It’s become commonplace now to scorn the dastardly year 2016, the calendar year itself having become a new God at which we can half-mockingly shake our fists. Any private or communal blows only further the charge against the year’s supernatural power. “Fuck you 2016” has even become a motto: the rallying call to a population grown increasingly disturbed by the celebrity-death-filled, demagogue-elected, Russian-hacked, Aleppo-bombed world of the present. One bad event keeps leading to another, and another, until we are as inured to injustices and tragedies as we were to the election’s escalation of indecencies, where we learned to accommodate hate speech, would-be human rights violations, would-be war crimes, bragged-about sexual assaults, and more, all dose-wise, each hit paving the way for the next, and the next, and the next.
When a person says they’ve hit rock bottom, they usually don’t expect that things can get any worse – they’re in the land of superlatives, the worst, so things cannot exactly get worse. I myself spent an early chunk of 2016 scouring the internet for “rock bottom” quotes, hashtagging my way across the Twitter-sphere through motivational and out-of-context-J.K. Rowling quotes, and feeling secure – almost relieved– in thinking I had definitionally found my way into that mythic land of the lowest.
“That’s the thing,” I told my mom, with what in hindsight rings as an obnoxious knowingness, my instant coffee lukewarm, the cold light reflecting through the haze of sludge and ice of Chicago-in-March. “Once you hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.”
Of course, things can -and do!- get worse, and that’s part of what seemed to make 2016 seem so maddening. Once you’ve set the limit – this is the worst, the line beneath which nothing else can fall – then any and all of the episodes of the tragicomic tangle of life act as a kind of quicksand. The floor keeps sinking lower and lower. It’s the King Lear effect – the moment when Edgar claims he is at his lowest and thus welcomes, even embraces the “unsubstantial air” of life that has tormented him, only to face, precisely at that moment, a greater horror: his bloodied father shuffling feebly onto the stage, two red spheres of pulp where his eyes had been gouged out.
When we, like Edgar, say we are at our worst, we are only setting ourselves up to find worse.
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After Trump’s victory, my brain struggled to do its usual job of smoothing over any cognitive dissonance, rationalizing away any negative thoughts or experiences into some falsely positive narrative.
Maybe the left needed to become less complacent. Maybe I needed to learn to be more actively involved in communities where sexism, xenophobia, racism, etc. are rampant. Maybe this is a good thing?
It was an exercise in neuronal origami. Fold reality into a pleasing shape, the ultimate yes-spin zone. I had already gone down the rabbit-hole/abyss of rock-bottom-logic, which was an uncharacteristic move for my generally-Pollyanna-ish brain, so this felt more like home.
“He’s bluffing” was the rally-cry for that point of view. It’ll just be politics as usual – one side happy for four to eight years, then not-so-happy.
After all, it’s perhaps no small reflection of the so-called information-bubble that up to this point I’ve complacently assumed my readers find 2016 to be the worst: many in this country were inspired to make America great again, to make America not simply better, but the best. We keep losing, was their mantra. Let’s win.
I have never been able to understand the fervor with which people hate – and really, really hate – Hillary. In fact, one of the first things I learned about her was that she was decidedly unattractive. This was sometime in the early to mid 90s, so I was in grade school at the time. I was up late in my parent’s old bedroom, splayed on the floor, a younger brother on the frayed soft green chair that reeked of baby formula and stale milk, my younger sister kicking her legs, up down, up down. It was Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, the mock-news portion of SNL that Comedy Central’s mock-news lineup of the early aughts would eventually replace. It must have been sometime over the holidays, because the square picture at the corner of the screen featured HRC wearing a thick, black velvet headband, and black tights and heels, smiling in front of a White House Christmas tree. The fake news-anchor mentioned something about her legs and the tights – I can’t remember exactly what – but the gist was that her legs looked fat in her tights. I remember the reactions better than the joke – the startled laugh of the audience (can they say that?!), and the collective snort of a low-blow joke.
“I don’t get it,” I said to my parents, because I didn’t get it. To me, she was not only normal, but also kind of attractive. How was I so off? What else wasn’t I getting? More to the point, it was starting to become clear that how she looked mattered – really mattered. That calling her fat or ugly was the ultimate diss, the worst possible way to insult a First, or any, Lady.
Yet, the more television personalities chortled over her thighs and pantsuits, the more the Ann Coulters of the world reduced her into an aesthetic object to be consumed by ever-greedy eyes, the more people interrupted her debates to comment on the relative merits of her hair style, debate jewelry, and unflattering heel size, the more I was drawn to Hillary, drawn to her dark eyebrows and ironic gaze, drawn by her very refusal to play the role so many wanted her to play, by her insistence that women are human (women’s rights are human rights), by the way she sneered while she clapped at Bush’s State of the Union addresses.
After John Kerry’s failed Presidential bid, my best friend from college updated her AIM profile: “hillary 2008, or the moon.” 2008 seemed impossibly far, as did the possibility of electing the first female president, but our hope flickered in the lavender pixels. hillary 2008.
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There are doubtlessly many lessons to be learned from the 2016 Presidential Election, none of which will likely be that 2016 as a year had some kind of deific agenda to kill our beloved celebrities and elect a ridiculous reality television star as the leader of the so-called free world. It’s unlikely a nuanced history of the early twenty-first century will read 2016: WORST.
But, just as the worst relies on an artificial set point, so too does the best create an artificial and deeply problematic label. The best requires a worst for comparison. The best must be protected, sealed off in some hermetic, purifying seal from lowly, corrupting others. The best is singular – the best seafood restaurant in this city, the best flavor of ice cream, the best breast to hip ratio, the best kind of person. The best is as much a myth as the worst: it inhabits a never-attainable ideal, it imagines an impossibly perfect past.
2016 wasn’t the best, and it wasn’t the worst. As always, there were injustices to fight against, tragedies big and small to mourn, kindnesses big and small to cherish, enough love and hate to make the world seem like some twisted paradox of fire and ice, lightness and darkness.
Whether in 2016, or 2017, we live somewhere in the middle.