Dave Barry’s Year in Review
Just when you’d think things couldn’t get any weirder, they always did. That’s 2017 for you.
Looking back on 2017 is like waking up after a party where you made some poor decisions, such as drinking tequila squeezed from the underpants of a person you do not really know. (At least you hope it was tequila.)
The next day finds you lying naked in a Dumpster in a different state, smeared from head to toe with a mixture of Sriracha sauce and glitter. At first, you remember nothing. But then, as your throbbing brain slowly reboots, memories of the night before, disturbing memories, begin creeping into your consciousness. As the full, hideous picture comes into focus, you curl into a ball, whimpering, asking yourself over and over: Did that really happen?
That’s how we feel about 2017. It was a year so surreal, so densely populated with strange and alarming events, that you have to seriously consider the possibility that somebody — and when we say “somebody,” we mean “Russia” – was putting LSD in our water supply. A bizarre event would occur, and it would be all over the news, but before we could wrap our minds around it, another bizarre event would occur, then another and another, coming at us faster and faster, battering the nation with a Category 5 weirdness hurricane that left us hunkering down, clinging to our sanity, no longer certain what was real.
Take “covfefe.” Remember? For a little while, it was huge. Everybody was talking about it! Covfefe! But then, just like that, it was gone. What the hell was it? Did it even really happen?
Another example: We have this vague memory that, for the briefest flicker of a moment, the White House communications director was a pathologically bronze man named Anthony Scaramucci, who — remember, this was the White House communications director — called up a reporter for the New Yorker and informed him, on the record, that he, Anthony Scaramucci, differed from White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in that he, Anthony Scaramucci, the White House communications director, was not trying to commit an act of self-gratification that would be extremely challenging even for a professional contortionist.
Did that really happen?
And were there really thousands of people marching around Washington wearing vagina hats?
And did the secretary of state really call the president of the United States a “moron?”
And did the president (of the United States!) respond by challenging the secretary of state to compare IQ tests?
We want to believe that we imagined these things. But we fear we did not.
There’s one thing we definitely remember happening in 2017: the “fidget spinner” fad. This was huge, and for a good reason: It was extremely stupid. In terms of mental stimulation, fidget-spinning makes nose-picking look like three-dimensional chess. You mindlessly spin the thing around and around, accomplishing nothing. It’s an idiotic, brain-cell-destroying waste of time.
So it was the perfect fad for 2017.
If that wasn’t the essence of 2017, we don’t know what was.
So now, finally, it is time to flush this year down the commode of history. But before we do, let’s don eclipse glasses to prevent retina damage, then take one last flinching look back at the events of 2017, starting with ...