2011 was a shitstorm, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. Nature behaved like an adolescent crystal-meth addict with rage issues. Tempests shook. Foundations trembled. It was the year when all that was solid melted into air and all that was clear grew cloudy and all that we assumed to be safe and obvious turned out to be dangerous and confusing. The world's inner unpredictability, the chaotic messiness of the whole business, shuddered to the surface and ruined the luxury of calm and order. This year things simply refused to do what we expected. We zipped from one crisis to another, without time to grasp or to digest or to consider.
The ground gave out beneath our feet intellectually as well as physically. A tsunami demolished not only the coast of Japan but also the well-laid plans of most industrial countries for generating sustainable power in the future. The omens were garishly over-the-top: One day an earthquake cracks the facade of the National Cathedral in Washington and the next Hurricane Irene threatens to rip parts down. The Arab world, without prompting, without any warning from Middle East experts, without much of a reason at all, decided that the tyranny under which it had been living for half a century had to end. And now. Immediately. When the system collapsed, it fell apart like Michael Jackson's face, not bit by bit but all at once.
The situation in America was equally fraught with turmoil and impending chaos: Washington's decades of decline, with its vicious partisanship, gridlock, and the most shortsighted thinking imaginable, finally began to have consequences. In August, Standard & Poor's, an agency that once upon a time gave AAA ratings to CDOs backed by subprime mortgages, suddenly decided that the United States government might not be able to pay off its debt — America might not be able to pay off its debt to China. If you had predicted that outcome even five years ago, you would have been either ignored or committed.
Not that these grand geopolitical shifts were even the most surprising or unnerving moments of the year's all-pervasive order-crumbling. Small everyday assumptions, it turned out, could no longer be taken for granted. Canadians rioted. The pope tweeted. After three horrific suicides over the summer, we learned that hockey goons are not tough guys; they live in a state of extreme psychological vulnerability. In September, when scientists announced that they believed they might have discovered a particle that travels faster than the speed of light, the news could not have come at a more perfect moment. You know that little fact we've been hanging our entire conception of physics on? Oops. As Alvaro De Rújula of CERN, the European physics center, put it, "If it is true, then we truly haven't understood anything about anything." Which may as well be the motto for the year. I mean, what's next? Women don't actually find George Clooney attractive? What they really want is Jason Alexander during his fat period?
Even the scandals this year had a chaotic flavor to them, a brutal randomness at their core. Schwarzenegger, DSK, Sheen — their lusts are different from those of Clinton or Eliot Spitzer, nastier, less considered. Whatever other faults Spitzer possessed — and they were enough to inspire a hit television show — the man had taste. He was capable, even in career suicide, of making aesthetic distinctions. He bought himself a ten. Arnie just grabbed the maid. Sheen may be the icon of the year for the simple fact that he has channeled his barbarism into a somewhat workable version of how to fall apart while riding high. (Or is it the other way around?) He represents a new and diminished ideal for a world of wild disorder: Surf the tsunami.
What does it all amount to? Remember when everybody made fun of Donald Rumsfeld, that prophet of the unknown unknown, for saying "stuff happens"? Now it seems like the smartest thing anyone's said in the past decade. "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility," T. S. Eliot wrote. "Humility is endless." The most encouraging aspect of this year of chaos is that the human race didn't come off all that badly among all the unprecedented ruination. During the disasters themselves, the selfishness of quotidian life, the ordinary beggar-my-neighbor zero-sum game of our everyday struggles momentarily evaporated. After the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, hundreds of elderly Japanese engineers volunteered to clean up the mess, so that the cancers that would inevitably result from exposure to nuclear waste wouldn't kill younger people. The tornado that swept through Joplin, Missouri, in May left in its wake stories of heroism and selfless generosity. The same during Irene, the same during the earthquake. Our best stuff comes out during the shitstorm.
These reprieves should be cherished because, unfortunately, the next test won't be far in the future. The prospective catastrophes of 2011 were somehow even more terrifying than the ones that actually happened. Hurricane Irene graciously demurred from destroying New York, but she raised the quite real possibility that Wall Street will someday look like New Orleans. The economy, Europe, the Middle East, the weather, everything, everything is churning, roiling with more turmoil. Increased volatility is the only safe bet. That's the only future we know is coming.
JANUARY 1
The year begins with five thousand blackbirds falling dead from the sky and eighty-four thousand dead fish washing ashore. At least with biblical plagues, God offered an explanation. Here: nothing.
THE ARAB SPRING
The world's roughest neighborhood just got a little better and a lot crazier.
PREDICTION OF THE APOCALYPSE BY HAROLD CAMPING
Thank the Lord there was one thing we could be sure of this year — this guy had no idea what was going to happen.
BERLUSCONI AND QADDAFI
Of course, everyone compares these two geriatric group-sex connoisseurs — bunga-bungaists, for short — to the great Roman emperors of the ancient world. Nothing could be further from the truth: No Roman emperor bragged about bedding eight young girls in his seventies. And as for Qad-dafi, he redefined the term creepy when rebels discovered a gynecological operating theater, possibly an abortion room, next to the bedroom in his complex at Tripoli University — about the creepiest thing that has ever been discovered.
CHINESE DETAIN AI WEIWEI
Just to remind us that all that debt America owes isn't to stable democracies and natural allies but to a terrifying communist juggernaut that has no problem locking up artists and their friends just because.
AMERICAN DEBT NEGOTIATIONS
Watching the debate over the debt ceiling in Congress was like watching your crazy high school girlfriend play chicken on a cliff face with your dad's car. "They're not going to ... Nah, they wouldn't imperil the prosperity of the world just to score some cheap points, would they?" Once the scrotum-tightening adrenaline rush ended, opinions of Congress sank to new lows. At least Obama had the decency to sign the resulting bill in private, out of shame.
POPE BENEDICT XVI TWEETS
Hey everybody! Vic of Christ here trying to stay hip with the kids ;) But not that way! #lol #hatersgoingtohate
JOPLIN
The summer of hell began after the most active tornado month on record. The worst of it was in Joplin, Missouri, where a three-quarter-mile-wide funnel killed 160 people. Oh, yeah, did I mention the Mississippi River caused billions of dollars in damage?
ANTHONY WEINER
Intent on fulfilling every taunt ever thrown at him by schoolyard bullies, he managed to lose his job and to lose the Democrats his seat in Congress without having an orgasm. It's an unprecedented achievement in idiocy, not just for the U. S. Congress and not just for politicians, but for men everywhere: Weiner managed to leave a record of an extramarital affair without having the extramarital affair.
LONDON RIOTS
A whole new kind of disorder was invented this year: the shopping riot. Roving packs of feral English youths wanted nothing grander than a new pair of sneakers. They photographed one another — such was their ineptitude even at criminality — with looted television sets and smartphones and even bags of budget rice. Consumerism may yet prove to be more destructive than all the political ideas of the previous centuries.
NEWS OF THE WORLD
Carl Bernstein thinks Hackgate is as bad as Watergate. But at least in Watergate there was a clear villain and a clear crime. The problem with the News of the World fiasco is figuring out who was screwing whom: Were the newspapers paying off the government officials? Or was it the officials bribing the police for information that they passed on to reporters? Or was it all of them? It's like trying to keep track of the asses at an orgy.
WEDDING OF PRINCE WILLIAM AND KATE MIDDLETON
While extravagant and truly weird, the royal wedding was just like any normal wedding insofar as everybody, while pretending to wave to the bride and groom, was actually checking out the maid of honor's ass.
KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN Everybody — I mean everybody — has a secret stash of pornography.
CAPTURE OF JAMES "WHITEY" BULGER
After sixteen years on the run, the FBI found Bulger with $800,000 in cash tucked behind the walls and a couple dozen guns hidden in history books. Wisconsin state Democrats, take note: This is how you hide from the law.
DELAYED UNVEILING OF THE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. STATUE
Which is the scariest part of this story, in order? A) Martin Luther King Jr. statue ceremonies were disrupted by an earthquake and then an extreme weather event; B) the statue of an American icon was made on the cheap by Chinese labor; C) Martin Luther King Jr.'s family insisted on an $800,000 royalty for permission to use his likeness and words.
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES DIPLOMATS FOR WHAT THEY REALLY ARE
What is a diplomat's job? Apparently, it involves going to weddings in the Caucasus, where a solid gold bar might make an appropriate gift, writing reports about the table manners of petromillionaires, and trying to assuage warlords whose vanity is as sensitive as a sunburnt strawberry-blond's neck. The most amazing revelation of WikiLeaks was how little control anybody seems to have. The diplomatic cables were befuddlingly absent of evil geniuses or even nefarious webs of influence: Who the hell is running this joint?
OCCUPY WALL STREET
Nobody knows what the protesters want, but boy do they really want it! The vagueness of their message hasn't stopped left-wing pols from violent head-nodding, and it hasn't stopped right-wing pols from disagreeing angrily. American politics takes yet another step closer to just being a call-and-response of angry grunts.
IT WAS commonplace, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to declare that the world had changed forever. And so, in many ways, it had. Catching a flight will never be the same, nor getting a visa to visit America. For the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan, almost nothing remains as it was.
