Kiss the Mean Teens Goodbye

And say hello to another Roaring Twenties for the plutocrats - in tandem with the Soaring (as in record heat) Twenties for everybody. Those hoping for a Boring, Snoring Twenties in the wake of Trumpism and a return to the status quo ante that produced Trump are probably out of luck - unless, of course, they are among the millions of people who will die prematurely because of the vicious, neoliberal capitalism that has all but subsumed representative democracy throughout the world. 

Then again, the Twenties could also finally bring millions more people into the streets, capitalism could be overthrown with some sort of socialist revolution, and inexorable climate change and its negative effects on life might at least be slowed down/ameliorated by a few years.

For as Barack Obama once so infamously proclaimed when he gave the Bush administration a free pass on its war crimes, we must look forward and not back. We're already witnessing the myriad global victims of the Bush-Clinton-Obama-Trump era no longer taking so kindly to American Exceptionalism. We just got a preview when thousands of Iraqis stormed the supposedly impregnable Emerald City Embassy in Baghdad in protest of US military airstrikes. The US war against that country, despite all the bragging to the contrary, has never ended.

There's already a plethora of lists of the Bests and Worsts of our last decade. I got a particular chuckle out of Politico's How Will History Books Remember the 2010s?  The title provoked in my head a zany picture of vast columns of nostalgic animated books marching along like the demented brooms in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

The actual people who supposedly will write those history books decades from now won't remember the Teens because they and the trees providing the paper and the bees pollinating the food crops will have all died out from the climate catastrophe and drug-resistant plagues. Now, if that's too gloomy and doomy a scenario for you to contemplate, let's say that maybe one actual human producer/consumer of memories is still left, a lonely character bearing a striking resemblance to the Burgess Meredith bookworm in that Twilight Zone episode about nuclear catastrophe.

Not for nothing has Dictionary.Com, to much media fanfare, just named "existential" the Word of the Year, not least because the noncommercial massive Websters on their own special stands are disappearing, right along with the not-for-profit physical libraries that house both them and increasing numbers of homeless people.

Meanwhile, Dictionary.Com at least has a sense of humor. Before you're even allowed to read about the Existential Crisis, this little caveat pops up from the darkness:

Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com use cookies to enhance {see also: improve, boost} your experience. By continuing without changing your settings, you agree to this use. To provide the best {see also: finest, first-rate} English dictionary and thesaurus on the web for free, we also request your permission for us and our partners to use cookies to personalize ads. To allow this, please click "Accept Cookies." Need more info? Take a bite out of our ∙ Cookie Policy

And that reminds me that high on my list of Best Books of 2019 is The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It's also, strangely enough, on Barack Obama's Best Books list. I say strangely, because Obama himself had kept alive the Bush era's mass surveillance program. He also accused Edward Snowden, the great revealer of the top-secret mass surveillance state, of being unpatriotic. Needless to say, Obama did not include Snowden's own memoir on his list of worthy tomes. To be fair, though, the New York Times also snubbed it from its list ot the year's 100 notable books. What the Times did strangely consider notable was Michelle Obama's ghostwritten memoir.

Let's face it. Lists are so fakakta. (Look it up on the online Yiddish dictionary.)

Of course, not being a history book, I can't even remember all the books that I have read and/or re-read in the past year, let alone collate them all into a fakakta list. But here is just a portion (some newly published, but mostly older) that I enjoyed and highly recommend. Despite my criticism and previous New Year resolutions, I find that I cannot completely Resist the List. Call me a hypocrite if you want, but here are listed (ugh) in no particular order:

Hate, Inc. - Matt Taibbi

 Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism - ed. by Jason Moore. 

Staying With the Trouble - Donna Haraway. 

A Brief History of Neoliberalism - David Harvey 

The 42nd Parallel - John Dos Passos 

American Nightmare - Henry A. Giroux 

Black Reconstruction in America - W.E.B. Dubois 

The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry 

Words Are My Matter -  Ursula K. LeGuin 

Owls Do Cry - Janet Frame 

Birth of Our Power - Victor Serge 

The Liberal Defence of Murder - Richard Seymour 

Cancer Ward - Alexander Solzhenytsin 

Making Trouble - Lynne Segal 

The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse 

Squeezed - Alyssa Quart 

American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace - John C. Culver 

The Original Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 

An American Utopia - Fredric Jamison 

The Power of the Dog - Don Winslow 

Down to Earth - Bruno Letour 

The Wrecking Crew - Thomas Frank 

The Book of Joan - Lidia Yuknavitch 

Bananeras - Dana Frank 

The Weird and the Eerie - Mark Fisher 

Travels With Herodotus - Ryszard Kapusinski 

Goya - Robert Hughes 

This Census-Taker - China Mieville 

Reporter - Seymour M. Hersh 

I put in a request months ago to the mammoth New York Public Library for Snowden's Permanent Record, but to no avail. It is glaringly still not on their list of virtually hundreds of thousands of books available to download. So in light of what seems to be an orchestrated blackout of his work, you should definitely watch his lengthy(nearly three hours) conversation with Joe Rogan, available for streaming on YouTube.

If you have more time after that, please also share your own favorite movies, shows, books, pet peeves, whatever, in the comments section. They need not be actual lists.

Happy New Year to Sardonickists everywhere!