Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?
Charles P.
Only one. I resolve to resist change at every turn. (I tried change once, around ’98, and didn’t care for it.) This, incidentally, was my New Year’s resolution last year, and every other year in memory. I thought about changing it. But being a man of resolve, I resisted.
Dear Matt,
What will you miss least about 2016?
Annus Horribilis
First and foremost, I won’t miss people saying that 2016 was the worst year ever. Sure, it was dark. Even for those of us with steady nerves and well-stocked liquor cabinets. (The two being inextricably linked.) But the worst year ever? The other day, my 13-year-old son, a generally chipper fellow, looked up from his hand computer and asked, “Dad, was 2016 a horrible year?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “What do I look like, Siri? Why do you ask?” He looked back down at his angst box. “Because everybody seems to be saying so on the internet. There’s a lot of memes about it.” Considering my children’s primary news source is now memes, maybe it was, in fact, the worst year ever. Kind of made me miss the old days, when the kids supposedly got all their fake news from the Daily Show, whose new host, Trevor Noah, sadly died this year. Or maybe just his career did.
But I’m still not convinced 2016 was the worst year on record. It’s become a fashionable thing to say among the group-thinking goat-rodeo herders of the internet, who are both vain and amnesiac enough to believe that there has never been any misery like the misery they presently assist in creating. In the interest of providing historical perspective, however, I’d offer that 1353 was a pretty crappy year. It was the last year of the 7-year pandemic known as the Black Death, which only killed 75 to 200 million people in Europe. Even Angela Merkel, trying to turn the continent into Europistan, can’t wreak that kind of havoc. Then there was 1939—no barrel of monkeys, either. It was the last year of a decade-long Great Depression, in which worldwide trade fell by 50 percent, and one-quarter of the United States was unemployed. That same year, thirty thousand people were killed in an earthquake in Chile. And the Spanish Civil War ended, but only after a cool half million died in it. This, all occurring at the same time Hitler was on the march, plunging the globe into World War II, which eventually resulted in 61 million military and civilian deaths. That’s the equivalent of wiping out the entire population of modern Italy, with Latvia’s thrown in for good measure. Not sure John Podesta’s emails getting hacked can hold a candle to 1939.
Then too, there was 1982, the year WKRP In Cincinnati was cancelled after only four glorious seasons. That could have been our darkest hour. Man, I loved that show.
So go ahead and keep peddling the fiction that 2016 was the worst year in history. But if 2016 were a street gang, it’d be that dance troupe of parking-garage toughs Michael Jackson headed up in his “Bad” video, as opposed to 1353’s Hell’s Angels or 1939’s Mongols, who would’ve taken 2016 out back, and stomped it. (It’s hard to be menacing in leg warmers.)
That stipulated, there are a few things about 2016 I won’t miss. I won’t miss the Obamas, and suspect I couldn’t even if I wanted to, since I imagine he’ll be in our faces every chance he gets, writing Vox explainers, doing lonely-guy podcasts, generally spending the rest of his life relitigating his failed presidency. (In fairness, Obama was a great president if you love Iran and freeing terrorists from Gitmo, and hate Israel and keeping your doctor.)
Nor will I miss Michelle Obama, most recently celebrated (again) in a lavish prose-poem to her gracefulelegantcourage in the New Yorker. Michelle conducted herself well enough over the last eight years, don’t get me wrong. But I’m not quite sure what she’s done to win the Nobel Prize for Awesomeness. Basically, she lectured us about eating vegetables and danced a lot in public. My mom used to lecture us a lot about eating vegetables, without embarrassing the family by showing up on Ellen to do the Dougie. So maybe my mom is the true hero.
I also won’t miss dead celebrities. I mean, I expect they’ll keep making more of them in 2017. But good Lord, they dropped like flies in 2016. So many famous people, now deader than dirt. This will be an ongoing, exponentially expanding problem of course. Since by the year 2025 or so, everyone is expected to be famous, we will be sitting through a lot more celebrity obituaries in the future. Personally, though, I’ve hit my quota. I have nothing against Carrie Fisher, even if I haven’t thought of her since she strapped on the gold bikini in Return of the Jedi. But after the umpteenth essay on her feminist iconhood, (she played Princess Leia, and wrote honestly about her drug addiction!), I’m starting to think that other dead celebrities of greater accomplishment (Jim Harrison and Merle Haggard, to name two), really got the shaft dying in the first third of the year, rather than in the last month, when your obituary is force-multiplied by the one-two punch of additionally showing up in the end-of-year honor roll. With our ever diminishing attention spans, by the end of last year, most Americans who were wearing purple to work back in April in honor of the fallen rock god were saying “Prince who?”
Lastly, I won’t miss 2016 election-year politics. Sure, they were exciting, in the way it’s exciting to eat a Hostess cupcake. It satisfies for a second, turning on your sugar-triggered dopamine drip. One Hostess cupcake is a delight. Two, are an indulgence. But it is basically nutrition-free, and if you sit there and eat the whole box, it’ll make you fat, ugly, and cause you to feel like a moral failure. During the 2016 presidential election, we ate the whole box. Then we asked for another box, and ate that too. Now we have problem skin, and are hauling around the Freshman 15, even if most of us left college decades ago.
We’ve got to stop. I understand that many 2017 prognosticators are already trying to get the jump on the vulgar herd by declaring this year, still in embryo, the worst year ever, on account of Donald Trump’s failed presidency, weeks before he even takes the oath. And I count myself a robust Trump skeptic. Already, he has me scratching my head with some of his decisions, such as selecting Andrew Puzder, chief executive of the parent company of Hardees and Carl’s Jr, as Secretary of Labor. This, after Puzder gave an interview earlier last year in which he spoke in favor of automating the workforce, since robots don’t have annoying habits like asking for raises and taking vacations. Color me a pedant, but this seems like a peculiar way for a Populist Avenger of a president to restore the dignity of the working man.
That said, we’d all do well to cut back on the obsessing over Trump, and politics, generally. The world is a big place, with all manner of variegated richness. Do yourself a favor and explore it. Even if just means getting off your hate-machines (i.e., the internet), and walking your dog through the woods. I’m taking my own advice on this one. Over the holiday, I bought my son a fly-tying kit, and my wife bought me a mandolin, under the ridiculously optimistic impression that I can learn how to play it. And maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll find another useful distraction, like following women’s field hockey. After all, watching fit college girls in knee-socks and Title IX ponytails running around, chasing each other with sticks, sure beats the hell out of obsessing over a former reality show star who counts Omarosa as a trusted member of his kitchen cabinet.
Maybe the doomsayers are right, and 2017 will suck hind teat. Or maybe it’s time to take our hands off the wheel, to stop kidding ourselves that we can control everything, and to let the fickle fates take us for a ride, hoping for the best, while not being surprised if we’re delivered the worst. I know, full well, that there are lots of good, solid Americans out there, still wailing and gnashing their teeth, crying that if only Hillary wasn’t a soulless robot, maybe things could’ve been different. But in the near future, once they fully automate Carl’s Jr., they’re gonna need soulless robots. So who knows what 2017 holds for Hillary, or any of us? Maybe she can slide in as an assistant manager. And maybe we will find good fortune, too. Therein lies the enchantment of every new year. It’s a do-over, in which beautiful amorphous possibility has yet to cement itself into hard reality. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
