A year in review
It’s time to cut through the clutter and reveal 2019 for all that it was and wasn’t. Donald Trump behaved worse and worse, so everyone else did, too.
House Democrats rushed overzealously to impeach the preposterous atrocity, and Senate Republicans rushed over-zealously to acquit it. The nation’s swing voters rushed zeallessly to tune it all out.
Robert Mueller put out a much-anticipated report saying, “I’m old. I’m tired. I’d go ahead and put in one more logical sentence that I found the president guilty of crimes, but, at this season of my life, I don’t need the aggravation.”
The national Democratic Party presented more than 20 candidates to oppose Trump and only one of them had any sense and all he’s ever done is serve unspectacularly as mayor of a town smaller than Little Rock. One of the candidates turned out to have a home-state connection in Arkansas should he choose to use it, which he probably won’t.
Arkansas grew economically at a faster rate than all nearby states except Texas and Tennessee. The state rocked along well enough with a (mostly) pragmatic Republican governor who became highly defensive the other day when
I called him moderate.
But Arkansas lost the lottery when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on leaving the White House, closed her eyes and pointed to a spot on the map and it turned out, odds to the contrary, to be the Pleasant Valley subdivision of Little Rock.
Otherwise, Little Rock did all right, except on the public schools that the pragmatic governor was maltreating, as it became evident Frank Scott was the right choice for mayor.
Scott produced a reasonable budget, made a couple of tough cuts, stuck his nose into the school fight without losing it and went to an evangelical church town-hall meeting on race and straddled with unsplit britches that insular white conservative culture and gay-rights advocacy. He generally applied an eclectic blend of Baptist preaching, racial advancement, millennial transformation and Beebe pragmatism.
Hype took firm hold as the Arkansas sports pastime. Chad Morris turned out to be entirely hype, so the Razorbacks replaced him with a guy who’d never been a head football coach at this level, and, within hours, Hogaholics were hyping him.
“All right,” the new coach bellowed. It’s what he says when he gets over in his left lane, apparently.
Razorback basketball became hyped again, subject to conference play.
Meantime, Razorback baseball is actually a substantive thing, like Arkansas State football.
Internet-streaming television enhanced my life and saved me money and Hulu even added three of the local television station news programs. Now I can know that it’s raining when it’s raining and that the Hogs are great no matter the record.
“Alexa” became my closest friend to the point that Shalah asked me what I was going to get her for Christmas.
The wealth of viewing offerings was led by Succession on HBO and Fleabag on Amazon Prime, though the best app altogether was Netflix, and the single most compelling television was Ken Burns’ series on country music on PBS.
The smartest fundraising tactic was AETN’s when it placed four episodes of that country music series on streaming TV for free and then made you contribute after you’d binged those four. I’m now a “Friend of AETN,” or something.
The most engaging movie of the year was Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The most impressive filmmaking was Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Brad Pitt performed at least as well in the former as De Niro and Pacino in the latter. The film to love most was Blinded by the Light, in which a young Pakistani writer-to-be living in Thatcher’s England finds solace and inspiration in the yearning anthems of the young Bruce Springsteen.
It would be my story if I was Pakistani and a better writer.
It was a stellar year for coincidence, considering that dozens of people wrote to say they never read my column and only accidentally read that morning’s, and hated it.
My anti-Hog trolling on Twitter during Razorback football games became more of a thing, although the governor of the state told me I was too snide, which I took as positive feedback.
This newspaper celebrated the 200th birthday of one of its merged elements, the Arkansas Gazette, at a dinner in which former President Clinton looked square at Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman and said thank God he won the newspaper war.
There was more remarkable irony in the full context of that moment than I have patience or space to begin to explain.
The newspaper I began working for 50 years ago as a 16-year-old part-time sportswriter quit coming to the house four days before I went on Social Security, causing me to believe more than ever that everything is about me.
Life is The Truman Show and I’m Truman and all y’all are paid actors. I take comfort in knowing that Trump is not real.