Ah, distinctly I remember...

[stephen_dedman]

Summing up December: four submissions, one acceptance, six rejections, no publications.

And from Time, a farewell to what they've called the worst decade in US history since WWII. It seems horrifically apt that it's ended with Blackwater ops apparently getting away with murder.

Comments

[suricattus]

Yeah, I saw that late last night and wondered if I could make throttling the ones responsible my last act of 2009....

[stephen_dedman]

I wonder whether the same standards of evidence will be insisted upon if and when any of the Guantanamo inmates go on trial...

[laura_seabrook]

I watched some local show with the copmpare saying that the 3 most significant stories of the last decade were:
1. The attack on the World Trade Centre;
2. The Tsunami on Boxing day, 2004; and
3. The election of barrack Obama.

The first two I agree, but the third?

[stephen_dedman]

I'm a little surprised that an Australian station would pick the third (rather than, say, John Howard losing his seat as well as the election), but Obama's election is historically significant. When I last visited the US, no-one I spoke to ever expected to see a president who wasn't a rich white male (those being the only qualifications Dubya had had, apart from having his daddy's cronies in positions where they could say he'd won the 2000 election).

What would you pick as the third story?

[laura_seabrook]

For Australians, it would be our PM saying "Sorry" to the indigenous folk for all the shit that has been forced on them.

[stephen_dedman]

True, though that would have been much more significant if he'd followed it up with some meaningful action to improve their living conditions.

And it's certainly something we'd prefer to remember than the "children overboard" affair, which proved that you can fool enough of the Australian people for long enough to win enough seats to stay in power, if you have a xenophobic lie and a judiciously cropped photograph.

If I had to choose the defining images of the decade from an Australian p.o.v., they'd be the World Trade Centre attacks, the Tampa, the cropped and uncropped versions of the "children overboard" photo, Osama bin Laden, Bush in his GI Joe playsuit with the 'Mission Accomplished' banner, the tsunami hitting Thailand, the Abu Ghraib photos, John Howard conceding defeat in 2007 (or a picture of the tally board showing the election results)... and the crowds at Obama's inauguration, celebrating the end of the Bush error.