Yet Another Year Shot To Hell: The Best Of The Worst Of 2010 At Kiko's House

I thought 2008 would be tough to top, but 2009 was made in blogging heaven. And so this blogger approached 2010 with some trepidation. I need not have worried as there was an inexhaustible supply of rich material and practically every day was an adventure in bathos, pathos, mythos and . . . uh, hathos.

Herewith some posts from the past 12 months in which I stuck my neck out. And as events would prove, occasionally got it loped off:

THE NEW CYBERIA: IN WHICH BRAINS ARE REWIRED ONE TEXT MESSAGE AT A TIME (November 29) As I write this, the brains of the people around us who are addicted to text messaging -- and there are millions of them -- are slowly but inextricably being rewired. Their ability to focus on the task before them, whether something as mundane as preparing breakfast or something as serious as driving on a busy highway at 65 miles an hour -- is compromised by their compulsion to text. What are we to expect from a generation that is going out into the world wedded to their smart phones, and Face Book, Twitter and email accounts? LINK

WHY THE GOP'S YEAR OF THE WOMAN STRATEGY WAS A SELF-INFLICTED DISASTER (November 8) If Republican leaders were to be believed, the mid-terms were shaping up to be a watershed election for women, but how did Republican woman candidates actually do? The short answer is poorly overall, and in retrospect, the record number of GOP candidates for high-profile offices and in high-profile races was identity politics at its most blatant. The Republicans are masters of the lowest common denominator, and this simply was a bald-faced effort to out Democrat the Democrats gender-wise. LINK

COLOR THEM UNDERWHELMING: WHY THE MID-TERMS WEREN'T A HINGE MOMENT (November 3) Things the morning after the election seemed pretty much what they were the day before: The sun still came up in the East, the San Francisco Giants still were the world champions of baseball, and Christine O'Donnell still didn't have a job. The big takeaway from the election is that despite the sturm und drang of recent weeks, the news media's obsession with the Tea Party, and the self-flagellation of many Democrats, things are pretty much what they were. LINK

BOOK REVIEW: 'HITCH-22: A MEMOIR' (JUST DON'T CALL HIM A CONTRARIAN OR GADFLY (October 25) As literary genres go, biographies of journalists tend to be tedious and autobiographies by journalists even more so. But Christopher Hitchens, as he so often has done over a four-decade career of skewering the high and mighty (Henry Kissinger, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mother Teresa and God Himself, among others) tries to break the mold with this memoir and largely succeeds in his trenchant and witty way. First and foremost, Hitch 22 debunks the notion that he is a flip-flopper. LINK

WHY THE VAMPIRE ELITE IS A FAR GREATER THREAT TO OUR SECURITY THAN TERRORISTS (October 18)A friend has appropriated the perfect term to describe the people who are sucking the middle class dry from their big corner offices in skyscrapers across America. He calls them the Vampire Elite. They represent a far greater threat to our security than feckless domestic terrorists or even Al Qaeda, yet most Republicans are in their thrall and most Democrats too cowardly to face them down although nothing less than the future of the American Dream is at stake. LINK

BREEDERS PLAY GOD AS THE EPIDEMIC OF GOLDEN RETRIEVER CANCERS GROW WORSE (September 27) American Golden Retrievers are ticking time bombs. An extraordinary six of every 10 Goldens succumb to cancer before living to the once typical 12- to 16-year life expectancy. The mortality rate for other dog breeds, as well as for humans, is three in 10, but try telling that to breeders who are getting rich off of the epidemic. LINK

SARAH PALIN'S POETIC SOMETHING OR OTHER (September 20) When someone like David Frum says that the former half-term governor from Alaska is running for president, it's time to clench the old sphincter and take notice. Frum, who was banished from the Republican temple earlier this year because he refused to bend to the purity tests of Palin and other right-wingers, writes that if Palin is indeed the frontrunner for the 2012 nomination, as many pundits have been saying, then "that 1964 feeling is settling upon the GOP."LINK

WE HAVE THE WORLD'S FINEST UNIVERSITIES. WHY THEN IS AMERICA SUCH A MESS? (September 1) The great Henry Adams called his schooling "time wasted" and concluded that self-education through life experiences, friendships and reading were ultimately more important. Adams frankly admits that his traditional education (at Harvard, no less) failed to help him come to terms with the rapid changes that America was undergoing during the Second Industrial Revolution, and over a century later colleges still aren't preparing their graduates for the rigors of the real world. LINK

25 (UNLEARNED) LESSONS FROM IRAQ (August 23) Don't go to war for political rather than national security reasons. . . . Don't start a war based on dubious intelligence. . . . Don't falsely link a war to the 9/11 attacks. . . Listen to your generals even when you don't like what they have to say . . .
Provide enough troops to do the job . . . Don't muddle the rules of engagement . . . LINK

WHERE HAVE ALL THE WAR HEROES GONE? (July 26) Has there ever been a sustained American war without heroes? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hero-free, unless you consider the Bush administration's deceitful attempts to put Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman on pedestals. The short answer would seem to be that both wars have been deeply unpopular, but the real answer lies in the increasingly amorphous nature of the War on Terror. LINK

TO KILL THE CRITICS: KEEP YOUR COTTON PICKIN' HANDS OFF OF 'MOCKINGBIRD' (July 6) I suppose that it was inevitable in our fractious, snark-heavy society that even a wonderful classic like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is coming in for criticism as the 50th anniversary of its publication is celebrated, but I for one am royally pissed off -- and detect an element of sour grapes in much of the carping. LINK

MARY PINCHOT MEYER'S ENIGMATIC LIFE & OH-SO MYSTERIOUS DEATH (June 21) When her body was found in October 1964, the apparent victim of a random murder, she was mourned by friends as a beautiful Georgetown socialite who in the years since her divorce from a high-ranking CIA official had blossomed into an abstract painter with an independent streak that included affairs with President Kennedy and other powerful men. LINK

LOVING & LOATHING AN ERA: I'VE FALLEN DOWN IN THE SIXTIES & CAN'T GET UP June 1) So when will the media's fixation with the 1960s end? When the last survivor of that era -- like the last Confederate widow or the last Great War veteran -- passes on. And while I'd like to take a few more trips around the Sun, that will not be a moment too soon. LINK

CHARLIE 'BIRD' PARKER: AN APPRECIATION (May 10) It is unlikely that anyone in the pantheon of jazz greats has been idolized more and heard and appreciated less than Charlie "Bird" Parker, the mercurial alto saxophone genius and bebop trailblazer. In the end, his remarkable gifts escape easy analysis. They remain immense but inexplicable. And will forever remain that way. LINK

OF PHERNOMES, HORMONES & MOANS IN THE NIGHT (April 25) Scientists are hard at work belaboring the obvious: We live longer and lead more productive lives when we're in good relationships, and it's kind of nice scientifically quantifying the benefits of a stable relationship. Oh yes, and that sex thing. But unlocking the mysteries of love is a fool's mission in that scientists will never fully understand what makes us tic. LINK

ME, TA-NEHISI & THE GHOST OF BOBBY LEE (April 15) The Lost Causers allow their forebears no humanity for all of their very real flaws, instead manipulating them to reconcile their sanctimonious present. And although this comparison is not perfect, it works well enough: The Germans have fessed up to their history, the Japanese have denied it, while Lost Causers have simply rewritten it. LINK

WHEN CARE GIVERS BECAME COST CENTERS: THE GENESIS OF THE CRISIS IN NURSING (January 6) The moment that the crisis in American nursing went from being worrisome to dire was when hospital administrators stopped considering nurses to be care givers and they became "cost centers." It's not possible to pinpoint exactly when that metamorphosis occurred, but the consequences have been all too apparent. LINK