2018 will go down as a year that happened
Alexandra Petri says the passage of time felt extra-inexorable during the past 12 months — if you remember it.
Ah, 2018! I can still almost remember what it was like to be alive in February 2018. Drake was on the radio, and there was an Olympics! Did you know that there was an Olympics in 2018? Someone reminded me recently that this happened, and I ceased speaking midconversation and just sat there with my mouth hanging open. I have lost all track of time. I entered 2018 a comparatively young, spry individual; I am emerging from it broken and in need of ointment, like Scott Pruitt (a man you may have forgotten, who a very long time ago was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency).
There was once such a thing as the environment. I think I remember some aspects of it — trees; a pleasing duck; forests that were not on fire. But that was a long time ago. September, maybe?
Everything of 2018 has been with us forever. Everything that departed in 2018 has been gone for as long as we can recall. The “Queer Eye” reboot was this year! This year!
Meghan Markle married Prince Harry, a member of the hereditary monarchy of England, which was nice of her.
We responded to distressing news about the pace of climate change by deciding that it was probably too late to do anything about it, but, just to be sure, we should maybe burn a little more coal. We responded to distressing news of numerous mass shootings by deciding that it was probably too late to do anything about them, but, just to be sure, we should arm teachers with deadly weapons.
President Donald Trump continued to find new ways of getting people to leave his administration. At the rate he is going, soon no one will be working in his White House; everyone will be malfunctioning. Rex Tillerson (remember Rex Tillerson? I don’t!) was fired and replaced by Mike Pompeo, and H.R. McMaster was replaced by a giant mustache.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., announced he would be leaving Congress after having achieved everything a person could possibly hope to achieve without compromising anything but his morals, and is presumably headed to the grassy, pleasant place where former Speaker John Boehner frolics and posts pictures of himself with increasingly large glasses of wine.
The Parker Solar Probe, seeing how things were going on Earth, demanded to be shot into the sun, and we obliged.
Bob Woodward wrote “Fear,” a book about people who did not enjoy the time they spent with Trump. Stormy Daniels wrote “Full Disclosure,” a book about the same thing.
Facebook is even creepier than we thought, it turns out. The good news about Facebook is that someone did, in fact, read and like everything you shared. The bad news is that this person worked for Cambridge Analytica.
In other good news, they rescued a soccer team from a cave! This just shows: If you really want your students to be safe, don’t send them to school in the United States, where all kinds of bad things may happen; trap them in a cave in northern Thailand.
The bad news is that Elon Musk (whose name, I have always thought, sounds like something the French would have thought made it impossible for them to lose World War I) had some thoughts about this rescue, and they were not worth sharing. Then again, these were only the second- or third-most-regrettable thoughts he shared on Twitter this year, and at least they did not get him into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Special counsel Robert Mueller continued to investigate. The Mueller investigation appears to be the equivalent of when you start off by looking for something straightforward on Wikipedia, and suddenly it is 3 a.m. and you are on the Wikipedia page for rat kings, with 83 tabs open and no recollection of how you got here. But the family of at least one ostrich got the measure of justice it deserved since Paul Manafort came into their lives.
The president made a new friend: Kim Jong Un! It is important to make friends — like those in Saudi Arabia — so that, hypothetically, when your intelligence apparatus later suggests they are responsible for murdering a journalist, you can accept whatever they say happened. Also, the president seems to be losing friends, who are all busy testifying or writing anonymous op-eds for the New York Times.
There was a midterm election that could be described as a blue wave only in the narrow and limited sense that it was the biggest Democratic gain in the House since the post-Watergate election. Still, some people were discouraged from voting, and that must be counted in the nature of a red win.
And here is 2019, when we must deal with the first half of 12 Democratic primary debates. Maybe by the time they are done, the Mueller investigation will be complete, but everyone who remembers why it was started in the first place will be too aged and feeble to speak.