Recalling the Year That Was
By David Foster
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, December 17, 1998; 12:08 p.m. EST
There were other stories this year in America, you know. Think of Texas floods and Florida fires. Think of Wall Street's wild ride and John Glenn's even wilder one. Think of Viagra!
Think of anything but presidential sex, lies and videotape. This 1998 retrospective certainly won't dwell on that tawdry matter. We in the media know you're sick of it all, from the cigar to Starr, and have been for months.
So you said in survey after survey. So you declared on Election Day, according to the pundits. Yet few among us, writers and readers alike, could help but keep watching as the sorry details emerged, holding our hands over our eyes while peeking out between our fingers.
To some extent, that's how America dealt with all of 1998, a year in which we grew more adept at filtering reality to our liking. With high-tech help from V-chips, Internet cookies and 100 cable channels, it was easier than ever create our own private takes on the world.
Our president led the way, inventing a planet where telling the truth differed from being ''legally accurate,'' but we're done with that subject -- remember? -- so let's move on to another example: the economy.
All year, Asia's slump threatened to drag the world into recession. Yet America diligently ignored the bad news abroad to forge an unlikely prosperity at home. Gas was cheap. Mortgage rates were low. Even the federal government made money, posting its first budget surplus in 29 years. The stock market, despite hair-raising fluctuations, seemed as Teflon-coated as Clinton's political career. (Oops, sorry. No more scandal references, and that's a promise.)
Since screening out the big, bad world seemed to work wonders on Wall Street, who could blame us for trying selective myopia elsewhere?
Powerful new drugs yielded another year of declining AIDS deaths in America, a cause for celebration if we ignored the 95 percent of AIDS sufferers worldwide who couldn't afford those drugs. Gulf Coast residents could be thankful that Hurricane Georges was destructive but not particularly deadly -- as long as they didn't look south, where Mitch killed more than 10,000 people in Latin America.
Many stories of 1998 were neither purely good nor evil, merely full of dueling ambiguities that dared us to find a personal perspective that made sense.
U.S. warships pointed their cruise missiles at Iraq but backed off when Saddam promised to cooperate with arms inspectors, not that anyone believed him. Trustbusting prosecutors stormed Bill Gates' software fortress, cheered on by Microsoft competitors with market-dominating dreams of their own. Dr. Jack Kevorkian continued his grim reaping and faced first-degree murder charges for what he called a mercy killing.
Republican leaders in Congress, expecting Democrats to be dragged down by you-know-who's problems with you-know-what, strolled confidently into the November election. They staggered away in shock, their majority thinned. Newt Gingrich quit his job as House speaker, even as former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura started a new career as Minnesota's governor.
While pundits puzzled over those turns, other news needed no expert analysis. As anyone could see, it was just plain bad.
The bizarre turned routine in a bloody string of school shootings in Jonesboro, Ark.; Edinboro, Pa., and Springfield, Ore. Hundreds of law officers combed the woods of North Carolina for bombing suspect Eric Rudolph, and another manhunt in Utah's canyonlands sought a pair of cop-killing survivalists. Both searches came up empty.
Hate wore many faces: A black man was dragged to death in Texas. A gay college student was beaten and left to die in Wyoming. An abortion doctor was shot to death through his kitchen window in New York.
The Red Cross spent more in 1998 than in any previous year, tending to a nation that seemed to have enrolled in the Natural Disaster of the Month Club. While hurricanes and tropical storms were the most destructive, other weird weather took its toll. A tornado wiped Spencer, S.D., off the map. A half-million charred acres in Florida and a deadly heat wave in Texas left Gulf Coasters praying for rain, which finally flooded in with a vengeance.
And Frank Sinatra died.
With so much bad news, it was tempting to follow the lead of Hillary Clinton, who swore off reading newspapers. (Please note, by the way, that since there's no mention here of WHY she stopped reading, this writer has technically not broken his promise, depending, of course, on how you define ''promise.'')
Now, where were we? Oh yes, bad news. There was plenty of it, to be sure, but completely shutting out the world to avoid it also would have meant missing some of the good tidings of 1998:
Impotent men rejoiced as Viagra lifted their spirits. IRS officials promised to be nicer, not that anyone believed them. Keiko, the killer-whale star of ''Free Willy,'' made his own real-life escape from an Oregon aquarium to a sea pen near Iceland. States won a $206 billion settlement from tobacco companies for the cost of treating sick smokers.
A duel of sluggers returned the magic to baseball. Mark McGwire won the good-natured race with 70 home runs to Sammy Sosa's 66 for the season, and both basked in the glory of shattering the 61-homer record set 37 years ago by Roger Maris.
John Glenn took America on another nostalgic ride, blasting into orbit at age 77. By turning the space shuttle Discovery into an Elderhostel, Glenn helped make space exploration exciting once more.
He gave America a reason to look ahead brightly, past the worrisome Y2K hump, toward a millennium when nations may work in peace aboard a space station, an era when the world may finally have forgotten a certain White House intern (not that we're talking about her now, mind you).
''Zero-g and I feel fine,'' Glenn said, again, floating about with a grin as he demonstrated one of the most satisfying ways to look at 1998. Through his distant lens, the world still was a place of hope, a blue jewel in the cosmos waiting for us to throw away the filters and see its beauty, this time with our eyes wide open.
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