Happy New Year

Happy New Year

          It’s stuff like the massive dissing of 2016 on the internet that adds to my feelings of embarrassment at being a member of the human race, or at least of the species’ Western Civilisation subdivision. The personification of a random, abstract cultural construct, a year, would by itself cause my spine to twitch and my lip to quiver in an involuntary reaction of frightened disgust. Am I really that alone?

          It goes beyond that, though.

          First, the focus on the deaths of a large number of culturally defined celebrities and a smaller number of powerful influencers in the endless battle against medievalism and other manifestations of oligarchic destructiveness shouldn’t be a cause of surprise.

          Yes, death does tend to be sad, if common. Each of the year’s high-publicity demises is of course individually worthy of passing notice by those they influenced, but I notice that the internet agony has dwelt on those celebrated by mass Western, mostly English-speaking culture. I don’t recall any publicity in regard to the deaths of Chinese or Japanese celebrities, at least a few of which must have taken place. Viva Fidel.

          Their clustering during the past year is of course hardly remarkable. More than fifty-five and a quarter million humans have died annually in recent years, and the explosion in the number of celebrities – and the indulgences available to them – since the advent of television and rock & roll in the 1950s guarantees a considerably large pool of well-known people living on borrowed time, either through age or life on metaphoric tightropes. The number in their 60s and 70s and 80s still living guarantees that the phenomenon is unlikely to have ended on New Year’s Eve. Cut the deck to see who’s next.

          Yes, 2016 did seem to have more than its share of atrocities via civil wars, murderous governments, and other sources of huge numbers of dead children and miserable refugees, but the entire history of the human race has been one of atrocities. The internet and other extensions of communication technology just makes them seem more immediate.

          The causes of these horrors, furthermore, were far from newly minted last year, new atrocities are sure to emerge, and their effects – not to mention the enormous number of people whose responses to these atrocities have themselves been atrocious – will provide misery for millions for a long, long time.

          And if you think that, in addition, the political horrors of 2016 warrant all the online truculence, you aint seen nothing yet. Once the American cossack-rube and corporate-dominance coalition, and their global fellow-travellers in Russia and elsewhere, gets into their work of finding ways to make rich people richer and working people poorer worldwide by both squeezing every dollar possible from accelerating climate change and then somehow making even more money out of exploiting the misery resulting from its acceleration, people will remember 2016 nostalgically as something akin to a year-long mild day in the spring.

          You aint seen nothing yet.

          I’ll decline to stamp my foot and have a hissy fit about 2016 myself, thank you.