Totally Killer by Greg Olear

Author:Greg Olear
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061959981
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

PART II

Cold Ethyl

CHAPTER 12

A

ccording to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession that plagued the nation in the summer of ’91 began in July of 1990, just before the U.S. occupation…er, liberation…of Kuwait. Recessions by their nature defy rational causal analysis, but that particular economic downturn was brought on by, first, the banking “credit crunch,” in the wake of the S&L scandal (a foreshadowing of our current financial crisis), and, second, a precipitous increase in oil prices, after Saddam invaded Kuwait. Or so economist Jane Katz argued in her 1999 report for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. While the recession technically ended in March of 1991, before Taylor had even moved to Manhattan, Katz notes that “a sluggish early recovery made the downturn seem to last much longer and kept unemployment rising—up to 7.8 percent in June 1992—even as the economy started to come back.” Indeed, by late ’93 things were more or less back to normal, and the economy, spurred on by a World Wide Web devised by Tim Berners-Lee the year our story takes place, took off thereafter, peaking big time in 1999. But in the late summer of ’91, Berners-Lee himself, peering through his rosiest Oliver Peoples, could not have foreseen such a drastic correction. The future looked bleak, even hopeless. Work was impossible to find. Prices were rising. The heat was unrelenting, as was the “sluggish recovery” that we referred to, at the time, as the “depression.”

The rest of the news cycle was just as grim. A dark horse presidential candidate, the Democratic governor of backwater Arkansas, threw his name into the hat with the other hopeless hopefuls—Poppy Bush, holding a political straight flush in the wake of the Gulf War, looked like a cinch for reelection. And the lurid confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas, as unqualified for the Supreme Court as Dan Quayle was for the vice presidency, introduced the nation to the jurisprudential definition of quid pro quo. On Tuesday, October 15, 1991, in defiance of Anita Hill and common sense, the Senate voted 52–48 to confirm Long Dong Silver. That was but one small detail, one tiny Fuck You from the gods, that contributed to October 15, 1991, being the worst day of my life. Up until that point, that is.

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