Looking back at a year of living anxiously
Bye-bye, 2018. Thanks for leaving us with a rich supply of nominees for my first annual Significa Awards, a year-end roundup of significantly trivial news that revealed something startling about our times, yet never quite turned into full-blown columns.
The list of nominees is long but shrinks a lot if you don’t count news that mentions our national newsmaker in chief, President Donald Trump, who persistently makes new news faster than I can comment on his older news. Nevertheless, here are the winners:
DIGITAL DENIAL. “Social media” are “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices,” tweeted President Donald Trump on Twitter, a social medium.
MAKE AMERICA RELATE AGAIN; WAIT, WHAT? In June, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, a former “Fox & Friends” presenter, cited the D-Day landings as an example of America’s “very strong relationship with the government of Germany.” Chancellor Angela Merkel was not available for comment. THERE’S BIG MONEY IN MUNCHIES. Congratulations to the enterprising San Diego girl who sold more than 300 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in six hours by setting up her stand in front of a legal marijuana dispensary. Although news media withheld her name, I foresee a great future in business for this young woman, who obviously knows something about targeting consumer demand.
HAIR TODAY, GROAN TOMORROW. Whatever White House senior adviser Stephen Miller was saying about border policy in his recent appearance on “Face the Nation,” Twitter chatter quickly became dominated by his high forehead and how much hair now was there. Speculation flourished on social networks about the prematurely balding 33-year-old’s new widow’s peak. Was it “spray-on hair”? Or was it a flattened Chia Pet, pasted on to distract from the administration’s flawed border policy? Stay tuned.
REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE SAID “MERRY CHRISTMAS,” NOT “WE’RE CRAZYTOWN.” Bob Woodward’s behind-the-scenes best-seller “Fear” quotes Trump’s chief of staff Gen. John Kelly as saying of Trump in a staff meeting: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown. … This is the worst job I’ve ever had.” Kelly and White House spokesmen denied Woodward’s report as fake news. Nevertheless, when Kelly left earlier than his previously announced year-end departure date, many wished — as The New Yorker’s satirist Andy Borowitz suggested — that he could take the nuclear codes with him.
NO THANKS, WE’D RATHER TEXT. Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps in the age of Tinder and Grindr, new research shows American teens and young adults actually are having less sex than earlier generations, much to the relief, I am sure, of countless parents of millennials. However, as the December issue of The Atlantic reports, psychology professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University has found the delay in teen sex may be the first indicator of a more widespread withdrawal from physical intimacy by teens that lasts into adulthood. My theory: The youngsters are too preoccupied with Snapchat.
CHARGED WITH LIVING WHILE BLACK. A lump of coal goes out to white people who were caught on video and shamed online after calling police on black people who weren’t doing anything legally wrong. CVS, for example, fired two employees in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood in July after one, the store manager, was videoed calling police on a black female customer who was trying to use a discount coupon that the manager thought was fraudulent. It was not.
Among others who were similarly shamed on social media, sometimes with catchy hashtag nicknames:
“BBQ Becky,” a white woman in Oakland, Calif., who called police on a group of black people whom she falsely accused of illegally barbecuing at a public park. Turns out that they had a legal permit.
“Permit Patty,” a San Francisco woman, was videoed calling police on an 8-year-old black girl who was selling bottled water near a ballpark without a vendor’s permit — which she did not need.
“Golfcart Gail,” a white woman and soccer field marshal in a golf cart in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., who called police in her overreaction to a black father who had been yelling instructions at his son during a youth soccer game.
Sure, people of all colors make mistakes. But it’s wise to remember a journalism professor’s advice that I heard years ago as he broke down the spelling of “assume” on a chalkboard. “Don’t assume,” he said, “or you make an ‘ass’ of ‘U’ and ‘me.’ ” Unforgettable.
Happy New Year.