In the tradition of categorizing and labeling everything we can get our grubby little hands on, it seems appropriate to come up with a defining title for the 90s.

Yeah, we’re only half-way through the last decade of the millennium, but in light of CD collections compiling the hits of the 90s, it looks like we need to catch up, if only to make sure our CD collection titles will sound as cool as “Freedom Rock”and “Love Songs Sung by Girls with Mohawks.”

So, by the power vested in me, I declare the 90s the “Decade of Cynicism.”

Perhaps this is not as catchy or inspiring as the “Gay 90s,”the “Roaring 20s,” the “Me Decade (the 80s),” or the seventies, affectionately known as the “Hey, let’s snort coke, smoke weed, wear bad pants, not bathe and nail anything that moves”decade, but it is appropriate.

The age of cynicism is appropriate because it seems we get some sort of perverse joy out of tearing down the notable figures and trends of our time until absolutely very little is considered “cool.”

Take this “alternative” schtick. You know what alternative is today? Paula Abdul and Judd Nelson. The dictionary defines “alternative”as “of an institution, etc., appealing to unconventional interests.” The “alternative”folks are just as big sheep as people who spent the eighties at BonJovi and Motley Crue concerts. Or maybe people just like what they like and hate what they hate and that’s that.

I am reminded by a former roommate’s sticker that had a cartoon entitled “Nothing’s Cool,” in which one guy asked another, “Hey, what’s cool?” The guy answered, “Oh, nothing.”

Perhaps this comes from the fact that the best possible way to show how cool one is is to exhibit a huge disdain for things. If you don’t like something, it is obviously beneath you, and you raise your own status above that measly something.

On the other hand, perhaps this is an era that has seen everything before, and the rare few things that are new aren’t very cool anyway (AIDS).

This decade does seem to be involved in an effort to categorize itself, because without a label, maybe we think we have no identity, hence this whole “Generation X” crap.

Maybe we’re worried about nothing, then. After all, the 20s probably didn’t seem all that “roaring” until the 30s showed up with a big dustbowl under its arm and its economic system developed a severe case of melancholy.

John Travolta, the Bee-Gees and Farrah Fawcett probably had no idea that they would come to be considered the symbols of the disco decade.

So who knows? Maybe we should just ease up on attempting to create or appropriate our defining people and moments; we’ll create them with the intention of them being something meaningful in and of itself, without worrying if it’ll make LIFE magazine’s pictures of a decade.

Besides, many of our attempts to create spokesmen and symbols have ended up rather shabbily, anyway.

Kurt’s dead, and as big a tragedy as that is, are we really sure we want our “spokesman” to be the guy who sang the meaningful lyrics, “A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido?”

What in the world does that mean? I could just not be intelligent enough to get it, but I personally would rather listen to Ani DiFranco or Toad the Wet Sprocket so I at least understand the people I “identify” with.

Perhaps other moments and people will live on as our stamps of existence, like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall (it’s in that grey area between 80s and 90s, era-wise), the arrival of Beavis and Butthead, Jim Carrey, Pearl Jam, World AIDSDay, the L.A. riots and baseball strikes.

But cynicism seems to weave a common thread through this decade. I’m cynical in that I hate all this “generational” crap anyway. My life is not Reality Bites. Others are cynical about music, that guys like Eddie Vedder and Trent Reznor aren’t saying anything meaningful; they’re just whining. Some people are cynical about cynics.

Who knows? I can’t even identify myself, so how can Iidentify an era? So I’m even cynical about calling our decade the “Decade of Cynicism.” How hypocritical.

Hey, that’s not half bad …

The “Age of Hypocrisy …?”

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Tim Davis is a junior in theater studies from Carlisle. He is the editor of the Opinion Page.