If there’s one thing the blogosphere is good at, it’s churning out ‘Top #’ lists. I did think about throwing one together here at Ghostwoods, but the blinding futility of it all stopped me dead in my tracks. Instead, if you feel the need, here’s a grand List of Lists covering the last decade:
I also considered rounding up a selection of news, reviews and so on, but again, it just felt like old hat.
When I thought about it some more, it became fairly obvious that I was woefully underqualified to talk about 2009 in any meaningful sense except one — how it seemed to me. That may not be a ‘fully leveraged’, ‘needs-focussed’ or ‘vertically segmented’ view of the year, but it does have the virtue of being honest.
My main sense of 2009 was of a lull between storms. 2008 was tumultuous, peaking with the global economy screeching right up to the very edge of total catastrophe, and with Obama’s victory at the American polls. Last year, by contrast, felt like we were all holding our breaths, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Governments world-wide poured torrents of money into the banking sector. The financial sector immediately stopped wailing doom and went back to binging itself stupid on cash. The sense of terror eased, but circumstances didn’t change all that much. We’ll have to start paying for those bail-outs soon… but we didn’t really start in 2009.
A nice picture of the Algarve in Portugal. Irrelevant, but so much nicer to look at than politicians or swine flu victims.
Swine flu and terrorism were the two huge sticks we were told to be scared of in 2009, but neither actually smacked us. Swine flu deaths, whilst tragic, were less than those from regular flu, and effective terror attacks were pretty much non-existent in the west. Even global warming, the big long-range Bête Noire of modern life, had its fear aura slightly blunted by the scandal over made-up data.
None of these things have gone away, and any one of them could still potentially become a hideous nightmare — yes, including the economy — but for 2009, they were little more than phantasms.
We had some things to distract us, as usual. In the US, Obama made some pleasant noises to the cameras without really achieving anything much; In the UK, we somehow spent most of the year being shocked that our politicians were greedy and unscrupulous, but even then, the MP Expenses firestorm didn’t really change anything in the real world. I was particularly revolted to note that everyone, everywhere seemed to be astonished that an ugly woman should possess a good singing voice and be a nice person.
As for my own life, I spent most of 2009 wrestling with arthritis. I’ll spare you the tedious details, and just say that Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory is as perfect a summary as you’re likely to find anywhere. I didn’t have any family dramas, massive job stresses, or relationship crises, unless you consider continued supply shortages in all three areas to equate to problems. Forgive me if that sounds downbeat; it’s not supposed to. I got back to the UK late in ’08 after several years Dubai and Australia. My arthritis only really started taking off in ’06, so for two years I’d been working around it, but not actually seeking treatment. I simply didn’t have enough money to do so whilst abroad. One of the reasons I came back home to the UK was to start getting the disease properly treated, and that’s what 2009 was about for me: working my way up the treatment ladder step by step. In that sense, it was a firm success. I hope to move up to drugs that can actually keep the disease fully at bay in 2010, at which point things like having ‘a life’ can resume!
In summary then, 2009 felt like a year on hold — both for me personally, and for the world at large. I suspect that my experiences have coloured my perceptions, but they’re the only ones I have.
I think the shock at the ugly singer was that TV, Movies and the music industry tell us again and again that if you want to be a star you have to be pretty. So to suddenly discover that there is such a thing as a talent that can do naturally what it takes studio technicians hours to recreate artificially was a big shock to the media-buying public.
I guess what I am trying to say is that people are basically shallow.
Don’t get me wrong; I like Girls Aloud.
Oh, I think you’re right, and agree that it’s all down to years of media spin. My disgust was more at the world et al than for the people themselves. Although the monkey-brain deserves a bit of scorn too, I like to think :)
SuBo was an inspired piece of marketing. The fake reaction from the panel, the crass exploitation of an obviously vulnerable individual, her inevitable breakdown. One hopes that she will cope okay in the mid to long term, make some money out of it, and get free of the satanic grasp of SiCo at the earliest opportunity.