2019: A Year in Review (and Meta-Review)

You won't see a "best of the decade" from me this year, for the simple reason that I insist that the decade has one year left in it.+  This CNN article recites some very good arguments that our obsession with round numbers drives an illogical view of when a decade (century/millennium) begins and ends, though it finishes with a disappointing "bothsiderist" compromise conclusion.  The short version of that argument: There was no 0 A.D., between 1 B.C. and 1 A.D., because when those terms were invented in the sixth century, use of the number 0 had not yet reached the West.

A Washington Post article (by James Hohmann) announced that the "decade that started with Arab Spring ends with widespread protests".  I agree with him, if the point be that these upheavals put the lie to Nicholas Kristof's NY Times argument that "2019 was the Best Year Ever" (as Kristof would have it, due to reductions in global poverty, mortality, etc.).  The defeat of rising expectations is usually the cause of revolutions, and the counter-revolution to the Arab Spring (which began in, you guessed it, 2011) is moving steadily toward a regional-level proxy war sponsored by competing tyrannies (ours, and Israel's, not exceptions to that generalization), and that can't be good. 

Anyway, I've read a lot of recent "Best of the Decade" articles and a few other reviews of 2019.  The decade-level article I liked best was an Esquire piece on the best restaurants.  This truly is a Golden Age of Global Food--I don't know if it can last much longer--and the selection, though limited to US restaurants opening in the last 10 years, makes the mouth water and my wallet itchy to open.  As for 2019 reviews, I take my "Happy New Year!" hat off to the version by Dave Barry, the frequently corny and bothsiderist humorist, who had me laughing heartily several times reading it, and who concludes he had nothing good to say about the year.

I'm not quite so empty when it comes to praise, and here are a few choice tidbits.

My Sentence of the Year
Overheard on MSNBC recently:
"Their 'there is no there there' is what they're selling..."
(referring, of course, to the House Republicans' so-called defense in the impeachment process).  Includes five words (three different ones) with the same sound in a five-second sound bite.

Phrase of the year
"fairy-tale fantasies of eternal economic growth" - Greta Thunburg, Sept. 23 speech at the UN Summit on Climate Change.  
I think the Time Magazine Person of the Year will be winning the Nobel Peace prize next year. She raises a challenge which very few people (and approximately zero politicians) have dared even to identify.  And, if they did, even fewer have been able to propose any solution.  

Event of Long-term significance 
I would opt for the importance of the mass demonstrations in Hong Kong.  Though the casualty count pales in comparison to others (Iraq, Iran, Chile, Venezuela), or even to several of the many mass shooting incidents this year, there is now a huge question mark about the course of the "one nation, two systems" solution the Chinese and British set up for the handover of the colony in 1997.  We are now almost halfway through the 50-year transition period envisioned, and the 'Hong Kong people' suddenly noted that there had been absolutely no progress toward true democracy, and that, most importantly, they were not satisfied, as demonstrated in the (otherwise almost meaningless) elections they held recently for the public's share of the electoral body which chooses Hong Kong's Chief Executive.  

I have followed the events in Hong Kong fairly closely since The Handover (from Britain to China) in 1997.  Mostly, there were no events.   Things went on as they went before.  There were changes, but they are the ones we might expect:  Innovations, a fabulous new airport, new stores, new stacked apartments, new escalators, new highways, bridges, and tunnels.  There were economic cycles, good and bad, and there were major weather events (typhoons, landslides).  These were occurrences that the former colony, always improvised and hacked from coastal island hillsides, could easily--ahem--weather.
This year, something changed.  I have some idea what it is, because I resided in the region during the months before Handover and the years immediately after, and it was present there at the time.   What returned was Fear of the People's Republic of China.

The Chinese Communist regime is very willing to let Hong Kong be a mercantilist, free-trade haven, surrounded by their own government-sponsored enterprises.  That works for them.  What they are not willing to have is any Chinese entity with meaningful political opposition, because if they allow it there, it will be difficult to prevent in the "mainland".  I am glad, though, that the siege of the Polytechnic Institute did not end up in a Tienanmen- or Les Miserables-type massacre.  


Album of the Year
That's a little tough for me, as my listening behavior is not all-encompassing (especially, anymore).  I would propose Lana del Rey's  NFR: that's short for "Norman Fucking Rockwell", an ironic view of relationship bliss.  Her lyrics are brittle, profane poetry, and her musical composition, though often simple in the extreme, fits the music very well. 

Word of the Year
The non-gendered singular "they" was deemed so by Merriam-Webseter.  Not bad, but not so new; it's a usage I have preferred for decades over the also-not-specifically-human "one". My friends and I came up with "shey", a combination of he/she/they, some forty years ago, but it didn't catch on much.  
My Word of the Year is more provocative:  "wypipo".  Say it aloud.  First time I saw it in print I was wowed--it seems exotic, but is thoroughly US domestic.  In case I need to explain, it is used, by people of color, to refer to the generic 'Murican people of non-color, usually attached to some behavior, trait or belief which would be incredible, if not pertaining to those wypipo. (It's a collective noun, like "cattle".)

Favorite Round-Number Anniversaries 
50: Release of "In the Court of the Crimson KIng" - King Crimson.  We are just now realizing the truth of "21st-Century Schizoid Man".  And they are still playing it, better than ever. 
OK, and I do believe there was 'A Man on the Moon' (see the inside cover art). 

100:  Chicago Black Sox throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.  My team's first baseball world championship (since their initial world-dominating barnstorming in the late 1860's).  It's tainted, but I'll take it. 

200:  Sir Stamford Raffles founds the port of Singapore for Britain.  In fairness to his enterprise, there was little to nothing there before him.

500:  Tough call between Cortes' conquest of Mexico and Carlos V being crowned Emperor.  Both were of massive importance for this era. 

256 (or 2 to the 2nd to the 2nd to the 2nd power squared):  Mason and Dixon begin surveying the line between Pennsylvania and Maryland.  (For a full-length exegesis, and more, read Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, Mason and Dixon.)

Person of the Year
It's Nancy Pelosi, of course.  She came to the first rank of the Resistance at the beginning of the year, defeating Trump in the shutdown standoff, and she finished the year outfoxing even the master strategist of the Senate, Mitch McConnell.  He will not get exactly what he wants--a quick shutdown in the Senate impeachment trial, though the ultimate outcome of it will certainly not be the removal of the President.  At this point, the whole process must be about smearing our Dick-Head of State and Conman-der-in-Chief, and preparing for the general election battle:  are we willing to tackle corruption? Or will we sell out, just like our Fearless Twitter?

The Year Ahead
I am honestly thrilled for the coming year.  As you may realize, not so much about the impeachment thing, though I am enjoying the US-style Mexican standoff Pelosi and McConnell are conducting.  The best way to resolve it would be to start drafting new articles of impeachment:  Trump is a never-ending fountain of illegitimate action.  No, the Democratic primaries and caucuses will start soon (finally)--of course, I will have a lot to say soon about how those may turn out.   
Then there will be the Olympics--the US will no doubt break the record for Gold medals they set the last time Russians were banned (see 1980, Los Angeles), which will be a Good Feeling.  

Ultimately, though, whether this decade--which, in US political terms, began with the "shellacking" Democrats got from the Tea Party-inspired reaction in the 2010 Federal and state elections--will end well depends if it will finish with the drubbing of Drumpf and some sort of control of the Senate. 

+ See my review of the last decade, dated December 31, 2010.