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Because that's what this decade was - the Zeroes. The pits. The shits. An utterly fucking horrible period of history. One of the worst decades in at least a century. The fact that it's ending on a slightly up note does nothing to absolve the decade as a whole.
During the '90s, I complained of the fact that so much of the era seemed almost exclusively devoted to nostalgia for previous decades, thanks to millennial angst, but in retrospect, there was actually at least a little bit of novelty there, albeit both good and bad.
During the Zeroes, though, there's exactly four things that I can think of that I could qualify as even remotely novel - 9/11 at the start of the decade, Obama at the end of it, with Stephenie Meyer and the unprecedented transformation of communication media in between.
Otherwise? This was a goddamn RERUN decade, as seen by the fact that I'm including Stephenie Meyer in the category of relative novelty, even though she's basically the unholy bastard spawn of the worst aspects of Laurell K. Hamilton, Anne Rice and Emily Bronte ("HEATHCLIFF EDWARD!!!")
We had a Bush in the White House, a Clinton running for president, a trilogy of Star Wars movies, a reimagining of Battlestar Galactica (which was itself originally a ripoff of Star Wars), a revival of Doctor Who, a reboot of Star Trek, and movies devoted not only to '80s franchises such as Transformers and G.I. Joe, but also to decades-older creative concepts and series ranging from '60s-era superheroes such as Spider-Man, the Hulk and Iron Man, as well as '30s-era superheroes such as Batman and Superman, to the World War II-era The Lord of the Rings and (a remake of) the Depression-era King Kong, the latter two helmed by Peter Jackson.
Yes, there's one hell of a lot of the superhero/sci-fi/fantasy pop culture in the above list that I enjoyed a great deal, but that doesn't change the fact that, even more than any previous decade - hell, even more than a fin de siecle decade like the '90s - the Zeroes are the decade when the last of our innovative thinkers in entertainment just seemed to fucking GIVE UP, because aside from my above-noted exceptions, we just did not seem to have a single original idea in our goddamn heads.
So, this is it, then; this go down in history be the decade that nostalgia exhausted the last of its non-renewable natural resources, because aside from a few salty leavings from the '90s, the Zeroes were the decade when we strip-mined pop culture so thoroughly that we finally ran out of past.
It's really rather dismaying to consider how fast we've burned through our reserves of potential nostalgia material, when you recall that the art deco movement of the '20s was inspired by Egyptian designs and architecture dating back to centuries before Christ, whereas during the '50s, the trend in movies was toward Biblical-era epics and the trend in TV shows was toward Old Westerns, but somehow, by the time we got to the '70s, we'd reduced the nostalgia gap from hundreds of years to 20 years at the most, with TV shows like Happy Days and movies like American Graffiti, the latter of which was set less than a dozen years prior.
The problem is that potential nostalgia material has to be either drawn from generational memories (folks who have hit the prime of their adulthoods pining away for their childhoods, thus accounting for the 20-year rule) or else sparked off by relatively current events (once again, art deco emerged not long after King Tut's tomb was opened). Sadly, American culture has become so xenophobic and anti-intellectual that I don't think archeology can feed nostalgia anymore. However, given the fact that everything geek is now becoming chic, I think we might enter into an era in which people wax nostalgic for old-timey science fiction portrayals of what people in previous eras imagined our current era might be like, complete with retro-tech like ray-guns, rocket-packs and flying cars. Which would be a total kick in the ass, because it'd be nostalgia for the future of the past.
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