Best Of '90's: Well, Hello to '90s Humility

Reassuring things, lists. They affirm that the buzzing, blooming confusion of the universe can be reduced to a tidy vertical column. But wait, there's a better way to do this. Herewith the Top Four Reasons Why People Love Lists:

1. Lists are fun.

2. Lists are quick.

3. Lists help us remember things.

4. Lists give us something to argue about.

Lists have been around forever. Noah undoubtedly used one to check off the lucky couples on his boat. Moses went up a mountain and came down with one. Man is an inveterate listmaker. I list, therefore I am. To define is to list. A Partial List of Lists (and the list is endless):

1. Grocery lists

2. The Sears Catalog

3. The Bill of Rights

4. Nixon's enemies list

5. The 1990 Census

The end of the year has become the traditional time of listmaking. (First Forgettable List of the Year: New Year's resolutions.) Lists may express people's instinct for order and compulsion to sum things up, but year-end lists also signify the American obsession with who's numero uno.

The idea of bestness, however, like a list itself, is an illusion. There is no "best." Bestness is a way of making something subjective appear objective. And best lists are a collection of the biases, or at least the interests, of those who make them. These lists incite a certain introspection too. For example, some of the Values That Made a Resurgence This Year:

1. Moderation

2. Sobriety

3. Restraint

The ostentation of the 1980s vanished; hello, '90s humility. Good intentions became fashionable once more -- even marketable. Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream was a best seller.

During the year, the symbolic targets of the '80s were shot down one by one: Donald Trump, Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos, Manuel Noriega, Michael Milken. Each comeuppance inspired an uneasy mix of glee and fear -- uneasy because we had so lately embraced the values of those whose falls we were cheering.

So 1990 was the start of a new decade, a new climate, a new mood. And it had barely begun before pundits were scrambling to label it. Some of the First Desperate Efforts to Name the '90s:

1. The Default Decade

2. The Nurturing '90s

3. The Gray '90s

4. The Nervous '90s

The last is probably best, but it can only be temporary. Decades don't really become themselves until about their middle. The '50s died with J.F.K.'s assassination in 1963; the Woodstock Generation did not flower until 1969; Tom Wolfe dubbed the '70s the Me decade in 1976.

The '90s will be nervous until they find their identity, but there is still another reason to be worried. Consider this: We're on the home stretch to the millennium.The end of a century, let alone a millennium, tends to bring forth bursts of energy and confusion. Even in 1990, as the Hubble space telescope peers deeply (sometimes fuzzily) into the cosmos, sliding toward the 20th century's close feels a little like sailing off the edge of the world. No one knows what is beyond.