Ch-ch-changes

Though we have about a month or so to go before we turn the corner into 2009, the obsessive early adapter in me has already started analyzing this year’s shenanigans. My verdict? With the grandiose f*ckery that went down in pop culture, sports, finance, and politics, 2008 has been the absolute balls.

Before you all think that I’m making stuff up at this point, let me direct your ADHD-addled brains to a movie that drew the comic-collecting geek out from everyone who saw it…more than once: The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger’s penultimate big-screen appearance is set to join the Billion Dollar Club, an elite fraternity of films that made that much in actual global ticket sales.

The peeps at Box Office Mojo say TDK is perched at the $997 million mark but all that will inevitably change when Warner Bros. re-releases it in January 2009 in time for awards season. Unless Beverly Hills Chihuahua catches up soon — sarcasm! — Chris Nolan’s opus will remain the highest grossing movie of the year in North America and beyond. 

Batman, Beijing, Banks

The world had barely recovered from Batmania when the Beijing Olympics whipped everyone into frenzy. Whitewashing the monster smog, torch protests, and negativity directed at the supposedly evil Beijing mascots, the Games turned athletes into gods who shattered world and Olympic records at nearly every opportunity.

Claiming eight gold medals — and surpassing Mark Spitz’s previous haul of seven gold medals in a single Olympic Games in 1972 — the manfish Michael Phelps was everyone’s hero. The medal machine’s performance was so astonishing that The New York Times wrote that, had Phelps been his own country, he would have ranked fourth in terms of gold medals won, trailing China, the United States, and Germany. That, dear kids, is ownage.

Olympics-induced euphoria would be short-lived, however, as the subprime crisis — see Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — finally bit financial institutions in the ‘nads soon after. Again, as someone who has learned to live — both literally and metaphorically — because of the news, I was dumbstruck at the number of major banks that collapsed one after the other in what could potentially be our own version of The Great Depression. (The domino effect brought a lot of traffic to our site but still, I was like, WTF.)

Doom And Hope

Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley — all the names (and this was in the US alone) I once looked up to had suddenly turned into Internet memes. I know that due to a myriad factors, a finance company can fold up like a house of cards. I just never thought that it would happen on a monthly basis. Lol.      

Going to emotional extremes seems to be the running gag in 2008. A planet painfully conditioned by impending doom suddenly finds hope in the form of — drumroll — Barack Obama. Political pundits may have noticed the unusual verve with which the public zeroed in on the US presidential campaign, but none of them could have predicted the by-product of Obama’s for-the-books victory.

Because of that one shining moment, the youth can finally shake off their reputation for civic apathy. Moreover, mitizens of other nations can at last dream more loudly about change in their respective governments. Most important, news junkies can now look forward to more innovative — holograms! — reportage on CNN. Oh snap.

A Bang, Not A Hangover

Any way you look at it, ending with a bang is always better than finishing the year with a hangover. But why did these bell-wether events come in such a rapid succession and not, you know, spread themselves out over a few years?  

On the one hand, this cultural hypercompression could be a consequence of that cliché: technology. As early as 1962, communications scholar Marshall McLuhan talked about the breakdown of time and space. His notion of the global village presupposed the worldwide reach of television, which brings distant events into the homes of viewers everywhere. According to him, accelerated communications would produce an implosion of personal experience. Translating that to today’s terms, stuff that takes place far away all of a sudden seems more immediate and accessible to people halfway around the world, thanks to a broadband connection.

On the other — and I’m venturing into the unknown here, so please hold my hand — some more, uh, untraditional folks chalk up the series of pivotal occurences to a higher state of consciousness overall. Don’t hate, but another Age of Aquarius could be upon us shortly. It’s a era of sensitivity and love and awareness of a power greater than all of us. (That was my interpretation.) What.

Whatever it is, I’m not gonna lie. I do feel a certain something in the air. It will be hard to top this year and as David Bowie’s 1972 song Changes puts it: “Strange fascination, fascinating me / Changes are taking the pace I’m going through.”

The world is reinventing itself once again and the shift to a (hopefully) more enlightened existence is proving to be a totally compelling one.