Roseannearchy by Roseanne Barr

Author:Roseanne Barr
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2011-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Looking Back at the ’90s

The ’90s was the decade that really changed my life. I went from being a working-class woman in the late eighties to being a multi-millionaire who played a working-class woman on TV. Half the year I’d be quarantined in a windowless world where it was all about the Connor family, while outside the real world seemed like it was getting whipped around in a blender. I was like Rip Van Winkle waking up to the new decade after each season of my sitcom, and it was like that for me for years.

Computers and cell phones and beepers and fax machines were invading people’s daily lives, but I lagged seriously behind in all of that. Suddenly, people had three phone numbers but never answered their phones. I thought computers were for nerds till I found out I was the nerd and had some serious catching up to do. The ’90s brought us technology whether we wanted it or not.

Politically, the decade started with President Bush the Elder, but it quickly became the Clinton era. “The man from Hope” seemed kind of folksy in a younger, hipper way, what with the Fleetwood Mac theme song and his “white trash to Rhodes scholar” backstory. But Clinton was basically a company man in Democrat’s clothing. He convinced people who were getting the short end of the stick that he “felt their pain,” but slowly and steadily we got used to words like “downsizing” and “outsourcing” and “corporate raiding” and “globalization” and all those other words that meant that lots more people would be getting the short end of the stick before it was all over.

There was plenty of talk about “dot-com millionaires” and everybody seemed to be in a hurry to “have it all,” but working people were slowly losing ground. I guess the upside (for me) to the ugly mess at the end of the Clinton era was that the leader of the free world risked it all to have some nasty diversion with a fat Jewish girl. Speaking of nasty . . . Ken Starr and his typically American sex-obsessed, puritanical torch-and-pitchfork army of self-righteous zealots took a gross minichapter in our history and turned it into a somehow more embarrassing pulp novel. Their exaggerated outrage and endless parading of the sordid details was off the sleazometer.

The ’90s was a wake-up call for Americans in more ways than one. The horror at Columbine (I lived in Colorado for years before I made it big; my kids went to school there) drove home the fact that high school was hell for most kids, and that lots of parents who thought they were doing well were strangers to their own children. I guess I wasn’t immune, either.

In my TV family, the Connor kids went through some tough life passages, but the family was tight in its own way and they muddled through. In real life, my marriage finally came apart for good and I wound up sticking my own kids in some of those bootcamp- type schools.

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