Just to Keep in Mind That Everything is Still Clinton's Fault, Shouldn't This be the Year 5 A.C.?

That Kevin Drum at Washington Monthy -- whose politics and cat pictures I embraced back when he was the Calpundit blogger -- had an interesting post on how some decades are more than ten years long and others are less if you insist on using "decade" labels to identify zeitgeist.

This is his view of the last century:


20s: 1919-1929 (League of Nations vote to stock market crash)
30s: 1929-1941 (Great Depression)
40s: 1941-1946 (WWII)
50s: 1946-1963 (Churchill "Iron Curtain" speech to JFK assassination)
60s: 1964-1973 (Civil Rights Act to end of Vietnam War)
70s: 1973-1980 (1st oil shock/Watergate to 2nd oil shock/Iran hostage crisis)
80s: 1981-1989 (Reagan election to fall of Berlin Wall)
90s: 1990-2001 (Berlin Wall to 9/11)
00s: 2001-

I like this because of the way he starts the Fifties early and then keeps them going.

Personally, since I was born in 1944, I certainly did spend my 20s in the Sixties, all of my 30s in my own private Seventies (out of work for awhile; moving around; it kept going), stayed more in less in step with the big picture by spending my settled 40s and 50s in the settled Eighties and Nineties. But now it looks as if even though George Bush wants me to spend my 60s in his own personal rerun of the belligerent Forties, I'm afraid he's going to overshoot and we'll careen back to the doleful Thirties.

As for the ten-year period we are in right now, why call not call it the Zeros? I think that sums it up ....

Math joke. Thank you, thank you.