Slouching Into the 2020s

Were they the twenty-tens or the twenty-teens?  Ah, who cares?  And even though the 202nd decade of the Christian calendar doesn't end until next December 31 (because there was no year zero to start the calendar), any ten years make a decade, so yeah, let's mark the turn of another ten-year period!

The 2010s, as I noted here before, were a disaster for America.  At the beginning of January 2010, I thought we were heading into a newer and better era, what with having a black President and all, especially a black President who was about to reform health care and give us high-speed rail, but now we have a Reagan-era celebrity who, like Reagan himself, wants to take us back to a less civilized and less advanced time and has a strong base eagerly supporting him for it.  The last four decades have been a disappointment for anyone in These States who believes in progress; even if Trump somehow loses his bid for a second term, chances are a fifth decade will be a disappointment for progress as well. 

I end 2019 and the twenty-teens (that's what I call them) on a sour note.  I've had some unexpected setbacks that are too personal to delve into here, but I'm sure I'll turn things around soon.  I have to.  Things have been off the rails for me for so long that they have to get back on track.

At least I still have my VW - all fixed up after constant stalling - and my satellite radio subscription.  Without either, I'd go crazy driving a Japanese car and listening to terrestrial radio.  Ring out the old.

2019: Winners and Losers

As 2019 draws to a close, it's time for me once again to look and see at who the winners and losers of the year were.  The only two reasons I don't have a list of the winners and losers of the 2010s, which are drawing to a close, is because 1) the 202nd decade of the Gregorian calendar actually doesn't end until the end of 2020, as the Christian calendar does not have a year zero, and 2) there were no real winners of the past decade, as it's clearly been one of the worst ten-year periods in human history.

Because my optimism and idealism have long since dissipated, I found it hard to come up with at least ten winners, and at one point it was hard to come up with even five.  But guess what - I managed to come up with ten winners.  As always, the losers were too easy to come up with, as I only needed ten.  In that respect, it was hard to consider what to leave in and what to leave out, and I hope my list doesn't suffer from having made the wrong decisions.

Without further ado, here are my winners for 2019:   

Nastasia Urbano.  This one is personal for me.  Spain's top model from the 1980s was at the bottom at the start of the year, being homeless in Barcelona, but thanks to her own determination and help from her friends and admirers - including yours truly, who fits into both categories - Nastasia (below) has a home, she's working as a model, and she couldn't be happier.  I love you, Nastasia.  You made it back! :-)

Norah O'Donnell.  She's not the first woman to anchor the CBS Evening News - Katie Couric was the first - but she is likely to have more staying power than any of her recent predecessors of either sex.

Jeff Daniels.  As Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin's stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird, Daniels not only proved that you can carry a play that was first a movie based on a novel, you can even make audiences forget someone like Gregory Whatsisname.

the Washington Nationals.  Only a miracle could get the Nationals - a hapless team since their beginnings as the Montreal Expos - to the World Series.  Fortunately, a miracle was at hand - a wild-card berth - and so D.C.'s lovable losers won Major League Baseball's ultimate championship.  Even Chicago Cubs fans were impressed.

Pete Buttigieg.  The small-city mayor with the funny name is the big breakout star of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, having gone from obscurity to a huge chance for victory in the coming Iowa caucuses.

Lil Nas X.  Even if you hate rap and think pop music is in an irreversible decline (like yours truly), you can't deny the success of the performer legally known as Montero Lamar Hill, whose country-rap collaboration with Billy Ray Cyrus, "Old Town Road," became the first rap record to top the Billboard singles chart for thirteen weeks, was the first single to sell ten million copies while at number one, and earned Hill six Grammy nominations.  (And what does this country-rap record say about rock? Country and rap fans, to paraphrase a classic rock lyric, really don't mind if rockers sit this one out.)

Cedric the Entertainer.  The idea of a white family moving into a black neighborhood sounds like a silly gimmick, but then, what do I know?  "The Neighborhood," starring Mr. Entertainer (as I assume the New York Times calls him), after a successful first season, just began its second season this past fall.

Tiger Woods.  Augusta, Georgia was just the place to be for him, where he won the 2019 Masters and staged a remarkable comeback after having been written off by golf fans for so long.

National security bureaucrats.  Their testimony before the House Intelligence Committee during Donald Trump's impeachment inquiry helped the Democrats' case more than the Democrats themselves did . . . and with fewer histrionics than elected officials of either party.

Democrats in southern states.  The first signs of what could be a bad year for Trump and the Republicans in 2020 were Democrat Andy Beshear winning the governorship of Kentucky and fellow Democrat John Bel Edwards holding the governorship of Louisiana, along with Virginia Democrats winning the legislature in the state's midterm elections.  It looks like the Republicans have gotten as far with Trump as they're going to go . . . except, possibly, in New Jersey, where Democrats saw their state legislative majorities shrink and lost a Democratic congressman to the GOP.

And now, the losers!

Climate change activists.  Greta Thunberg notwithstanding, climate change activists had a year of no progress and no luck.  Carbon emissions are up, the United States is continuing its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the Green New Deal was as popular as an old brown banana, Jay Inslee's climate-change-centered presidential campaign bit the dust,  the Madrid climate summit ended in failure, and even car buyers in Europe are opting for gas-guzzling monster wagons.  The people who could do something about climate change are listening, but they obviously don't want to hear it.

Lori Loughlin.  I could include Felicity Huffman along with Loughlin, as they both paid to have their children enrolled in college in a cheating scam that was the biggest scandal of the year, but Huffman at least admitted her guilt and paid her debt to society.  Loughlin could be going to jail for a long time despite her pleas of innocence.  I keep expecting her to be taken to the slammer while yelling, "No quid pro quo!"

Matthew McConaughey.  Everyone thought McConaughey made the worst movie of 2019 when the thriller Serenity came out . . . in January.  Then he surprised everyone with a worse movie - the March release The Beach Bum, a movie so disdained, this is the first time I've heard of it.  At least those Lincoln commercials pay his bills.

John Crowley.  Never heard of him?  Well, he's the guy who directed The Goldfinch, the movie based on a novel about a boy whose life is forever changed by his mother's death in a terrorist attack.  You may never hear of him again; the movie was such a flop, it became the biggest box-office failure of the year.  Surprisingly, Matthew McConaughey is not in it.

Boeing.  When you have a plane involved in numerous crashes and a satellite that can't reach orbit, you have no right to call yourself an aviation company.

Prince Andrew.  I thought R. Kelly and Ryan Adams were bad boys, but Prince Andrew blows them both out of the water.  Thanks to his, ahem, association with noted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and charges against him for similar, umm, transgressions, the Duke of York found himself having some explaining to do, and he made things exponentially worse for himself when he did offer an explanation.  Proof that, if you don't choose your friends well, you can get into really big trouble.

the U.S. men's soccer team.  When your failure to win the CONCACAF soccer tournament, in the wake of your failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, coincides with the success of the U.S. women's soccer team, which won the Women's World Cup (again) this year, you're not just a losing team.  You're a set-up for a misandric Stephanie Ruhle girl-power riff.

Americans who like small cars.  Detroit is getting rid of its smaller sedans and hatchbacks in favor of monster wagons, Honda may be dumping its subcompact Fit in the U.S. market after 2020, and Volkswagen may only sell performance variants of its compact Golf in the United States and will not sell its Golf-sized ID.3 here.  When will American car buyers think small again?  You'll see high-speed rail here first.

Martin O'Malley.  The former governor of Maryland began 2019 on a sour note by eschewing another run for President.  He ends the year as a failed writer, having put out a book on improving local government that got no attention from the mainstream media (and when Karine Jean-Pierre, his deputy campaign manager from his 2016 presidential bid, promoted her memoir on the PBS NewsHour, she mentioned her associations with Anthony Weiner and John Edwards but not O'Malley).  In between, he squandered what little political capital he had left by supporting Beto O'Rourke for President.  He enters 2020 as a politician with a brilliant future behind him.

Beto O'Rourke.  And speaking of Beto . . . Several other Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 quit before 2019 ended, but no other candidate began with so much promise . . . or ended with so much humiliation. Especially when you consider that Beto quit before Marianne Williamson did.

This may be the last winners and losers list, which I've been doing since 2004, that I ever do.  See, Donald J. Trump is running for re-election as, ahem, President of the United States, and if he gets another four years in the White House, there will be no winners - only losers.  A winners and losers list will likely be inappropriate. Let's hope 2020 provides more victories to focus on than defeats.

Christmas 2019

Have yourself a very kitty Christmas! :-)

All That Glitters Isn't Gold

While the women's World Cup soccer tournament was going on in France, the 2019 CONCACAF Gold Cup was going on back in this hemisphere for the national men's soccer teams of the Americas.  And you probably didn't even know about it.  You may not have even known that the championship game for the Gold Cup took place in Chicago yesterday while the women's championship game was in Lyon, France.

And with good reason.     

The U.S. men's team, the defending Gold Cup champions from 2017, lost the final to Mexico, a national team they haven't defeated in six years. 

I wrote yesterday that the American men's team's failures often coincide with the women's team's successes.  But this may be the first time they coincided on the very same day.

And the men lost on home turf.

What are we paying them again?

The women are getting a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan's "Canyon of Heroes."  I propose that the men's team get a parade in an appropriate urban downtown district.  How about Newark or Detroit?

We'll even have ticker tape thrown at them.

In bundles.

Some of you will say it's easy for me to bash the national men's team when I don't play soccer myself.  No, I don't.  And neither, apparently, does our men's team.    

Tanks A Lot

"There is one day of the year when America should receive nothing but praise.  That's July Fourth." - Paul Fussell (1924-2012) 

If Fussell were alive today, he might want to eat his own words.

On July 4, I usually publish a meme wishing greetings for Independence Day and leave it at that. But I can't do that this year.  Instead, I must speak out on how Donald Trump hijacked the national Independence Day celebration in Washington.  He plans to make a highly politicized speech not about the virtues of America but rather what he thinks the virtues of America are.  That is, military power - and lots of it.  VIP tickets to the celebration have been given to members of the Republican National Committee but not the Democratic National Committee.  Trump expects military leaders to flank him on either side when he appears, and he's leading a celebration that includes several of these.

This is an Abrams tank, a component of the U.S.'s mighty arsenal that has been used in many a military adventure, which Trump, I've been led to understand, wanted to have parade down the streets of Washington to show how bad-ass we are - no, how bad-ass he is.  These tanks are huge enough to crush rocky terrain, as well as asphalt. That may be why they will be merely parked outside the Lincoln Memorial but not be paraded down Constitution Avenue.  But we all know that Trump - and the Republican Party, which has made it clear for decades that Democrats are not a legitimate part of America - would love to have them in motion.  This celebration - dubbed a "Salute To America" - will be a political rally masquerading as a national celebration, and at a great monetary cost, with Trump acting like the dictator he wants to be, looking down at all he controls.

And by the way,  I can only think of one time a President sent tanks to a major American city.

And it didn't work out well for Detroit in 1967 either.

Trump got this idea from watching France's Bastille Day parade in Paris.  Ah, France - elegant perfume, intelligent movies, splendid urban architecture, high-speed rail - and this is the idea Trump wants to emulate?

There are other parts of the national Independence Day celebration in Washington that have nothing to do with Trump.  But this part is certain to grab all the headlines.  

Memorial Day 2019

Happy St. Patrick's Day!