in today's paper...
There was a nice idea in the NYTimes today: the Decade in Review, with 10 authors reflecting on individual years. It was incredibly good, incredibly bad, and disappointingly milquetoast at different points. By far, the most powerful was Richard Ford's reflections on 2000, an excerpt of which is below:
". . .if we’re gauging a year’s importance here, as seen from a decade’s distance, it’s impossible in terms of moral consequence to think of 2000 as anything but the critical year before 2001, when all that savagery rained down on us. We unhistorical Americans, spiritually encased in the present, are always disbelieving when the seeds of our woes are said to be long sewn in our own little patch.
But 2000, if it looks like anything now, looks like a year in which we proved ourselves not to be a completely thriving democracy but rather a dangerously ambivalent and inattentive one - willing to let its presidential election be decided not by the voters but by a politicized court, willing to be apathetic about the outcome of our constitutional acts, willing to feel insulated from violence by our own putative rectitude in the world, willing to define life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as our right to bury our noses hubristically in our personal lives and public irrelevancies and do whatever we please.
Oh, I wouldn’t argue that the year 2000 caused the year 2001 and all it wrought. That’s just not true. But I would argue the milder point that the year 2000 left our country perilously adrift and vulnerable. For countries, just as for citizens, it plainly matters what we do."
Ford , Richard. "2000: What Came First." New York Times 27Dec20009, National Ed.: wk12. Print.
I'm still a bit confounded as to how the entire piece, The Decade We Had, ended up taking the shape it did. The first couple of years were represented well enough, but suddenly I'm reading about the U.S. and 2005 and what will be remembered according to Jonathan Safran Foer, and not once is Hurricane Katrina mentioned. In it's stead, the fact that the height of Everest was recalibrated, that Kasparov retired from competitive chess and that Fiji ruled their sodomy laws as unconstitutional. Then 2007 was given to Anthony Bourdain who--interestingly enough--felt the year was all about food:
The best news of 2007 was that chefs, as a social class somehow empowered by the strange and terrible glare of celebrity, were finally free to rid themselves of the time-honored dictum of “the customer is always right.”
If true, somebody--please--kill me. The best news? Really?
". . .if we’re gauging a year’s importance here, as seen from a decade’s distance, it’s impossible in terms of moral consequence to think of 2000 as anything but the critical year before 2001, when all that savagery rained down on us. We unhistorical Americans, spiritually encased in the present, are always disbelieving when the seeds of our woes are said to be long sewn in our own little patch.
But 2000, if it looks like anything now, looks like a year in which we proved ourselves not to be a completely thriving democracy but rather a dangerously ambivalent and inattentive one - willing to let its presidential election be decided not by the voters but by a politicized court, willing to be apathetic about the outcome of our constitutional acts, willing to feel insulated from violence by our own putative rectitude in the world, willing to define life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as our right to bury our noses hubristically in our personal lives and public irrelevancies and do whatever we please.
Oh, I wouldn’t argue that the year 2000 caused the year 2001 and all it wrought. That’s just not true. But I would argue the milder point that the year 2000 left our country perilously adrift and vulnerable. For countries, just as for citizens, it plainly matters what we do."
Ford , Richard. "2000: What Came First." New York Times 27Dec20009, National Ed.: wk12. Print.
I'm still a bit confounded as to how the entire piece, The Decade We Had, ended up taking the shape it did. The first couple of years were represented well enough, but suddenly I'm reading about the U.S. and 2005 and what will be remembered according to Jonathan Safran Foer, and not once is Hurricane Katrina mentioned. In it's stead, the fact that the height of Everest was recalibrated, that Kasparov retired from competitive chess and that Fiji ruled their sodomy laws as unconstitutional. Then 2007 was given to Anthony Bourdain who--interestingly enough--felt the year was all about food:
The best news of 2007 was that chefs, as a social class somehow empowered by the strange and terrible glare of celebrity, were finally free to rid themselves of the time-honored dictum of “the customer is always right.”
If true, somebody--please--kill me. The best news? Really?