Johnson describes the Clinton years as a decade when every bright light cast a dozen dark shadows. "Technology in a way scares me," a Stanford senior who supposedly represents American youth tells Johnson. "Cloning and those kinds of issues are very scary to me. I want to make sure there are mechanisms in place to control those kinds of things, and I don't know that there will be." Johnson concludes in his last chapter that "the problems promise to become even more tortuous in the future."

To draw a convincingly dire picture of where we are heading, stasists need a plausible critique of where we have been. But The Best of Times is hardly the best of social histories. Johnson seems a stranger in his own time, often sounding like someone who has partially awoken from a long cryogenic sleep. The PBS News Hour erred by including him on its regular panel of historians. He doesn't study yesteryear; he is yesteryear.

In the book's first section, "Technotimes," Johnson tells of a visit to Microsoft's corporate headquarters. "Its employees and top executives refer to it as their 'campus,"' he says with an air of discovery. "They all speak of its 'culture,' their 'Microsoft culture."' He is apparently unaware that firms have long referred to office complexes as "campuses" and that "corporate culture" has been a corporate cliche at least since the 1980s.

Johnson has heard of the Internet, but he is hazy on its capabilities. For example, he quotes a Silicon Valley friend as saying that in 10 years it might just be possible to send e-mail in English to Germany and have it come out in German. That friend probably didn't survive the dot-coin shakeout since he or she wasn't keeping up. E-mail translation services are already available on a number of Web sites, and although their treatment of idiomatic expressions leaves something to be desired, the basic technology is in place.

It is no surprise thatJohnson uncritically accepts the notion of the "digital divide," the purported gap in Internet access between rich and poor, white and black. In a reason article three years ago ("Falling for the Gap," November 1999), Adam Clayton Powell III demolished this myth with data that showed increasing access, particularly in the workplace. More recently, other observers, including the U.S. Department of Commerce, have made similar points, but Johnson does not acknowledge their views or, for that matter, just about any free market argument.

Where others could see opportunity, Johnson can see only turmoil. By producing cheap computer operating systems and software programs, Microsoft helped trigger a vast revolution in communications, but Johnson's discussion of the Microsoft antitrust case rails against "the reality of a cutthroat business filled with egotistic, arrogant people." If he really wanted a portrait of egotism and arrogance, he needn't have gone farther than Microsoft's nemesis, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

In his next section, "Teletimes," Johnson looks at the mass media and sees even more disturbing signs. Here he does make a point, albeit unintentionally. He worked for many years at The Washington Post and now teaches journalism. If his level of accuracy and grasp of historical context represent the best of the profession, then the media have deep troubles indeed. Johnson cites data showing that Internet usage is increasing but claims "that doesn't mean people are using the Internet news offerings in greater numbers." Wrong. He should have checked surveys by the Pew Center for the People and the Press (people-press.org). In 1998, 13 percent of adults reported going online for news at least three times a week. Two years later, that figure had grown to 23 percent. Now news junkies can bypass Johnson's friends in big-city editorial offices and instead pick what they want to see, whether from the Associated Press, Salon, or reason online.