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1995 Movies, Teens, Tots, and Tech TIMOTHY SHARY The middle year of the decade was marked by a visible concern for youth within the nation’s media. The most disturbing evidence of this came in the aftermath of the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on 19 April. Many news sources initially assumed the attack had been perpetrated by foreigners, but within days authorities revealed that it had been the work of a few homegrown terrorists (Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier). In this swirl of confusion, the majority of news media made an interesting symbolic choice, launching an emotional campaign featuring images of the children murdered and wounded in the blast to exemplify the tragedy, rather than exploring the complex political issues behind domestic terrorism. Of course, the children in the building’s daycare center were not disproportionately represented among the victims; far more adults were killed. But the senseless victimization of young kids touched so many Americans that the adult casualties were accorded less coverage. The dead children became the icons of national outrage, allowing the public to focus its shock and sorrow on individual victims and families and displacing more probing examinations of the ideological state of the country. Racism, too, remained a prominent topic, as witnessed by the coverage accorded the biggest news event of the year, the O. J. Simpson trial. The trial started on 24 January, and for over eight months the nation was riveted as it watched the unfolding courtroom drama of the former football star accused of killing his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman. O.J.’s defense attorneys strategically directed the trial as a debate on racism. Did white cops frame this famous black man, and would white America believe his innocence? On 3 October, the jury found Simpson innocent of all charges, and many in the media soon saw a clear divide between Blacks who agreed with the verdict and whites who remained suspicious. Race was a central issue, too, in the Million Man March held in Washington, D.C., just thirteen days after the Simpson trial ended. Organized by controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the event brought attention to 137 continuing racial problems in the country, although some critics questioned its masculine emphasis. Gender issues were germane to the Simpson case as well: O.J. had a record of beating Nicole, a fact that was essentially dismissed during arguments in and around the trial. Certainly, issues of spousal abuse and men’s violence against women were elided by the strategy of the (all-male) defense. Macho culture exposed its fears of women even more in the ongoing Whitewater investigation, with Republican senators accusing First Lady Hillary Clinton of illegally removing important documents from the White House, a charge that was dismissed the following year. The effort appeared clearly directed at discrediting the Democratic president’s (overly) ambitious wife who had previously been vilified for trying to overhaul the national health care system. Nevertheless, there was one prominent casualty for mistreatment of women: Bob Packwood (a five-term Republican senator from Oregon) resigned in October after a Senate panel concluded he was guilty of sexual misconduct. Curious differences in gender status were evident in other cultural activities. In sports, Baltimore Orioles’ baseball star Cal Ripken Jr. was a logical choice for the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year (since he broke Lou Gehrig’s fifty-six-year-old record for most consecutive games played), although the AP had few professionals to consider for Female Athlete of the Year, and thus gave the honor to college basketball player Rebecca Lobo. The music world was rocked when twenty-one-year-old Alanis Morissette released her massively popular debut album, Jagged Little Pill, which contained surprisingly aggressive songs about female resilience and sexual prowess. And other media challenged gender norms as well: television premiered the quasi-lesbian “Xena: Warrior Princess,” comic books introduced a female detective with supernatural powers in Witchblade , and The Orion Conspiracy became the first video game to actually label a character as homosexual. Global communities confronted many crises. African nations continued efforts to accommodate over two million refugees from the Rwandan genocide . The raging civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina that had left at least 100,000 people dead was, oddly enough, settled in Dayton, Ohio, with a peace agreement signed in November. Russia reached a truce with its renegade republic of Chechnya in July, after a year...

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