Well, one of the early suggestions was "The Zeros." Never caught on, for obvious reasons. But at least it's fitting.


That's not to say I haven't enjoyed the, sigh, the Two Thousands. I have. Immensely.


But as a decade, it's the second featureless one in a row. And I'm tired of that.

Eh. It'll work itself out. Or not.

Regarding the "characterlessness of the 90's", I totally disagree. Of course, I came of age in the 90's, so you'll see it differently from me, but is a decade featuring this list "characterless"?

(Please excuse my use of sound bites but it's a concise way to describe how the decade was distinct.)

End of Apartheid, Fall of Berlin Wall
Nirvana/Pearl Jam
Gen X's slacker culture
Ska's 3rd Wave, leading into Rockabilly, Swing, Punk revivals
Peak of Rave culture
PC Gaming as we know it comes into being - First Person Shooters (Doom), Real Time Strategy (the original Warcraft).
Columbine

And, oh yeah, the invention of the World Wide Web, causing The Internet To Go Public.

The world was a very different place after the 90's ended.

Yes, the '90s already have a name: Post Cold-War.

Similarly, the '30s and '40s aren't so much defined by the numeric appellation as by The Depression and World War II.

I suspect (though futurism is a fool's game) that eventually this last decade will primarily come to be defined by 9/11 and the spasmodic reaction to same.

Besides the "names" we give periods tend to be erroneously reductive rather than helpfully descriptive so if we can skip that for a couple decades I'm all in favor.

I don't have any suggestions for what to name the decade - but everytime I see this thread title I think of that song with the line: I've been to the desert on a horse with no name

Don't know about the other stuff, but I'm pretty sure the Berlin Wall fell in the late 80's

Barely, it fell in November 1989. Besides, "the '60s" didn't really start until 1963 or so. As cultural movements the "decades" are generally only rough approximations. "The '50s" similarly start in the late '40s and started to crackup with the Civil Rights movement in the late '50s leaving a period of the better part of a decade that people aren't really sure which they should be assigned to.

Well, I guess for me the fall of the Berlin Wall was the culmination of the Red Scare. The 80's for me included red/commie jokes and such, as well as Reagan/Gorbachev talks, so the fall of the wall fell squarely in line with all that 80's-esque stuff. Maybe that's just me.

But it also marked the beginning of the Post-Cold War period which was a major psychological shift from what had come before.

I guess it is like asking to which apartment the wall dividing me from from our neighbor belongs.

Good metaphor

True, the decades don't correlate exactly with the chronology of the numbers. What we think of as The Sixties is likely '63 through '71 or 2. Same true for all the others, but it's pretty darn close.


But as for either the Berlin Wall or Nine Eleven, I posit that political events ... with the lone exception of WWII ... don't make up the "style" of the decades, at least the styles that I'm thinking of.

Perhaps political events and climates made what we think of as the 50's or 60's or 70's possible ... but it's the pop culture (some of it politically influenced), the music, the fashions, the zeitgeist if you will - - that characterizes these decades and gives them the unique "flavor" we've come to associate them with.


So, I'm gonna have to say meh to the Berlin Wall as characterizing any decade, imol. And I think most of the other things on CP's list were 80's as well. Or reeked of them, at any rate.


But, heh, DURING the 80's I wasn't so sure that decade had a character. And, of course, it infamously did.