There are many ways to look at 2010; many ways, indeed, to distill it into some abstraction which may or may not be true. Characterizing an entire unit of time is about as silly as claiming legal ownership of the sun, but guess what: In 2010, a woman did exactly that, and many more people — many more demagogues with startling amounts of power over public opinion — would have done the same if buying the sun could guarantee a ratings bump. In my opinion, 2010 was crazy. It was chock full o' nuts. It was nuts in a Technicolor toaster oven. It was like that one episode of "Star Trek" where Spock goes haywire for Vulcan mating season.
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200,000 people attended Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" in October. 200,000 people who weren't psychiatrists. That's a powerful testament to our collective mental health. Stewart and co. were criticized — primarily by Bill Maher and other bruised left-wing pundits — for holding a rally that wasn't "about anything" in particular. But I think it was about everything. It was about the extent to which irrationality has pervaded our public discourse, which is something epitomized but not wholly localized in punditry. It was about the extent to which we've allowed one-toothed fortune-tellers to take over the marketplace of ideas.
Like the bully who responds to your protests with ever more elaborate wedgie techniques, the Tea Party grew in direct proportion to the massive amounts of legitimizing attention we gave to it. "Can they Govern?" asked the cover of TIME Magazine, referring to people like Rand Paul and Christine O'Donnell. We gave credence and airtime to "Obama is a Muslim" and "Death Panels," concepts that depend on "The Manchurian Candidate" and "The Giver" being real. I say "we" when perhaps I should say "the other side of the aisle, in the mental asylum," but we are all complicit. The Tea Party wasn't anything until everyone, including its critics, made it something.
In 2010, hyperbole drove us to misconceive nearly everything that could be misconceived. Four Loko was doing fine, chillin' in the backs of bodegas, until we decided to saddle it with the destiny of being either scourge of America's youth, or beverage of champions. Now it gets to be neither. It was something, something normal, until we made it nothing. For all the controversy surrounding it, Wikileaks, too, has failed to produce — or be — much of anything at all. Most of the leaks themselves would've been better with Perez Hilton Photoshop dribble.
Perhaps the most important product of Wikileaks is Julian Assange himself, which suggests another disturbing trend: This year, we were remarkably good at fostering demagogues. If Sarah Palin shoots enough caribou on basic cable, she could very well be our next president. That shouldn't be a cause-and-effect relationship, but she's reached the logic-defying position — reached through defied logic — where it can be.
Kanye West doesn't deserve, perhaps, to be linked with all the others, since he's neither a creation of the media nor an insane conservative (and he's also a kickass rapper). Still, I can't help but think his cult of personality was born alongside Palin's, O'Donnell's, et al. — nurtured by a cultural climate that encourages irrational outbursts and undisturbed trains of thought. In "Star Trek," the frenzy of the Vulcans is bounded; it ends, eventually, and their rationality is restored. As a nation and a culture, we have no such biological reassurance. The crazy won't end until we let it. Here's hoping, then, for a 2011 with some sanity.
