Year of the trolls

Annus Horribilis, or: What the f**k just happened?

One of the few good things to come out of 2016 was the excellent Netflix series “The Crown,” featuring a humanizing and surprisingly likable portrayal of a young Queen Elizabeth II. As we take stock of what this year has wrought, the Queen is a fitting place to start, A) because she has been with us for a very long time and like all old people her presence reminds us to keep things in perspective, and B) because even the Queen once deemed a year in the early 1990s, during which her family was rocked by scandal and her house, Windsor Castle, caught fire, “an annus horribilis,” which seems, in at least two ways, like a fitting descriptor for this year, too. 

We’ll look back on 2016 as the year the assholes took over the world. 

It all kicked off well enough, after Mexican drug lord El Chapo, wearing a very shiny shirt, was photographed with Sean Penn and then promptly arrested. Beyoncé broke new artistic ground with “Formation,” heralding the year of hot sauce with the line, “I got hot sauce in my bag, swag,” just as I was finishing up my book “Hot Sauce Nation.” The Democratic presidential primary had become a surprisingly interesting contest between the establishment and an insurgent democratic socialist from Vermont. 

And the GOP primaries were the greatest show on earth, as a rage-hued toad-man barked made-for-TV insults and insane ideas at a long bench of establishment contenders. The Republican base roared with laughter and everyone else roared along with them, until we all realized that while we’d been enjoying the spectacle someone had drawn the shades, switched on the black lights and locked the doors from the outside. Our ringmasters were replaced with something like the Insane Clown Posse, only worse. The circus became a dark carnival. 

Then Zika. You remember the rest.

As nature ordains, the unrelenting march of time eventually takes from us the people we love, but 2016 felt especially cruel. First went David Bowie, then Alan Rickman, the literary giants Umberto Eco and Harper Lee (on the same day, no less), seemingly indestructible former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, and Merle Haggard, Mohammed Ali, Gene Wilder, Leonard Cohen, Prince, and Leon Russell.

This year killed the most colorful Supreme Court personality, Justice Antonin Scalia, as well as the VCR (the last one manufactured rolled off an assembly line in Japan in July). Gawker, the media juggernaut whose irreverent, impulsive and often irresponsible style once seemed destined to conquer the entire Fourth Estate, was razed into rubble in 2016, bankrupted in a lawsuit at the behest of billionaire super villain Peter Thiel. 

Terrorist attacks in Brussels, Orlando, Istanbul, Nice and elsewhere reminded us not that the world is an especially dangerous place these days (it isn’t) but that terrorism is still very good at terrorizing us. A gorilla named Harambe almost tore a child apart, and then the question of whether killing the animal was justified tore us apart. American swimmers humiliated themselves at the Rio Olympics. Seeing a groundswell of young activists excited about Bernie Sanders, the Democratic National Committee told the kids to go to hell and conspired to help Hillary Clinton. Then the toad-man surprised everyone by nabbing the GOP nod fair and square.

After that, the year that couldn’t get weirder got even weirder. At least two separate Russian intelligence outfits hacked into the computer systems of the Democratic and Republican parties, and selectively leaked information to tip the scales toward the GOP in the 2016 U.S. elections. The FBI closed a long-running investigation into Clinton’s private email server after determining no laws had been broken, then, in what a less skeptical observer might mistake for collusion with the Kremlin, the FBI reopened its investigation just before election day, then promptly closed it again. When the votes were cast, the Kremlin’s horse won. Toad-man became president-elect. 

And just when we thought 2016 had peaked, annus horribilis raised the bar again. Trump celebrated his Electoral College victory by asserting, without basis, that Hillary Clinton received millions of fraudulent votes. When the media pointed out that not only was there no proof of this, there wasn’t even evidence of it, Trump demanded that someone prove that the election he won wasn’t rigged. 

A fake news story went around that Trump had tapped El Chapo to head up the DEA, which was bullshit. Another story went around that Trump had tapped the wife of a pyramid scheme CEO to head up the Department of Education, which wasn’t. Trump announced he was replacing Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz, who is a nuclear physicist, with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is not. The president-elect broke with U.S. tradition by refusing to release his tax returns and declining to divest from his substantial business interests. As 2016 drew to a close, the toad-faced con artist was preparing to turn the United States of America into a subsidiary of his real-estate empire. Then Trump held a meeting with Kanye West, who had just gotten out of the loony bin. If you need to take a moment now to stare bug-eyed into the mirror and ask yourself “what in the fuck is going on?”—feel free. So do I. 

I’ve been thinking lately of the Yeats poem we so often turn to when things seem to be flying off the rails: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” 

This is one of those singular moments in human history when life feels especially tentative and the world is positively heaving with change. The end of the poem is the most chilling part, particularly in light of where we are at the close of 2016: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

But another less famous quotation has come to mind a lot recently, too. In the final game of the 1980 World Series, Tug McGraw was pitching for the Phillies with two strikes on the board and Kansas City Royal slugger Willie Wilson on the plate. It was the bottom of the 9th and the Phillies had the lead. The series had come down to a single pitch and the crowd bellowed and roared. It was the sort of moment for which sports exist, and how it ended doesn’t really matter. What matters is that in that moment, when everything was on the line and the stadium rumbled like a thundercloud, Phillies catcher Bob Boone stopped the action and approached the mound to whisper into McGraw’s ear.

“Isn’t this exciting?”

For more from Denver, read his article on the doomed nature of Trump's America.