2015: A Year That Happened

By Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post

I was going to write a wrap-up of the year, but thanks to all the election coverage I had been laboring under the misapprehension that it was 2016 and had been so all year, and the news that there were still eleven months of campaign to go - and 10 MORE primary debates - nearly broke me.

Still, now that I have my bearings, I refuse to accept the general valuation that 2015 was an unmitigatedly terrible year. Some good things happened. Adele released the massively successful album “25” after her initial pick, “I Am Young! Just Look How Young I Am! What Have You Ever Done With Your Life?” was ruled less marketable.

A new “Star Wars” movie came out and was actually good! People complained about it by saying things like “This was TOO MUCH like the original Star Wars” and “The female protagonist was TOO STRONG AND GREAT and I FOUND HER FAR LESS ANNOYING THAN LUKE SKYWALKER!” which - SPOILER ALERT! - are not complaints. Especially compared with the complaints they had about the prequels, which were things like “Has a human being ever uttered that sentence?” and “Jar Jar.”

2015 was many things. It was, weirdly enough, the first year when America realized how terrible Woodrow Wilson was. Why it took us nearly a century to notice that Woodrow Wilson was terrible is unclear, but the second we realized, everyone frantically tried to delete him from their history. We also did this with Ashley Madison.

Late-night network TV went from a slate of white male hosts named Jimmy, Jimmy and Dave to a slate of white male hosts named Jimmy, Jimmy and Steve.

There was a wildly successful campaign to put women on the $20 bill, after which the Treasury announced that it was going to . . . put women on the 10, the only piece of currency that no one had any complaints about. The $10 bill, in fact, is the only piece of currency so popular that it spawned a BLOCKBUSTER MUSICAL, “Hamilton,” which has attracted a cult-like following so potent that large sections of the Internet are conducted entirely in “Hamilton” quotes.

If you were a gun, it was a great year. Guns in America are the only things that get constantly fired and get to keep their jobs. Politicians responded to another year of mass shootings by suggesting that we take simple, common-sense measures like replacing all Americans with guns or banning lightsabers from movie theaters.

They took down the Confederate flag over the statehouse in South Carolina, raising the question: WAIT, WE WERE STILL FLYING THE CONFEDERATE FLAG OVER THE STATEHOUSE IN SOUTH CAROLINA IN 2015? DID NO ONE REALIZE HOW THE WAR ENDED?

2015 marked the first year when if someone told you that “All Lives Matter” that person was probably being a jerk on social media. John Boehner was released from his captivity as House Speaker and a new tribute, Paul Ryan, was selected to take his place. Boehner sang “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as he left, while Ryan has grown a long beard and sometimes, if you listen, you can hear his sobbing echo across the Potomac.

Hillary Clinton continued her ineluctable progress toward the presidency, just as she has done each year since her birth. This year she did many relatable, human-like things, such as announcing a six-phase plan to be more human-like and relatable. She gave nine hours of testimony on Benghazi, which seems like an awfully long time to talk about an upcoming Michael Bay movie.

On the Republican side of the aisle, something like 35 people ran for president. If you ran into someone it was safest to assume that he was running for president and let him correct you later. There were so many people running for president that they had to divide them into two debates: one “real” debate in prime-time and one “undercard” debate, where candidates were tossed into a dark hole with Rick Santorum and a set of sharpened stakes and told that whoever emerged victorious could go to the real one. (Carly Fiorina won this.)

On the Democratic side of the aisle, they have been trying to divide the candidates into two debates, one for Bernie Sanders and Clinton, and another one for Martin O’Malley to talk about Maryland in a room by himself, but O’Malley keeps showing up to the real one anyway.

Perhaps most alarming is that this was a race where Rick Perry took one look, said, “You know, this is a little weird, even for me. I’m out, guys,” and left.

Everyone who Knows Things About Politics for a Living insisted that Donald Trump was a phase. America responded, as one, “IT’S NOT A PHASE, MA!” and we are still committed to this, even as Trump says weirder and weirder things and it gets embarrassing to be seen with him in public. But we are committed now, no matter what pundits say.

You could construct a wall around the United States entirely out of the things pundits have promised to eat if Trump continues to rise in the polls. And, I’m sure, in 2017, President Trump will.

That’s another great thing about 2015: It was one of the last two years before the Donald Trump presidency! We should have savored that more.

Alexandra Petri writes the ComPost blog, offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences”.